(upbeat piano music)
- [Man] We're looking at a painting at
the Museum of Modern Art by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
It's Street Scene Dresden and it dates to 1908.
- [Lady] And Kirchner's known as an Expressionist artist
that's his classification.
- [Man] He would become part of the group called De Brugge.
- The Bridge. - The Bridge
- as they call themselves. - The Bridge.
- [Lady] What did the Bridge mean?
What was it a bridge to and from?
From the past to the future?
- [Woman] Well, yeah, from the past to the future
but it refers really directly to Nietzsche.
- [Lady] Really? - [Man] I didn't know that!
I didn't know that either.
That makes it much more interesting.
- [Woman] Thus Spake Zarathustra.
- [Lady] Right so the bridge from
civilization to the uber mensch,
Crossing the bridge is a journey of self discovery
of individual self-actualization.
- [Man] There were so many German artists and craftsmen
that were really interested in Nietzsche at this moment.
- [Lady] Obsessed is a better word.
- [Woman] What was it about Nietzsche?
- [Lady] Well, he was interested in taking
apart ideas of morality which constricted culture so much,
all over Europe, but especially in Germany.
I think the young artists, I think Kirchner was not even
30 at this point.
They're all pretty young, and they're interested in renewal
and the new and...
- [Man] Germany was late coming to the
Industrial Revolution, right?
So there's a lot - Yes
of change that's happening in a very compressed time period.
- [Lady] They in the later 19th century tried to catch up
to England and to France and
they worked really hard to do that and
then there was a lot of growth really fast.
But there were all these cultural morings that
they worked really hard to break out of.
And Nietzsche was totally influential and inspirational
because he posited all these ways of breaking out of,
very constrictive-- - And holding the
individual accountable for--
- [Lady] So that you wouldn't be proper and contained.
- [Man] And Even in this painting there is a kind of
isolation among those figures,
- [Lady] Yeah, definitely.
- [Man] Even though it's a crowded, really dense scene,
I mean this is this is a pretty wild painting really.
- [Woman] I have to say I know that you like this painting.
- [Lady] I do, I love the painting.
- [Woman] And I have always really not--
- [Lady] I love this painting.
- [Man] So I want to hear from both of you.
- [Lady] Why do you not like this painting?
- [Woman] It feels very like a man looking at women
on the street, and I know that they're,
I guess for me it doesn't build all that
much more on the 19th century.
It looks like a street scene
of Karl Johannstrasse and so that kind of interest
in psychological angst and alienation in
the modern world and that kind of using color
to describe those things and brushwork.
This I really, as a Symbolist artist, I really like this.
- [Man] And so do the Germans, by the way,
- [Woman] But then when we come to this,
and the colors become more garish and more difficult,
the composition a little more disjointed
the brushwork more open,
I'm not sure how much this adds.
I guess there's something uncomfortable
to me about the way he is looking at the women here.
- [Lady] For me, the color and the garishness is what
attracted me to it.
I love the distortion,
I love the green,
I love the orange, I love the orange
tracing around the woman's hat.
It's glowing, I just love looking at that.
I feel like it's neon.
If you look again at the entire composition
I love things that kind of pop out.
At different moments, I think it is about looking,
it is about voyeurism, about the male gaze.
If you look on the right side of the painting
I love that he's cut halfway out of the composition.
- [Woman] Degas did that in 1872.
- [Lady] I think for me this feels very much about isolation
and German angst.
- [Man] You know, the point you were making about Degas
I thought was an interesting one.
Because in some ways France is going through those
issues when Degas is painting.
And Germany is a little bit later, but that
doesn't make this not authentic.
And an authentic expression of that moment,
I'm not saying that they're the same thing.
But the issue of industrial alienation and the
issue of urban alienation are both important
issues in both of those painters' work.
But this is clearly a 20th century work.
There are lessons that have been learned and
freedoms that have been generated from post-Impressionism
from other artists.
- [Lady] Think of Fauvism.
- [Man] Exactly.
- [Lady] Just the coloration I think for me makes it
extremely like early 20th century.
- [Man] But it's not just the beauty of Fauvism
- [Lady] No, it's not.
- [Man] This is really a kind of aggressive
- [Woman] So Van Gogh's Night Cafe,
he wanted to give the night cafe a sense of darkness
and misery by means of red and green.
What van Gogh said 20 or 30 years before this.
It's got that horrible pink color.
- [Man] So maybe the power here is the thing you don't like
which is the women as subject.
- [Lady] Well, I know that he's doing images of prostitutes
on the street and I guess that knowing that informs
my looking at this painting and starts to make me
really worried about the way that modern historians
look at these images.
- [Lady] I think that because of his prostitute streetwalker
scenes of five years later.
- [Man] Those are in Berlin, right?
- [Lady] He's in Berlin, and they're in Potsdamer Platz and
Friedrichshagen the main city centers.
Where the women,
that's a lot more strident.
The women are definitely the focus of the male gaze.
And there are a lot of men kind of
circling around the women.
Those are less interesting to me also
I think just even in terms of looking at the color
and the composition for some reason and I know
that a lot of people like those more.
His style is more developed and he is
more mature as an artist.
I like that this is more raw.
Kirchner is more focusing on that authentic
kind of direct engagement, the experience of the city,
the electric, the movement.
- [Man] A kind of constant shift and change here
as if all of those voids that sort of wonderful
sort of pink area is constantly changing and shifting as
the figures that define that space move.
- [Lady] I feel like he's experimenting with something.
- [Woman] Could we see the women here as sympathetic
in some way, maybe if I wasn't reading it through the
guise of those later images,
of prostitutes on the street.
I mean she does look out at us,
she's lit by the lights of the city.
When you said neon, I could sort of feel that,
those kinds of lights maybe in the dusk in the city.
She looks out at us and well they don't
look to me honestly like prostitutes.
They are bourgeois women, but maybe there is something
sympathetic about her if we don't look at her through
the lens of those later images.
- [Woman] I think that there is, I mean I guess to me it
just seems like these isolated figures and that's what
attracts them to me.
Like it's a theater.
If you look at the side it's almost like a pillar figure
of that male figure holding the picture together.
It pulls your eye in and he's right there sort of
between you and the female figures.
And then everything kind of recedes behind that
diagonally to the left.
In the back, so you see the girl kind of in the center
stage and then
- So what makes it theatrical? - just like the lighting.
And the way the figures are arranged.
- [Man] That could almost be limelight coming from below.
You know, what I love about it is
although it's a city and you have the
slightest trace of the trolley track
There's no architecture.
The entire space is defined by the occupation
of these figures.
Or their occupation in space and a sense it's the
city defined by these people.
Defined by space itself, shaped by the sort of
changing crowd which I think is really an interesting idea.
He's not using buildings, he's not really even
using intersections,
he's using people to - To define what's going on
- define the space.
And in a sense to build a city out of the people--
- [Lady] Out of the shifting masses.
This is Koenigstrasse in Dresden
which is a main thoroughfare of shopping.
So there is a lot of traffic and movement
and this is definitely a part of a very well known street
and a very well known area,
and it's very populated.
- [Lady] In the second half of the 19th century
when artists painted street scenes like Degas.
'Cause this looks to me like he's looking at Degas
but there is more of a sense of architecture and place.
- [Man] There's nothing here that's stable,
everything here will be different in a moment.
There's something sort of wonderful about it.
- [Woman] I think I like looking also at that little girl
and her big hat and her ugly, kind of clawlike
hand, I think she's holding some kind of toy.
- Or flowers maybe - Or flowers or something,
But in the painting it really looks scary.
- [Man] It's also the way her legs are sort of like splayed
there's something very ungainly.
- [Woman] Her hair is kind of dripping down
the sides of her face
- [Man] Kind of inelegant, yeah.
And actually throughout the entire painting there's
this really interesting tension between the
effort and elegance in the dress and then the
ungainliness, sort of the aggression
of the representation.
So there's this wonderful sort of back and forth.
(upbeat piano music)