Potsdamer Platz

Potsdamer Platz (1914) is one of the large-format works in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's series of Berlin street scenes, painted after he moved from Dresden to Berlin. The scene is set at midnight on the Berlin square: in the foreground, on a traffic island, two elegantly dressed women, prostitutes of the period, wait for clients, while passers-by move in different directions. The figures appear almost life-size against a distorted background, and the real subject is the tension between the women and the men approaching from either side. The painting was probably begun in spring 1914 but was not finished until after the war broke out, a detail reflected in the figure on the left, read as a war widow. According to art historian Hyang-Sook Kim, this reading helps explain the social contradiction of the time between mourning and economic need. The unreal colours, the bright greens of the pavement and the sharp-angled composition create an unsettling tension that Kirchner used as a deliberately Expressionist device. The work is held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Painter

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Date

1914

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

200 × 150 cm

Museum

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

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