Dr. Hans Bütow 1925

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this drypoint etching of Dr. Hans Bütow, and what strikes me is the raw, almost urgent quality of the lines. It's like Kirchner is thinking through the image, letting the process guide the form. The texture is everything here; you can almost feel the burr of the drypoint needle scratching into the plate. The lines aren’t precious, they have a nervousness to them, and there's a real tension between the delicacy of the medium and the intensity of the gaze. Look at the way the lines around the eyes are scratched in. They are not gentle. There is something quite confrontational in the way Dr Butow’s image has been captured, and you sense that Kirchner is not trying to flatter his subject. Kirchner's contemporaries like Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff were also pushing the boundaries of printmaking. These artists weren’t just making portraits, they were building a whole new language for how we see each other, and ourselves.