Women on the Street

In 1914 Berlin was moving faster than any city Kirchner had known. He'd left Dresden three years earlier, and the crowded boulevards became his real subject. The elegant, feathered women he paints here are cocottes, streetwalkers working the evening pavements, and he renders them with sharp, spiky, almost brittle lines that carry his own nervous energy more than any real fashion. Faces narrow to masks, the pavement tilts, the figures press together yet stay strangely alone. He borrowed some of that speed from the Italian Futurists and some of the elongation from old German painting. This belongs to the street-scene series he made between 1913 and 1915, the work most people now think of first when they think of him. Within a year of finishing it he had volunteered for military service, and the breakdown that followed would keep him from ever painting Berlin this way again.