Train station Nollendorfplatz at night

Train Station Nollendorfplatz at Night, painted in 1925 and now at the Märkisches Museum in Berlin, is among Ury's most significant late works and one of the few major paintings he devoted to the newly expanded U-Bahn (underground railway) infrastructure of Berlin. The Nollendorfplatz station on the U-Bahn line opened in 1902 and was expanded in 1908 with an elevated structure; by 1925 it was a key interchange in the Schöneberg district of Berlin's West End. The station's elevated structure, with its artificial lighting, its waiting figures, and its context on a busy street junction, gave Ury exactly the combination of artificial light, nocturnal urban atmosphere, and social observation that his mature style required. The subject also connects his Berlin nocturnes to the new century's infrastructure — the underground railway, electric trams, and motor vehicles — replacing the horse-drawn cabs and gas lamps that had populated his earlier work. The Märkisches Museum, dedicated to Berlin's cultural and social history, holds this painting as a document of the city's modern transformation as much as an aesthetic object.

The elevated station structure provides architectural scaffolding for the composition — the platform, canopy, and stanchions create geometric grid elements against which the dispersed glow of electric lighting plays. Ury handles the complex light environment of an electric-lit station — multiple sources, hard overhead lamps, diffused ambient glow — with the experience of decades painting artificial urban light. Figures on the platform are small-scale elements in a predominantly architectural and atmospheric composition.