Top of the World 1957

Mort Künstler’s painting, “Top of the World”, captures a high-stakes encounter in a frigid landscape. You can almost feel the chill. It’s rendered with meticulous detail, and I imagine Künstler carefully layering the paint to build up the textures of the snow and the characters’ clothing. It’s a wild scene, isn’t it? Someone is taking aim at a polar bear, another guy is running away. I wonder what Künstler was thinking as he painted this? Maybe he was fascinated by the drama of survival, or the tension between humans and nature. Either way, you can see the artist had to capture the urgency of the moment, the kind of thing that makes your pulse race. The painting reminds me a bit of old adventure novels, where people are always facing incredible dangers in faraway places. Artists, like writers, are always borrowing from each other, building on the stories that came before. Each stroke and each color invites us to reflect on our place in the world, and the stories we tell about it.