Cinque donne per strada

By 1913 Kirchner had left Dresden for Berlin, a city that had roughly doubled in size within a generation and was still swelling. This is the first of the street scenes he painted there over the next two years, and the five figures pressed together are cocottes, streetwalkers got up in feathered hats and dark coats, their faces sharpened almost to masks. He was after the pulse of the place: the crowd, the commerce, the nervous speed of it. The greenish light and the tilting pavement give you no easy place to stand. A little more than a year after he finished it, the Berlin he watched here went to war, and Kirchner volunteered.