Kirchner, Street, Dresden

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, oil on canvas, 1908 (MoMA) Speakers: Dr. Juliana Kreinik, Dr. Steven Zucker, Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.

[@michaelagonzalez]

Thank you, Dr. Kreinik your interpretation was interesting!

[@Sasha0927]

I could tell by the extended intro this was a classic, lol. Dr. Harris throwing shade and Zucker's cracking up about it made me laugh. I appreciated the honesty - we can't like all art, even if it is famous. I did enjoy hearing both perspectives on why the painting is (dis)liked. It could be the video quality, but I can't fall for this one. The colors just seem strange, sickly, and unnatural to me. I do like the half gone male on the right - I love that blue and his unique positioning, but I wouldn't miss the rest of this. 😅

[@robertmather6152]

A very interesting presentation. Thank you

[@piaoingrou]

I am glad to hear that someone dares to speak out that she doesn't like the painting..

[@holyknight234]

thanks for this. i needed it.

[@levoy4ge]

i clicked like at first just for how good the jazz music was :D ...

[@leonpse]

Seems like the painting's focus is the girl, the future. She may be selling flowers. We may have the Bourgeoisie vs. the working class. She stands defiant and ready to take over when it's her time. The others represent the present now, but the girl represents the future.

[@BrianHutzellMusic]

5:20 “[Louise] Bourgeois’ work is intense and mysterious, often made from unusual materials in jarring colors. Pink appears frequently, as the artist believed it contrasted with traditional ideas about what was suitable for art.” - Des Moines Art Center label text for Bourgeois’s sculpture, “The Blind Leading the Blind” I like Kirchner’s pink street because it is unexpected and garish. It is a gaudy stage for all of these performers.

[@AMorgan57]

I haven't seen this painting before and know nothing about it or about Kirchner, so I may be way off base. To me, it has more to say than Munch's painting, to which it is compared here. It shoves aside the man and the crowd, and uses color and form to blur out the familiar, so we can see the strangeness of the relation of the individual women to their social space. The women aren't depicted as objects but as individuals and participants, both shaping and shaped by the space they inhabit. The child is particularly deformed by this space, almost imploding, weighed down by her giant hat and grasped by an adult.

[@Bix12]

I didn't appreciate the post-feminist lens through which Dr. J. Kreinik's seems to be critiquing this fabulous painting - she's obviously channeling her 21st century hostility toward men directly at the artist. Kirchner is a bit more abstract than that. His motivations draws from a deeper well than merely base sexist ogling of the female flesh. In her attempt to reduce the ARTIST by projecting her hatred of men onto the canvas, she completely loses the objective of contemplating the ART. I thoroughly enjoy these conversations between Dr. Harris and Dr. Zucker Please let's not muck it up with needless modern political posturing or additional voices which only lower the bar.

[@emiliaqo]

Hostility toward men? really, what rock did you crawl from? Men still have a lot of privilege in this society and feminism is resistance against violence from men toward women. Since 1960s feminism is a methodology used to study art and is a tool that can be used to understand art from any century, even if feminism didn't exist. In this case, feminist was alive and well when Kirchener made this painting. But still, hatred toward women has existed in Europe since Antiquity and art always reveals a lot from the age it was made, and a part of analyzing art is understanding what art tells us about the year it was made. So, using a feminist methodology to understand this painting is not lowering the bar, is putting the bar higher. If we analyzed art only by the standards of the moment it was made we couldn't call art from Ancient Greece Classical because the term was used first in the 18th Century, or we couldn't speak about how Impressionism foreshadowed modernism, because modernism as we know it didn't exist in 1874, and so on. We now understand how men used to think about women in the early 20th century, and we can use that knowledge to elevate our understanding of an artist's reasons.

[@opticalmixing23]

stop projecting your hatred of men onto canvas lady

[@leonpse]

She is a possible future for the little girl, grown-up, too bad.

[@jackmjohnson]

you have summed it up perfectly !