In the cafe garden

Kirchner painted this cafe garden in 1914, in Berlin, which turns out to be a strange year to be recording people at leisure under the trees. Within months the city he painted had emptied of its young men, and Kirchner himself went into military service the next year, then broke down and was discharged. The scene keeps none of that. It has the sharp, acid colour and the restless, splintered brushwork he and the other Bruecke artists had brought to the modern city, the figures pressed close and a little on edge even at their ease. That nervous modern look is exactly what a later German government could not tolerate. In 1937 the painting was pulled from a museum in Halle in the Nazi campaign against so-called degenerate art, sold off abroad, and only reached the Bruecke-Museum in Berlin decades later.