Children and roosters 1921

Tadeusz Makowski’s "Children and Roosters" feels like it was made with earth and fire. Look at those ambers, siennas and blushes. You can almost feel the hand of the artist building up the paint, pushing and pulling the medium this way and that to create volume and texture. I bet Makowski was really trying to work out a formal problem here, how to make the figures feel sculptural. I can almost feel him thinking, “How do I make these kids and chickens rise from the surface?” See the way he uses a kind of hatching technique to create these forms? He’s really earning the image, stroke by stroke. The rooster's comb practically vibrates, as do the cheeks of the children. I can see how he might have been looking at someone like Chaim Soutine, who also built up paintings, lump by lump. But Makowski keeps a lid on it, never letting it get too carried away. I wonder what he was thinking about while he was making this? What personal narratives and influences were at play? Painting is an embodied expression, and we will continue to interpret it in new ways.