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Modernisms 1900-1980
Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 2
Lesson 2: Expressionism- Expressionism, an introduction
- Expressionism as Nordic?
- Der Blaue Reiter
- Kirchner, Street, Dresden
- Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, "Street, Berlin"
- Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait Nude with Amber Necklace, Half-Length I
- Emil Nolde, "Young Couple," 1913
- Jawlensky, Young Girl in a Flowered Hat
- Schiele, Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait)
- Nazi looting: Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally
- Schiele, Hermits
- Kandinsky, Apocalypse, Abstraction
- Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
- Vasily Kandinsky, "Klänge (Sounds)"
- Franz Marc and the animalization of art
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, "Street, Berlin"
Walk the streets of 1913 Berlin with the Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. To learn about other great moments in modern art, take our online course, Modern Art, 1880-1945. Created by The Museum of Modern Art.
Want to join the conversation?
- Atthe speaker pronounces the artist's name as "KeerSH-NER", I thought the ch in Kirchner was pronounced like a hard letter "K", no? 2:13(5 votes)
- Yes, i agree with you, becuase she used the hard K atand 0:06. 0:12(5 votes)
- Does Kirchner paint the men in the background with undistinguishable features while putting detail in the women because he's demonstrating how a man in Berlin would view the street? Like, instead of focusing on everyone they only have eyes for the prostitutes?(2 votes)
- I'm not so sure. The men in the painting do not pay attention to the women at all. In fact the only man to be rendered more or less as clearly as the women turns his back towards the prostitutes and seem to be more interested in whatever is in the window display (or possibly posted on the wall, but I find that less likely because posters are normally put higher up). To me this seems more a message that when anything is for sale people get jaded, but unless Krichner wrote about the whys himself i don't think it is possible to find the reason why he chose this motive precisely.(2 votes)
- What are Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's other works of art aside from the one they showed from this video?(2 votes)
- You can find some of his artworks here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Ludwig_Kirchner(2 votes)
- What does this painting say about women (in society)?(2 votes)
- how did the public at his time react to his art? did they actually understand his idea about their new material reality?(2 votes)
- Why does Kirchner decide to illustrate the psychological minds of people in Berlin during this time period? What is he trying to represent specially during the early 1900's?(1 vote)
- I believe that as an artist, he saw the world as an outsider. He wanted to portray the things that he saw that other people may not have seen the same way.(2 votes)
- Why were the people he painted so close together?(1 vote)
- To make the most of the canvas or to show action people were usually crammed together.(1 vote)
- What did the speaker mean when she said, "... but the sad reality of a culture in which everything was for sale." ?(1 vote)
- Was the bold color in both this painting and "Street, Dresden" to depict the scene or hint at an underlying meaning of the painting?(1 vote)
- What are Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's other works of art?(1 vote)
- Another one of his works was the Female Artist.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(individual keyboard notes played calmly) - I'm in MoMA's storage
with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's The Street Berlin painted in 1913. Kirchner had moved to Berlin
a couple of years earlier with other members of the
expressionist painter group, Die Brücke, but by 1913
many of them had left and he was there in the city on his own. This is one of a number of
street scenes he painted all characterized as this
work is by this vivid anti-naturalistic color. These spilling perspectives and this very very visible brush stroke. All hallmarks of expressionist painting. You instantly recognize
that Kirchner's subject is not the city per se,
instead his true subject is the psychological
experience of an individual in this very large,
overcrowded urban metropolis. At this point, Berlin was
the third largest city in the world, and Kirchner
clearly is responding to that in the way that he
structures this composition. The figures in the very
center are two prostitutes who for him embodied not
only glamour and alienation, but the sad reality of a
culture in which everything was for sale. You see them surrounded by this relatively faceless anonymous mask
right of these black garbed suited men. None of whom engage them directly. These are symbolic
representations of a form of urban angst that is
made all the more dramatic by the way that he tilts
and spills this composition out toward us. The effect is claustrophobic, I think, for us as a viewer and is reminiscent of what it must have
been like for Kirchner to experience the streets
of Berlin in 1913. (individual keyboard notes played calmly)