Among the first works that come to mind when I hear the phrase “German Expressionism” are Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s tough-minded street scenes. Painted at the age of thirty-one, a few years after he moved from Dresden to Berlin in the autumn of 1911, they are testimony to his fascination with the louche metropolis. In this powerful series, the young artist (1880–1938) concentrated on the city’s urban core at night, filling his canvases with tightly pressed crowds of pedestrians—prostitutes in narrow, fur-trimmed wraps and feathered hats, men pursuing them in long overcoats—revealed by the lurid glow of shop windows and newfangled electric street lighting. There’s something sinister about Berlin after dark as Kirchner presents it. The paintings’ tipped space, angular drawing, and slashing brushstrokes bear witness to an awareness of Cubist ideas about constructing a picture, while their blazing blues, purples, yellows, and pinks suggest knowledge of what the Fauvists were doing as well. Yet Kirchner’s warping of viewpoints and exaggeration of shape, touch, and color never read simply as formal innovations, as they do in the work of his French colleagues. Rather, they seem to be irrepressible expressions of anger and urgency. Just about all of Kirchner’s works, whether portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, or studio interiors with models, are notable for this kind of intensity, although most are less fierce than the Berlin street scenes.

Still, it is only mildly surprising to learn that their author was a volatile personality, with problematic, contradictory, sometimes unsavory political views. Kirchner