Frauenfigur 

Karl Wiener made this ink drawing, "Frauenfigur," at some point during his short career. The subject is simply a female figure, but consider its context: Wiener was a Jewish artist working in Austria in the first half of the 20th century. The angularity and starkness of the figure recall the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, a rejection of Expressionism that was popular in Germany and Austria during the Weimar Republic. We can read the image's visual codes through the lens of the interwar years, a time of economic hardship and political instability, and, more ominously, rising antisemitism. The figure's somber expression and the artist's choice of medium might reflect the anxieties of the time, a world on the brink of collapse and genocide. Art history allows us to view works like this through the lens of social and institutional history, revealing the ways in which art both reflects and shapes the world around it. To fully understand this image, we might research the history of Jewish artists in Austria during the Nazi era, as well as the cultural and political movements that shaped their work.