Self-Portrait Sketching 1920

Lovis Corinth made this self-portrait with what looks like charcoal or ink. The sketch is all about contrasts, darks against lights, building up the image with quick, nervous lines. You can almost feel him wrestling with his own image, trying to pin it down on paper. I bet he was thinking, "How do I capture what's really me?" It’s a dance between seeing and feeling, a real push and pull. You know? The way he's scratched in those shadows around his eyes—it's heavy, but also kind of vulnerable. Like he's showing you everything, even the stuff he might usually hide. It reminds me a bit of some of the raw self-portraits by Beckmann. Artists, looking into the mirror, looking into themselves. It's like they're all in conversation, across time. Painting, drawing, sketching—it's all about this exchange, this messy, beautiful dialogue where nothing is ever really finished, just kept alive.