Portrait of Dr. Bauer 1933

This is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s woodcut, "Portrait of Dr. Bauer." There’s a raw directness in those carved lines, a kind of gutsy honesty in the way he approached mark-making. And Kirchner’s color palette, that ochre yellow slashed against the reddish-brown, gives you a sense of both the doctor’s vitality and the shadows lurking underneath. Look at the way he renders the eye on the left, it is ringed with this inky hatching that pulls you into the depths. The lines are crude but full of feeling, and the overlapping planes of color make the portrait seem to shift before your eyes. Kirchner doesn’t hide his process; he flaunts it. You can see echoes of Edvard Munch, in the psychological intensity, but Kirchner's boldness is all his own. It reminds us that art is an ongoing experiment, a conversation across time, and an invitation to see the world in new ways.