Street, Berlin

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted this jagged street scene in 1913, showing two women walking past men on a Berlin sidewalk. The figures are angular, their faces mask-like, rendered in sharp contrasts of black, pink, and acidic green. The tilted perspective and clashing colors create a sense of urban anxiety.

The women are likely prostitutes, a subject Kirchner returned to repeatedly in his Berlin Street Scenes series. He saw the prostitute as a symbol of the modern city: glamorous yet alienated, intimate yet transactional. The painting was made shortly after the dissolution of Die Brücke, the Expressionist group Kirchner had co-founded.

Kirchner's Berlin years produced some of his most powerful work, but also marked a period of personal crisis. The outbreak of World War I would devastate him further. This painting is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a landmark of German Expressionism.