Graue Stimmung c. 1923

Karl Wiener made this watercolor, Graue Stimmung, which translates to Grey Mood, sometime in the first half of the 20th century. The way the grey washes float around the stark realism of the central figure feels so perfectly unresolved. It’s like a mood in progress. Look closely and you can see how Wiener applied the watercolor in layers, allowing the washes to blend and bleed into one another. This gives the background a hazy, ethereal quality, as though the figure is emerging from a fog. The face, though, is rendered with tight control, the lines are precise and the colors are bold. His piercing blue eyes lock onto the viewer’s. The figure’s yellow-tinged skin feels sickly. All these details give the figure a sinister aura. There’s something about the tension between the loose, fluid washes and the controlled, almost obsessive rendering of the figure that reminds me of the work of Alfred Kubin, another Austrian artist known for his dark and unsettling imagery. Art’s like that, an ongoing conversation about how we see and feel. There’s no right or wrong way to read it. It’s more about embracing the questions than finding the answers.