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How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13)
Reviewed by John Haber
No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? Who else first exhibited in a former butcher’s shop, where it also met? When, decades later, Adolf Hitler denounced the movement as “degenerate art,” his rhetoric feels familiar from religious conservatives even now blaming a perceived moral decline on urban liberals. And who in Die Brücke was as cosmopolitan as its oldest founding member, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner?
That butcher’s shop in Dresden was Kirchner’s first studio, and he hit the streets all the more knowingly after his move to Berlin, the capital city. Nothing of his sticks in memory so much as a scene from 1913, in which fashionably dressed men and women press forward without ever quite acknowledging one another’s existence — except, perhaps, by competing for attention. One can feel a sidewalk as the site of congestion and isolation just as much today in New York. So why did he pass his last thirty years in the Swiss Alps? The Neue Galerie shows Kirchner’s love-hate relationship with a city, its inhabitants, and himself.
