Evening in Berlin

The Museum of Modern Art’s extensive, world-class collection, not to mention its lending and borrowing powers, enables it to mount small, concentrated shows devoted to subjects most museums could never dream of. A year ago, MoMA dreamed up “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at 100.” This fall, the museum will bring us “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” which will center on “The Starry Night,” one of the hallmarks of MoMA’s permanent collection. Van Gogh’s twilight and nighttime works are a great basis for an exhibition, as is the centennial of Picasso’s groundbreaking Cubist masterpiece.Which brings us to the question: Just because MoMA can, should they? “Kirchner and the Berlin Street,” centered on MoMA’s classic German Expressionist works “Street, Berlin” (1913) and “Street, Dresden” (1908/19), is a thoughtful, elegantly installed exhibition that explores the artist’s renowned “Berlin Street Scenes” of 1913-15. Eight large oil paintings of German city streets, from collections in Cologne, Berlin, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, and New York, form the basis of the show, which is fleshed out with nearly 70 drawings, prints, sketchbooks, and one sculpture, from private and museum collections around the world.“Kirchner and the Berlin Street” is not earthshaking or particularly exhilarating. It will not necessarily change the perception of Kirchner or of German Expressionism. It may even feel a little underdone — not because of the weakness of its conception, but because, rather, of the quality of the work. But it proves how essential MoMA is as an institution, and it demonstrates how an artist of less-than-stellar talent can be understandably overshadowed by the stellar company he keeps. Removed from the genius of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, van Gogh, Mondrian, Balthus, Giacometti, and Klee, Kirchner’s work can be seen exactly for what it is — which is a rare treat in New York.Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in 1880 and committed suicide in 1938. He was an original and key member of the German Expressionist movement, as well as the well-known founder, in Dresden in 1905, of Die Brücke, or “The Bridge,” which is generally considered to be the first Expressionist group. Die Brücke — inspired by Nietzsche’s existential idea that man, in a constant state of becoming, is a bridge rather than an end point — was made up of former architecture students. Core members included the artists Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl.Kirchner was Die Brücke’s most talented painter. He has been included in countless shows of German Expressionism, and a Kirchner retrospective was held in 2003 in Washington, D.C. Surprisingly, however, “Kirchner and the Berlin Street” is the first-ever New York museum show of the artist. Organized by Deborah Wye, MoMA’s chief curator of prints and illustrated books, “Kirchner” is a first-tier show devoted to a second-tier artist.MoMA’s “Kirchner” is a slice-of-life exhibit. The show, which displays its seven featured oil paintings, spread out across the center of the gallery, facing the entrance, makes a fanfare commencement that somewhat peters out at the periphery. Luckily, however, because the exhibit is installed intelligently in one wide gallery, you must pass back and forth in front of Kirchner’s “Berlin Street Scenes” as you take in the rest of the show — an act that further grounds you in the focus of the exhibition.Influenced by van Gogh’s brushwork, Fauvist color, and, through Futurism, fractured Cubist space, Kirchner developed his own figurative works built of raucous shot color activated by brusque, black lines. Some of his most engaging work is his sculpture, which was influenced heavily by Gauguin and primitive art. Kirchner’s hand-carved and painted wood “Standing Girl, Caryatid” (1909-10) — in which her breasts are cupped by her arm, as if in a bowl of fruit, and her weighty belly swings languidly to one side — is one of the high points of the show. Kirchner and his fellow Brücke members, along with models and prostitutes — as if attempting to re-create a German Tahiti — hung out together in communal digs with homemade, quasi-primitive wall hangings, furniture, paintings, and sculpture.The “Berlin Street Scenes” are considered the peak of Kirchner’s oeuvre. And certainly they, along with MoMA’s crowded, fluid, and clawing “Street, Dresden” — in which bright red-orange and blue-black lines snake around figures, faces, street, and architecture, all made up of hot orange, pink, and lime green — are the high point of MoMA’s show.The grouping of “Berlin Street Scenes” presents us with an energetic, cinematic wall of city street, people, color, and line — tight clusters of figures that rustle and rise like windblown foliage. The paintings work well together, as if we are seeing different views of the same figures and interactions. In two of the paintings — all of which depict prostitutes in boas, feathered hats, and long black dresses, accosted by johns in topcoats and top hats — the figures rise from a point like a bouquet or an opening fan.In the black and yellow-green “Five Women on the Street” (1913), the central female figure is abruptly cut by a straight, vertical edge that adds stop-action allure and specificity. In “Potsdamer Platz” (1914), the best work in the series, Kirchner gives us sudden and distinct changes in scale, as tiny figures in the background seemingly attempt to cross over to the larger foreground, inhabited by the Amazonian prostitutes. The painting, in which the two women move on a circular, carnivalesque island median, becomes a dangerous game.But overall, the “Berlin Street Scenes” tend to generalize into a style that resembles a nervous, angst-fueled tick. Color is tonal, strident, and chalky. Lines slash and scratch with repetitively rote and crude simplification. The prostitutes and johns all look of a type. And compositions have a crazy-quilt quality that feels hurried and abandoned too soon.The exhibit’s drawings, which include nudes, prostitutes, and street scenes, can also feel a little thin, scribbled, angst-ridden, and unresolved. Many of the drawings — quick jottings of figures and buildings — were the studies for the paintings and prints. Some of the graphic work, especially the nightclub scenes influenced by those of Toulouse-Lautrec, is strong. And some of the black-and-white woodcuts, which embrace Northern Gothic angularity, have a taut muscularity and graphic punch. (There are a few real gems here.)Mostly, however, “Kirchner” presents us with an artist seemingly concerned more with energy than form. I sense that Kirchner, unlike his influence, van Gogh, is asserting himself too much and too soon on his art; that he, like many artists from the Expressionist camp, is telegraphing received feeling, rather than doing the required work of feeling his way through these pictures until they can speak for themselves. Despite its weaknesses, “Kirchner” allows us to see the painter alone and afresh. The show reminds us that nearly every artist in MoMA’s collection needs to get out on the town occasionally.Sunday until November 10 (53 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).

Evening in Berlin

Evening in Berlin

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