Composition (Große Komposition) 1913

Wilhelm Lehmbruck made this etching, Composition, and you can see it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I imagine Lehmbruck, bent over the plate, layering line upon line. The composition emerges, figures gathering, their forms suggested rather than defined. There’s a sense of searching, a tentative quality to the marks. Maybe he reworked areas, wiping away and starting again. I know that feeling! The figures have a ghostly presence and remind me of other artists, like Rodin or even Edvard Munch, and the way they captured the human condition through vulnerable forms. You can feel the pull of gravity in the slumped figure to the fore. It seems as though Lehmbruck wanted to create a sense of the body as a site of reflection and internal experience. The human form becomes a vessel for expressing states of being. We are all, as artists, drawing on the past, responding to it, and reimagining it through our own lenses.