基希纳 | 柏林街头

'Street, Berlin' by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 中文翻译：佚名信 译文校对：斯凯 翻译仅供参考 | 视频不得商用

英文稿：

I'm in MoMA's storage with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's

The Street Berlin painted in 1913.

Kirchner had moved to Berlin a couple of years earlier

with other members of the expressionist painter group,

Die Brücke, but by 1913 many of them had left

and he was there in the city on his own.

This is one of a number of street scenes he painted

all characterized as this work is by this vivid

anti-naturalistic color.

These spilling perspectives

and this very very visible brushstroke.

All hallmarks of expressionist painting.

You instantly recognize that Kirchner's subject

is not the city per se, instead his true subject

is the psychological experience of an individual

in this very large, overcrowded urban metropolis.

At this point, Berlin was the third-largest city

in the world, and Kirchner clearly is responding to that

in the way that he structures this composition.

The figures in the very center are two prostitutes

who for him embodied not only glamour and alienation,

but the sad reality of a culture in which everything

was for sale.

You see them surrounded by this relatively

faceless anonymous mask right of these black garbed suited men.

None of whom engage them directly.

These are symbolic representations of a form

of urban angst that is made all the more dramatic

by the way that he tilts and spills this composition

out toward us.

The effect is claustrophobic, I think,

for us as a viewer and is reminiscent

of what it must have been like for Kirchner

to experience the streets of Berlin in 1913.