Street, Dresden

The Artwork I picked is an oil painting called Street, Dresden, this artwork was painted by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1908. Kirchner is well known as an expressionist artist, who is a part of the German Expressionist collective Die Brücke, also called The Bridge. The bridge mainly focused on the authenticity of expression, because its members felt that’s what has been lost during the innovations of modern life. The meaning of “The Bridge” During this period of time, most of the German artists are obsessed with Nietzsche. The young artists like Kirchner were interested in the renewal and new ideas. In this painting, Kirchner shows isolations between those figures even though there’s crowds in the painting, but we as audience can actually feel the tension between people. During this time period, German joined the industrial revolution and trying to catch up with British and France. The civilians and even the whole country was facing to a new changes. People felt unstable and anxious about everything. Kirchner boldly picked the color for this painting. He uses bright red, green, a weird pink and even neon orange to convey a sense of alienation. Kirchner uses the garishness to reflect people’s unsureness of the new. I think another interesting point of this painting is that there are no architectures involved. According to the video, “The entire space is defined by the occupation of these figure or their occupation in space”, we can know the well designed composition and layout of this painting. There is also an tension between the elegenceness of the women’s dress and the ungainliness of their face, that’s also what attract me. In the center of the canvas, Kirchner exaggerates the little girl’s hand, toy or flowers and her big hat. Her hair and her leg are kind of split in a creepy way. The women’s facial expression are sort of sympathetic in some way, the women are surrounded by the creepy man, which shows women were enduring the feminist suffragettes during that period of time in German. In my opinion, this painting also represents women’s liberation. Personally, I really like this painting. I was attracted by the wild color in the beginning, and after I learnt more background informations and histories of this painting I got more clear about it.

Citation/url

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/early-abstraction/expressionism1/v/ernst-ludwig-kirchner-street-dresden-1908