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>> 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.
>>Kirchen is known as an expressionist artist.
That's his classification.
>> He would become part of a group
called Die Brucke.
>> Yes, The Bridge.
>> The Bridge, as they called themselves.
>> What did the bridge mean?
What was it a bridge to and from?
>> From the past to the future.
>> Well yes, from the past to the future,
but it refers really directly to Nietzsche.
>> Really?
>> I didn't know that. I didn't know that either,
but it makes it much more interesting.
>> Thus, speak Die Brucke.
The bridge from civilization to the Uberwanch,
Crossing the bridge, it's a journey of self-discovery,
of individual self-actualization.
>> There were so many German artists
and craftsmen that were really interested in
Nietzsche at this moment, right?
>> Obsessed is a better word.
>> Yes, yes.
>> What was it about Nietzsche?
>> Well, he was interested in taking apart
ideas of morality which constricted culture so much,
I think all over Europe but especially in Germany.
I think the young artists, I think Kirchen
was not even 30 at this point,
they're all pretty young,
and they're really interested in renewal
and the new.
>> Germany was late coming to the
Industrial Revolution, right?
>> Yes.
>> There's a lot of change that's happening
in a very compressed time period.
>>They, in the later 19th Century, really
tried to catch up to England and France
and they worked really hard to do that.
Then there was a lot of growth really fast,
but there are all these culture morays
that they worked really hard to break out of
and Nietsche was totally influential and inspirational
because he posited all these ways of breaking out of.
>> It was very constrictive, proper.
>> Accountable for..
>> Yes, yes so that you wouldn't be
proper and contained.
>> Even in this painting, there is a kind of isolation
amongst those figures, isn't there?
>> Definitely.
>> Even though it's a crowded, really dense scene;
this is a pretty wild painting really.
>> I have to say I know that you like this painting.
>> I do; I love this painting.
>> I have always really not.
>> I love this painting. (laughter)
>> Right, so I want to hear from both of you then.
>> Why do you not like this painting?
>> It feels very like a man looking at women
on the street and I know that they're...
I don't know; I guess for me it doesn't
build all that much more on the 19th Century,
on Munch's Street Scene of Karl Johan Strasse.
>> Right, from 1892.
>> That kind of interest in psychological angst
and alienation in the modern world
and using color to describe those things
and brush work.
This, as a symbolist artist, I really like this.
>> So did the Germans by the way.
>> Yeah.
>> They really heroized him, right?
>> Then when I get to this and the colors
become more garish and more difficult,
the composition a little more disjointed,
the brush work more open,
I'm not sure how much this adds.
I guess there's something uncomfortable to me
about the way that he's looking at the women here.
>> For me, the color and 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 and it is about
voyeurism and it is about the male gaze.
If you look on the right side of the painting,
I love that he's caught halfway
out of the composition.
De'Gaulle did that in 1872.
I think for me this sort of feels very much
about isolation and German angst.
>> The point that you were making about De'Gaulle
I thought was an interesting one
because in some ways
France is going through those issues
when De'Gaulle was painting and Germany is
a little bit later, but that doesn't make this
not authentic,
an authentic expression of that moment.
I'm not saying that they're the same thing,
but the issue is industrial alienation and
the issue of urban alienation I think are both
very important issues in
both of those painter's work.
This is clearly a 20th Century work.
There are lessons that have learned and
freedoms that have been generated from
post-Impressionism and from other artists.
>> I think of Fauvism.
>> Exactly.
>> Just the coloration I think for me is something
that makes it extremely early 20th Century.
>> It's not the beauty of Fauvism.
>> No, it's not.
>> This is really a kind of aggressive.
>> I like that.
>> 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.
That's what Van Gogh said
20 or 30 years before this.
He's got that horrible pink color in that painting.
>> Maybe the power here is the very thing
that you don't like which is the women as subject.
>> 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.
It starts to make me really worried about the way
that modern historians look at these images.
>> I think that his, because I think of his prostitute,
the streetwalker scenes as five years later.
>> He's in Berlin, right?
>> He's in Berlin and they're in like
Potsdam or Platts and Friedrichshafen,
those main city centers and where the women...
That's a lot more strident and the women are
definitely the focus of the male gaze.
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 composition for some reason and I
know that a lot of people like those more.
His style is more developed
and he's more mature as an artist.
I like that this is more raw.
Kirchen, he's really focusing on that authentic,
kind of direct engagement with the
experience of the city,
the electric, the movement.
>> A kind of constant shift and change here
as if all of those voids, that wonderful pink area,
is constantly changing and shifting as the
figures that define that space move.
>> I feel like he's experimenting with something.
>> 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.
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.
>> Well, they don't look to me honestly
like prostitutes.
>> Right, I'm saying they're bourgeois women,
but maybe there is something
sympathetic about her if we don't look at her
through the lens of those later images.
>> I think there is.
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,
there's almost like a pillar figure,
of that male figure,
kind of holding the picture together and it
pulls your eye in and he's right there and
he's sort of between you and the female figures.
Then everything kind of recedes behind that
diagonally to the left in the back.
You see the girl in the center stage.
>> What makes it theatrical?
>> I think the lighting and the way the
figures are arranged.
>> That could almost be limelight
coming from below.
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.
In a sense, it's the city defined by these people,
defined by space itself shaped
by this changing crowd which I think is really
an interesting idea.
He's not using buildings.
He's not even really using intersections.
He's using people to define the space
and then in a sense to build a city out of
the people...
>> Out of the shifting masses.
This is Koenigstrasse in Dresden which is
a main thoroughfare of shopping so there's a lot of
traffic and movement and this is definitely
part of a very well-known street and a very
well-known area and it's very populated.
>> In the second half of the 19th Century
when artists' painted street scenes, like De'Gaulle
because this looks to me like he's looking at
De'Gaulle, but there is more of a sense of
architecture and place.
>> Yes, there's nothing here that's stable.
Everything here will be different in a moment
and there's something sort of wonderful about that.
>> Yeah. I think I like also just looking at that
little girl and her big hat and her
ugly, kind of claw-like 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.
>> Yes, yes. There's also the way that her legs
are slightly splayed and there's something
very ungainly.
>> Her hair is kind of dripping down the sides
of her face.
>> Yes, that kind of inelegant.
Actually throughout the entire painting,
there's this really interesting tension between
the effort and elegance in the dress
but then the ungainliness or the aggression of
the representation.
This is sort of wonderful sort of back and forth.
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