Herbstabend c. 1924

Karl Wiener made this small pastel landscape, presumably in Austria, sometime before 1949. Look at the gradations of colour in the sky, how the delicate pastel marks build into this soft atmospheric glow. You can really feel the hand of the artist here, carefully layering the colours, pushing the pastels around to find the forms and shadows within this image. The texture is really beautiful too; the way the tooth of the paper grabs the pastel, and the gentle smudging of the colours, creates this tactile surface, which is kind of funny considering the subject is a big open sky. It reminds me a bit of a Turner sunset, the way the atmosphere is conjured through colour and light. Like Turner, Wiener is playing with how much information is needed to convey a sense of place and time. It’s never really fixed, is it? Always open to interpretation and feeling.