Paar, im Garten gehend 1913

This etching by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner gives you that feeling of trying to remember a dream. It's all scratchy, blurry, hazy... He was working with black ink on paper, and the image emerges from a flurry of marks. I imagine Kirchner, back in 1912, hunched over the plate, digging in with his tools, trying to capture this fleeting vision of a couple in a garden. What were they talking about? Were they happy? Were they in love? Maybe he was trying to evoke the feeling of being lost in thought, or the way memories fade over time? The lines feel so urgent, so immediate. It's like he's trying to pin down something that's just out of reach. He has that expressionist interest in emotion, and the raw immediacy of lived experience. You see this approach in other artists too, like Munch with his prints and paintings. There's something so vulnerable and human about that struggle, that desire to capture the uncapturable.