Ernst Kirchner's Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913-16

An article entitled "Culture in the Display Window," which surveyed the elegant artistry of Berlin's display windows, appeared in Der Kritiker, a Berlin cultural journal, during the summer of 1913. Its author stated that these windows were an important factor in Germany's recent economic boom and the concomitant rise of its culture on the world stage, serving "as an alarm clock of our hedonism" and transforming the frugal German housewife into a fashionable lady. [1] Women's fashion was said to be at the heart of a new love of luxury that made Berlin the economic and cultural equal of Paris.

The historical and theoretical bases of the article's argument lay within recent developments in German applied arts. For several years the Deutscher Werkbund had promoted both the aestheticization of commodities through packaging and display techniques and the growth of German fashion's prestige within the world market. [2] Display window competitions and articles in the popular press encouraged consideration of the new commercial culture's artistry, [3] while scholars, such as Werner Sombart in his 1913 book Luxus und Kapitalismus, ascribed new importance to luxury's role in capitalism's development. Sombart equated Titian's paintings of nudes and celebration of the courtesan with the flowering of capitalism in the sixteenth century, arguing that a "purely hedonistic aesthetic conception of woman" promoted luxury and economic growth, as courtesans began to influence other women through art, fashion, and an eroticism of consumption. This, he maintained, was a pattern that persisted to the present, when "all the follies of fashion, luxury, splendor, and extravagance are first tried out by the mistresses before they are finally accepted, somewhat toned down, by the reputable matrons." [4] Sombart's linkage of art, luxury, fashion, and sexuality was common among intellectuals who worried about the social and moral implications of Germany's burgeoning consumption at the beginning of the new century. [5] During 1913-14, art, luxury, fashion, and sexuality also became the key terms of a debate that focused on the display window and included efforts to pass a set of laws to protect youth and check the spread of immorality.

I will argue in this article that certain of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's street scenes from 1913-15, such as his crayon and tempera drawing Cocotte in Red (Fig. 1), participated in a discourse on luxury and immorality that revolved around art, advertising, and fashion. [6] Such an assertion builds on scholarship that has discussed this series in relation to the metropolitan character of Berlin prior to World War I. Kirchner's vision has been related to Georg Simmel's observations about urban experience, myths about Berlin's sinfulness that arose during the nineteenth century, literary efforts to define the city's uniquely modern qualities, and the contemporary practice of prostitution within the city. Such studies have explained much about the significance of the series's stylistic character. [7] Several scholars have also suggested how the discursive formulation of Berlin as a whore and representations of fashion contributed to Kirchner's interpretation of the street-walkers. [8] My study extends such claims by examining the impact of specific elements within the discourse about luxury and immorality on Kirchner's work and considering why such issues would have concerned an avant-garde artist. However, such assertions claiming a relationship between Kirchner's work and contemporary social and political issues contrast with Kirchner's own view that his art was essentially unmediated by culture, being a personal, purely optical response to the city. Carl Einstein stated this position well in 1926:

Kirchner's originality is optically based; as soon as he sketches the first mark, the motif is already taken in and absorbed. The eye, which passionately moves the hand at the same moment, without the hand faking or propping up the imagination's power, is the origin; consequently literature is avoided, made impossible. One does not enhance the real, but punctuates individual vision, the personal way of seeing. [9]

This is a view that has continued to be expressed in some recent writing that maintains that nothing is found in the street series, or Strassenbilder, that was not directly experienced and recorded in sketches that Kirchner made on the streets. [10] Such assertions take their lead from Kirchner's writings, such as a diary entry of February 18, 1926, in which he states that his art privileged an "ecstasy of initial perception," and the "Zehnder Essay," where he wrote, "The work arises as an impulse, in a state of ecstasy, and even when the impression has long taken root in the artist, its recording is nevertheless swift and sudden." [11]

Kirchner used such comments, particularly as expressed in essays that he wrote using the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle during the 1920s and 1930s, to position his work in relation to contemporary and past art. [12] These writings laid rightful claim to the extraordinary role that rapid sketching played in his work, but also obfuscated its relationship to contemporaries in Paris, Vienna, and Dresden during the period before 1914 for whom the rapid sketch was also crucial. [13] While Kirchner made the "unself-conscious and aimless" sketch the signature of his artistic achievement, his statement in the "Zehnder Essay" also suggests that even the most spontaneous drawing grew from extended experience, which, although he did not note it, necessarily involved cultural mediation. [14] By focusing solely on the sketch as a recording of a momentary experience on the street, recent commentators do not pay sufficient attention to the full scope of the role of the imaginary in Kirchner's sketches and works in other media. [15]