Herbst c. 1924

Karl Wiener made this landscape with colored pencils, sometime between 1901 and 1949. The title is “Herbst”, which means Autumn in German, and you can really feel it in the twilight colors of the sky. The whole image is built up out of tiny marks, hatched together, like the image is breathing. Look at the way the hillside is made out of so many little lines! Up close it’s this crazy, vibrating surface, but from further away, it resolves into this solid form, with a light source raking across it. What really makes this work for me is the tension between the stark, almost gothic, rendering of the figure, and the romantic sunset. There’s something very Hopper-esque about the way Wiener creates a mood out of these contrasting elements. This might be because, like Edward Hopper, Wiener embraces ambiguity, he isn't spelling everything out for us. It is up to us to work out our own response to the piece.