Horses in a Landscape 1924

Max Pechstein made this painting of horses in a landscape with ink on paper. The ink wash feels so fluid, like Pechstein was chasing a fleeting image. It's like he's not trying to capture the horses perfectly, but more like he’s trying to capture the feeling of seeing them, maybe in a dream. The color is limited to a sepia ink, which gives the whole thing a dreamy, old-timey feel. Look at the way the ink bleeds and pools, especially around the legs of the horses, and see how it creates soft, undefined edges. There's a looseness here, a kind of "anything goes" attitude to the mark-making that reminds me of outsider art. You can almost feel the artist's hand moving quickly, intuitively, across the page. Pechstein’s work reminds me of Paula Modersohn-Becker, who also worked with simplified forms and a deep connection to the natural world, and whose painting style was driven by intuition. Art is always a conversation, an exchange of ideas. It embraces ambiguity over fixed meanings.