Born in 1880 in Bavaria, Germany, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner studied architecture in Drsden before his interest in painting led him to form Die Brucke in 1905. He works as a painter, engraver and sculptor and plays an important role in the rediscovery of woodcut. Favorite subjects of early works are urban scenes from Drsden and Berlin.
He also paints prostitutes, models and friends. While serving in World War I, he suffered from a nervous breakdown. In 1917 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner went to convalescence in Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life, finding inspiration in the mountainous scenery.
Later he turned more and more towards abstraction. His work is defined as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1937. Depressed and in poor health, he committed suicide in 1938.
The story that this work tells us is linked to Berlin and Die Brucke. Kirchner participated in the founding of this group of artists, whose members moved from Drsden to Berlin in 1910-11, at the time the hub of the arts in Germany. At the beginning of the twentieth century Berlin was a city full of contradictions, in continuous cultural and political ferment.
In Kirchner's paintings we see that the streets of Berlin were full of life, but in the images of bars, cabarets, traffic, shop windows and faceless masses, something else emerges. There is an atmosphere of inevitable degeneration. This decadent sense is well represented in this work.
Two prostitutes strut along the street, flanked by some men on the right and traffic on the left. The vision is that of a claustrophobic world, without the possibility of physical or emotional contact. The faces look like masks, the eyes are expressionless, devoid of reflection and pupils.
The colors are bright, the brushstrokes wide and disconnected. Before us we have a dark canvas with jagged and angular shapes that in a certain sense are influenced by the influence of the Futurists. In Drsden Kirchner represented artists and models immersed in nature.
In Berlin, on the other hand, the painter fixes the decline of a society on the brink of an abyss, from which two world wars will start, leaving Europe in ruins.
