The calm during the flight 1907

This is "The Calm During the Flight" by Wilhelm Süs, and it's a stained glass design held at the Städel Museum. It feels like a medieval tapestry, or maybe a Pre-Raphaelite painting, but it’s actually a design for stained glass, so the colors would have been luminous. There are so many figures, and so much is going on here! You can almost feel the artist's hand in the confident outlining of the forms and the considered arrangement of color blocks. It’s a beautiful, complex piece. There’s a real tension between the figures, who are quite formally rendered, and the landscape, which has this free, almost psychedelic feel to it. Especially the way the long, looping tree branches snake through the scene, it almost feels a bit like Gustav Klimt. Ultimately, the artist finds a compelling balance between these elements. The work reminds us that art is an ongoing conversation, a continuous exchange of ideas across time.