Poster for Die Brücke 1907

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this poster for Die Brücke with a woodcut, and like many prints, it feels super immediate. It's this high-contrast, two-color banger of green and mustard. There’s something very matter-of-fact about the marks here. The flatness of the color is a strong statement. The image is reduced to bold outlines and shapes, yet the figure seems both present and distorted at once. You can see this especially in the lines of the face. The green is like a mask but also like a revealing of the subconscious. The heavy, blunt rendering of the figures feels radical. It makes me think of other printmakers, like Munch, who worked with similar strategies of simplifying form. This isn’t just about representation; it's about confronting something raw, something real. And that’s what art should be, right? An ongoing conversation, never settled, always buzzing with energy.