Tiergartenallee mit Siegessäule

Tiergartenallee mit Siegessäule (Tiergarten Avenue with Victory Column) of 1925 depicts one of Berlin's most iconic vistas — the great avenue through the Tiergarten park leading to the Siegessäule, the Victory Column commemorating Prussian military victories. By 1925 Ury was in his late sixties and had painted Berlin through its transformation from the imperial city of the late nineteenth century through the traumas of the First World War and into the turbulent Weimar Republic years. This late painting documents a Berlin landscape that had become deeply familiar to him over decades, invested now with layers of personal and historical memory. The Siegessäule itself, erected originally before the Reichstag before being moved to its current position in 1938, was a potent symbol of Prussian-German national ambition. Ury's rendering of it through the tree-lined avenue treats it as a picturesque element in a larger landscape vision.

The long avenue provides pronounced perspectival recession, the rows of trees diminishing toward the distant column. Ury exploits dappled light under the avenue's canopy — a subject with Impressionist precedents.