After the seminal, formative "Brücke" years in Dresden, E. L. Kirchner followed his fellow artists Hermann Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller to the metropolis of Berlin in the fall of 1911.\~Around 1900, the city had\~not only\~grown to become one of the most exciting cultural centers\~but was also\~the fastest-growing city in Europe.\~After the turn of the century, life in Berlin was buzzing: Department stores, bars, theaters, and dance halls sprang up. The parallel worlds of splendor and misery, poverty, unemployment, and prostitution, modernity, upheaval, and sophisticated prosperity, as well as the fast pace of life and the masses of people living in a confined\~space\~overwhelmed but also inspired him to his more mature "Berlin style",\~which would yield some of the most important works in his artistic oeuvre, including his famous "Street Scenes",\~which are now considered\~key\~works of German Expressionism. The few paintings in this series are now in important museums, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, the Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

E. L. Kirchner arrived at these outstanding compositions through drawing. In fleeting sketches, but also in more complex, elaborate, and sometimes - as is the case in our work - colorful compositions, and later also in large-format sheets (e.g. "Berliner Straßenszene", c. 1914, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main), the artist creates dynamic and tangible documents of his impressions of Berlin. A portrait of the anonymous mass of people in the modern city. In the glaring artificial light of the streetlights and shop windows, passers-by stand close together, meeting, talking to each other, or turning away from each other. Kirchner observed the hustle and bustle of the town, capturing it with a focused gaze, reducing the surroundings and yet concentrating on the monumental nature of the city. Strong strokes with colored chalks emphasize the figures' contours, setting them off against the background of the facades in neon lights.

Looking back on his own "street scenes" in 1925, Kirchner wrote under a pseudonym: "Kirchner found that the feeling that lies over a city is represented in the form of lines of force. In the way people compose themselves in the crowd, indeed in the way they walk, he found the means to capture the experience. There are pictures and prints by him where a pure framework of lines with almost schematic figures depicts street life in the most lively way." (Kirchner as "Louis de Marsalle" on his own work, quoted from: Lothar Grisebach, E. L. Kirchner's Davos Diary, Wichtrach/Bern 1997, p. 78) [CH/MvL]