On July 26, the Neue Galerie opens “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Berlin Street Scene,” an exhibit centering around a celebrated oil on canvas from 1913–14, which is prescient in its view of the urban experience. Kirchner’s proudly garbed scissor-people slash their way through the street with vibrant energy. The two men and two women in the forefront of “Berliner Strassenszene” (Berlin Street Scene, 1913–14) crowd us, imposing their physicality upon us, much as a tourist in today’s Berlin may experience when traversing a major thoroughfare, and finding that a bit of grass on a crossing island is occupied by naked, tattooed sunbathers.

Kirchner (1880–1938) was famously a founder of the Dresden group DieBrücke, or “TheBridge,” advocating “all revolutionary and surging elements.” Alongside other young German artists such as Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner’s inspiration was international and highly individual, including influences from van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, and Vlaminck. Of these, Norway’s Munch (1863–1944), in his anguished 1892 oil on canvas “Evening on Karl Johan Street,” now in Oslo’s Munch Museum, shares close psychological parallels to Kirchner’s “Berlin Street Scene.”

World War I triggered physical and mental collapses for Kirchner, but even earlier he was plagued by alcoholism, drug abuse, headaches, and anxiety attacks, possibly of syphilitic origin. We who have experienced 20th century history are accustomed to praise doleful artists such as Kirchner and Munch as prescient. By contrast, John Sloan (1871–1951), a leader of New York’s Ashcan School, a supposedly “realist” movement, created an oil on canvas around 1918, “Bleecker Street, Saturday Night,” auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2000, which shows happy couples strolling around sentimentally. Sloan noted about his painting: “A cheerful, happy street, there’s many another bleaker.”

Among those that are decidedly bleaker is “Scene de Rue, Paris” an oil on canvas from around 1918 by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), formerly in the collection of the Clarke Galleries in Vermont, showing worried women crowded in the foreground. Even so, Bonnard’s women are clustered around a puddle transfigured into a radiant golden pathway by reflections from city streetlights. This kind of visual redemption is entirely foreign to Kirchner’s sensibility in his 11 surviving canvases of street scenes, of which “Berlin Street Scene” has become the most famous because of its removal from Berlin’s Brücke Museum, where it had been displayed since its purchase in 1980. “Berlin Street Scene” was returned — amid much local public outcry — by the Berlin state senate to the heirs of its original owners, Alfred and Tekla Hess. The restitution was justified by the allegation that the sale of “Berlin Street Scene” in the 1930s was forced by the Hess’s persecution as Jews by the Nazis.

At Christie’s last November, the cofounder of the Neue Galerie, the cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder, bought it for $38.1 million, setting a record for the artist. (Last year, Lauder also purchased a Gustav Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, restituted by the Austrian government, for $135 million). The British press has exulted over the fact that Anita Halpin, the London-based heir of “Berlin Street Scene,” is chairwoman of the British Communist Party, and has been nicknamed “Stalin’s Granny” because of her hard-line, publicly expressed views in support of the former Soviet Union and against the very notion of personal inheritance, as well as vehement opposition to the state of Israel. Mrs. Halpin, who is reportedly also laying claim to six other valuable paintings currently hanging in European museums, participated in a “Free Palestine Rally” in London in 2003, which also involved artwork, including a satiric image of “Goya’s [Ariel] Sharon Devouring Palestine.”

This kind of uneasy irony would surely have pleased Kirchner, a master of ambiguity who was alternately attracted and repulsed by the women whom he painted in the street. He later acknowledged that these women were prostitutes, but in his painting’s titles at the time he referred to them as “Kokotten.” This term, deriving from the French “cocotte” refers to capricious women of light morals, as featured in Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta “The Merry Widow.” The faces of these shady ladies in “Berlin Street Scene” are depicted with Cubist hard angles, echoing the influence of African masks in Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), currently the subject of a focus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Kirchner’s swirling figures, caught in an ominous whirlpool of city life, are allies of Picasso’s message of savage modernism.

Likewise, Kirchner may be linked to the self-consciously prophetic paintings of the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla, such as his 1912 oil on canvas “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,” in which a fashionable lady drags her pet along, just as Kirchner’s stylish Kokotten lure their male acquaintances in “Berlin Street Scene.” In the background of Kirchner’s painting, the oddly sloping pink planes make the crowd look as if they are jumping up and down on a mattress, echoing in another futuristic street scene from 1913, “The Cyclist” by Natalya Goncharova (1881–1962), in which a Russian constructivist messenger boy pedals his bike over cobblestones which are as buoyant as loaves of bread. Kirchner’s Berlin is a seduction and a pit, with streets that are both dynamic stage sets and quicksand traps; today’s city dwellers can certainly share his ambivalent point of view.