Court Martial 1951

Jerome Kaplan made this lithograph, Court Martial, in 1951. There's a scratchy energy to it, a kind of nervous mark-making that feels really immediate. You can almost feel Kaplan's hand moving across the stone, building up these intense blacks and grays. Look at the table, how it angles up into the picture plane. The surface is roughly hewn, and those marks give it a palpable weightiness. And those faces! They're not just portraits; they're like masks, distorted and full of anxiety. It feels like Kaplan wasn’t trying to show us what these figures looked like, but more about how they felt, trapped in this moment of judgement. Kaplan's approach reminds me of some of the German Expressionists. But in his own way, Kaplan's giving us something deeply personal and raw. Art isn't just about pretty pictures, but about wrestling with the messy stuff of life.