Berlin Street Scene

By 1913 Berlin was pulling in people faster than it could absorb them, and Kirchner had followed his artists' group Die Brücke from Dresden into the middle of it. He spent that year painting the same subject over and over: the wide new shopping boulevards after dark and the women who worked them. The two figures in the foreground, in tall feathered hats and lace collars, are cocottes, high-class prostitutes, and the men pressing close behind them are clients sizing them up. Kirchner tilts the pavement up toward you and stretches everyone thin, so the crowd feels less like a street than a current nobody controls. He made about seven of these Berlin street pictures before the war interrupted him and left him a nervous wreck.