Sweat of Blood 1943

Leopoldo Méndez made this intense print called Sweat of Blood sometime in the 20th Century. I can only imagine the focus required to carve away at the block, the physical effort of pressing the image onto paper. Look at the nun’s wringing hands and the skull at her side. I bet Méndez wanted to draw us into her distress. The sharp lines give the image a raw, urgent feel – there’s no room for subtlety here! The choice of black and white amplifies the stark contrast between light and shadow, life and death. Méndez must have been thinking about how to capture the most emotion with the fewest marks, like Goya or Käthe Kollwitz, those masters of graphic intensity. I bet they would have sympathized with this image of despair. Artists are always in conversation, you know, echoing each other across time.