Steinbruch bei Wildboden 1923

Curator: Immediately, the vibrant, almost clashing, color palette strikes me. It creates an unsettling but strangely compelling dissonance. Editor: Indeed. We're looking at "Steinbruch bei Wildboden," or "Quarry near Wildboden," painted by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner around 1923. Oil on canvas. Note how he employs jagged brushstrokes to render the landscape. Curator: The compression of space is noteworthy. Kirchner flattens the pictorial plane, emphasizing the surface and the application of paint, in ways evocative of analytic cubism even if Kirchner wasn't interested in it per se. Notice also the arbitrary use of color—that mauve mountain, those almost iridescent greens in the trees. It completely disregards naturalism in favor of expression. Editor: The landscape surrounding Davos provided Kirchner with a respite following the trauma of his World War I service. This painting seems to represent a yearning for reconnection to a more harmonious relationship with nature, despite the lingering impact of conflict in his life. The quarry hints at that human intrusion. Curator: Yet the overall impression resists simple interpretation. The formal elements--color, line, and composition-- work together to construct a disquieting and dynamic arrangement. The trees are no less abstracted than the architecture in the middle. One feels a psychological turmoil barely contained. Editor: The work resonates within a particular cultural moment of societal rebuilding. Kirchner, among other Expressionists, strove to capture psychological depths but they did so in a new post-war era increasingly marked by industry and human modifications of nature. Curator: Agreed. Its tension stems precisely from the discordant harmony of those clashing elements which are pulled together so confidently to convey a lasting mood. Editor: Well, looking at the way his experiences inform how we now observe and interpret the canvas and brushstrokes reveals complexities of both artist and era.