Mit dem Selbstmord Spielen (Playing with Suicide) 1919

Walter Gramatté made this intriguing print, Playing with Suicide, with lithography, a process of printing from a flat stone or metal plate. The yellow ground is jarring, almost acidic, as though it is glowing. The black lines give definition to the central figure, a reclining nude, and its doppelganger, or is it a nightmare? With touches of red, the palette is limited, but emotionally intense. You can see that Gramatté scrapes and scratches at the surface. I can imagine Gramatté in the studio, wrestling with the stone, as the image emerges through trial and error, a deeply intuitive process. This feels related to the work of other German Expressionists like Kirchner, Heckel, and Schmidt-Rottluff, all of whom were grappling with psychological themes. In that sense, Gramatté is in dialogue with his contemporaries. I wonder if he ever imagined we would still be looking at this print almost 100 years later? How interpretations change over time. Painting is like that, an ongoing conversation.