Kirchner's Berlin: The City as Anxiety

When Ernst Ludwig Kirchner arrived in Berlin in 1911, the city was in the grip of a frenzied modernity. The population had swelled to over two million. The streets teemed with motor cars, department stores blazed with electric light, and a new, anonymous urban humanity jostled on the pavements.

Kirchner responded to all of this with a visual vocabulary of jagged edges, compressed space and acid colour. His Berlin Street Scenes — painted rapidly, almost feverishly, between 1913 and 1915 — are among the most electrifying images of city life ever put to canvas.

The women in these paintings are often reading as prostitutes by scholars — their powdered faces, feathered hats and elongated silhouettes recurring obsessively. Whether or not this reading is correct, the figures register anxiety and desire in equal measure, their bodies pressed together in streets that seem to offer no escape.

Discover Kirchner's Berlin at our summer exhibition, Expressionist Berlin: City of Shadows, opening in July.