Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Street, Dresden [1908]

This work is Kirchner’s bold, discomfiting attempt to render the jarring experience of modern urban bustle. The scene radiates tension. Its packed pedestrians are locked in a constricting space; the plane of the pavement, in an unsettlingly intense pink (part of a palette of shrill and clashing colours), slopes steeply upward, and the exit to the rear is blocked by a trolley car. The street, Dresden’s fashionable Königstrasse, is crowded, even claustrophobically so, yet everyone seems alone.

 

[Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York - Oil on canvas, 150.5 x 200.4 cm]

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