Bauer mit drei Kühen 1922

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this woodcut, Bauer mit drei Kühen, with gouges and ink. Look at the raw, expressive marks; you can almost feel Kirchner wrestling with the wood, scraping away at the surface. The black ink sits powerfully against the paper. You can see the mountains, the farmer and his cows. Did he start with an idea or sketch or did the image emerge from the process of cutting? I imagine him thinking about Dürer, but then pushing the tradition somewhere new. Kirchner was part of Die Brücke, a group of expressionist artists, who were interested in emotion, distortion, and primitivism, as a means of challenging academic artistic conventions. The jagged edges create a nervous energy. There’s no attempt to prettify; rather, Kirchner is looking for a certain kind of truth. You can see how Kirchner’s woodcuts influenced later artists, like the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s. It’s all one big conversation.