Zwei Frauen auf der Straße

Kirchner moved from Dresden to Berlin in 1911 and spent the next few years painting the same stretch of pavement, women in narrow coats and feathered hats moving through the crowd near Potsdamer Platz. He made this one in 1914, the year the war began, and the street series ended the following year, when he went into military training and broke down.

The canvas has a second picture on its back. Turn it around and there are two bathers in the waves, the kind of open-air subject he painted on summer trips to the Baltic.

It was bought from Kirchner by the critic Paul Westheim, one of the earliest champions of the German Expressionists, who fled Germany in 1933 and managed to keep this canvas through years of exile. The museum in Dusseldorf acquired it from his widow in 1981.