Women at Potsdamer Platz

The subjects of Women at Potsdamer Platz (who also appear in a number of Kirchner’s paintings) may look to modern eyes like fashionable ladies from high society, perhaps granted their moment in the spotlight by an indulgent artist. In reality, however, their demeanour and poses are intended to attract business, since these women are actually prostitutes plying their trade on a traffic island. ‘We ourselves have become like the tarts I once painted. Simply mopped up, and afterwards no sign of ever having been there. Nevertheless, I persist in my attempts to put my thoughts into some sort of order, and to create out of the confusion a picture of our age, as is indeed my duty’, wrote Kirchner in March 1916, shortly after suffering a physical and mental breakdown brought on by the war. His depiction of the Women at Potsdamer Platz can thus be regarded as a modern (and prophetic) counterpart to the vanitas paintings of an earlier age.