Flanierendes und Kokotten: Kirchner and the Berlin Street at MoMA

Kirchner's move from Dresden to Berlin in 1911 proved to be a hard transition. A story told a thousand times, the artist hoped to meet great success upon moving to the big city, but sometimes, as we all know, the big city can let you down. Fellow buddies of his art group, the Brücke (Bridge) moved to Berlin as well, but the group couldn't hang after a couple of years. The Berlin avant-garde had gone abstract on them, and so the Brücke group members' representational work started looking parochial. Out of loneliness, Kirchner started wandering the streets. As we learn from one of the text panels, the artist remembered, "An agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars." Out of these wanderings emerged the tour-de-force of his Street Scenes, a topic he began to explore in the fall of 1913 and continued until 1915.
The range of media impresses. Along with the central paintings, with the wonderful Postdamer Platz (1914) serving as the exhibition's focal point, the museum shows us Kirchner's woodcuts, drypoints, inks, and pastels. In addition, three sketchbooks reveal the process of an artist making quick gesture drawings on location, penciling in ideas to fully work out once back at home. He's also a good student of the sociology of the strassenszene, distinguishing the cocottes from ordinary people in their drabber street clothes and from the flâneur types with their top hats and canes. The men of Kirchner's street scenes, interchangeable for the most part and upstaged by the street women, function like backup dancers.
Kirchner and the Berlin Street
through November 10, 2008
3rd floor, Special Exhibitions Gallery
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
11 W. 53rd St.
The online version of the exhibition may be found here at this MoMA website.
I just love reading the historical facts about different communities,I really liked your post for that.
ReplyDelete