Illustration to Voltaire, "Candide" 1948

Imre Reiner made this illustration to Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ as a print, likely in the 1940s. Look at how the image comes alive through Reiner’s confident, flowing lines. There’s a real sense of the joy of mark-making here, where the process feels like a dance between the artist and the plate. The magic of printmaking lies in how the texture of the plate translates onto paper. See how the ink pools and thins, creating depth and shadow? It's almost sculptural. Take a look at the figure’s face; it’s barely there, just a few lines suggesting a nose, an eye, a mouth, yet so expressive. That face feels like a window into the story’s chaos and absurdity. This kind of expressive, almost frenetic line work reminds me of artists like Grosz or Beckmann, who used distortion and exaggeration to capture the unease of their times. Like them, Reiner uses his medium to create a world that’s both captivating and unsettling, inviting us to question what we see and how we see it.