drawing, woodcut
portrait
17_20th-century
drawing
self-portrait
narrative-art
death
german-expressionism
figuration
expressionism
woodcut
Copyright: Public Domain
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this incredible woodcut, "Self-Portrait with Dancing Death," using stark black lines carved into wood. Imagine him, wrestling with the block, trying to get this image out. The face is so angular, so…tormented. And then you see death right there beside him, like a dance partner. I wonder what was going through his mind? Was he thinking about the war, about art, about life slipping away? I feel for him, you know? The way he’s chopped away at the wood, it's like he's trying to carve out some truth. It reminds me of Munch, and those raw, exposed nerves. You can almost hear the scraping and the struggle in every line. It’s like he’s saying, “This is me, this is what it feels like.” Artists, we’re all just talking to each other, across time, trying to figure things out.
Comments
As in a metamorphosis, the figure of a dancing Death seems to rise up out of the portrait of the artist with a hunchback. During the phase when Kirchner suffered from paralysis of the hands, he was unable to break areas of any appreciable size out of wooden blocks. The resistance offered by the material, however, enabled him to cut lines into the surface with a V-parting tool as steadily as with a drawing utensil. This print is accordingly defined for the most part by white (non-printing) lines.
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