Löwen am Urwaldbach 1911

Wilhelm Kuhnert made this painting of lions at a jungle stream with oil on canvas. It's interesting how Kuhnert uses a mostly brown and green palette, but somehow manages to make it shimmer with light. There’s something very appealing about how he's built the surfaces here. Look at the way the water rushes over the rocks, indicated with these quick, confident strokes. I get the feeling that Kuhnert was really trying to capture something specific, something real, but you can also see a degree of abstraction in the way he lays down the paint, particularly in the lion's mane. See how those brushstrokes become almost like abstract marks when you zoom in. It's like he's translating the essence of 'lion-ness' onto the canvas. Kuhnert reminds me a little of someone like Courbet, in that he seems to be wrestling with how to render the real world in paint, and I think that makes this piece really interesting. It’s a window into the ongoing conversation between perception and representation in art.