Walking into the Sublime

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Street, Dresden demonstrates his fondness for dynamic brushwork similar to that of Neo-Impressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin, while his unique use of space and form hearkens back to Cezanne. Despite these references to the past, his singular use of color, employed to express emotion, sets him apart from his predecessors and establishes him as the leading Expressionist of the 20^th Century.

In Street, Dresden, Kirchner depicts a busy, contemporary street scene completely filling the picture plane, save several spots of shocking pink. The massive oil on canvas painting measures 4’ 11¼” x 6’ 6⁷/₈” and features several women walking briskly toward the viewer, a mob of women in the background, and a lone man in the lower right corner of the canvas. The painting is utterly devoid of any architecture or landscaping features. The elongated figures in the foreground look directly into the eyes of the viewer/artist, and each is dressed in stylish outerwear befitting the turn of the century cosmopolitan Dresden. Their faces and figures are slightly abstracted, with pupil-less eyes and orange and green faces. Despite their abstract forms, the foreground figures are more stylized than those in background, which appear as abstracted blue forms with splashes of green, ochre and orange. There is no horizon line or vanishing point in this panting. In fact, Kirchner, like Matisse before him, introduces an unnatural tilt to render perspective, distance and depth.

Kirchner uses unblended, long feathered brushstrokes to create his elongated and narrow figures. Heavy curvilinear contour lines of dark blue and green create the outlines of the overlapping figures. In the background, there is a feeling of compression; a feeling of density created by the mass of abstract bodies.

Kichner’s skills as a Expressionist colorist are at their best in this painting. He uses deeply saturated blues and greens to depict his forms with accents of bright orange, lime green, and ochre and off white used as highlights. Like Van Gogh, he applies paint in vigorous, thick layers, allowing previous layers to bleed through the top colors here and there, adding energy. Like Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude, Kichner did not blend his paint colors but allowed them to co-exist side-by-side creating further intensity of feeling. This rough and unfinished look gives the painting a feeling of movement and tension befitting the busyness of this turn of the century street scene. His figures move in a dream-like fashion perhaps alluding to Dresden’s carefree, contemporary lifestyle. Swirls of dark blue and green heighten the action and purpose of the image. In the foreground, a large area of pink, in shocking contrast to the blues, greens and oranges, adds further momentum and tension to the bustling street scene.

The cool-colored, fast-paced city scene lacks the modeling and chiaroscuro of classical paintings, because like Gauguin and Matisse, Kirchner’s world was flat and not idealized or naturalized. Kirchner relies upon his color expertise to express the dignity and character of Dresden city life. His dark palate, with splashes of pink, orange and cream, creates an atmosphere of progression and action, of moving forward, of accomplishment. Simple as this image may seem, Kirchner demonstrated with great aplomb his freedom from academic oppression and his ability to express the excitement, emotion and narrative of the epoch in which he found himself to be the leading German Expressionist of the early 20^th Century.

Image Credit:

Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig. Street, Dresden. 1908. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. ARTstor. Web. 09 January 2010.