Street, Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

       Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was an architecture student before he became an artist. A born German, Kirchner founded the artists' group Die Brucke (The Bridge) in 1905. Similar to Expressionism, Die Brucke sought to capture the raw emotion behind works of art, frequently taking the themes of modern society as reference points.
    


      The work features a crowded city street. Men and women walk about, attending to their daily tasks. A monorail is shown in the background, taking a group of people elsewhere in the city.What makes Street, Dresden unique is the facial features of the subjects of the work: most are shown walking away from the viewer, preventing their faces from being visible. The people who are actually taking time out of their day to stare at the viewer do so with blank, almost mask-like expressions. It is as if the monotony of daily life in the city has taken a toll on their psyche, putting a visible drag in their step. The young girl pictured in the center work, for instance, almost appears mentally insane based on her slouched posture and wildly open arms.
       One unavoidable characteristic of modern art is that themes, the words and images that our minds use to label the world, are often idealized, exaggerated, and occasionally made into stereotypes. Street, Dresden dramatizes Kirchner's perception that life in the city takes a certain mental toll on its inhabitants. There is some truth to this perception, however. Research has shown that living in a city with no visible nature (which was often the case during the ongoing modernization of Europe) can inhibit the brain's higher functions, such as self-control, and also make the brain more susceptible to stress. All because of the controlled chaos of city life. The human brain simply needs the occasional break.
       At the time Street, Dresden was painted, Europe was being influenced by the works of notable figures like Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Marx's socialist ideas presented in his Communist Manifesto were new at the time, and Kirchner likely believed that the hierarchy of society, which Marx opposed, was what had reduced the people to this masked state.