Street Scene after the Rain

Dresden and Berlin

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Street Scene after the Rain

1914

Woodcut on Japanese paper, image 26.5 × 24.7 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington

A woman holding flowers walks between men in hats and dark coats, all built from jagged black shapes left standing on the block. The print takes the street subject of his paintings into black and white.

  • Look at the large hatted figure at lower left: his face is turned toward us while his body runs off the bottom edge.
  • Short, sawtooth cuts along the coats let the paper show through as bright notches.
  • Diagonal cuts split the background into splinters, so the strain of the street lives in sharp, broken forms rather than in described detail.
  • A red estate stamp on the back shows that this sheet passed through the artist's estate after his death.
  • The Washington collector Ruth Cole Kainen bought it in 1970 and gave it to the gallery in 2012.

Image: National Gallery of Art · CC0 (NGA Open Access)

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