Dodo and Her Brother 1908

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made "Dodo and Her Brother" with oil on canvas. The way Kirchner attacks the canvas here is raw and kind of punk. The colors vibrate against each other, and the loose brushstrokes leave the figures looking a little haunted, maybe a little too green. He's not trying to make a perfect picture, but to capture a feeling, a mood. There’s this one little mark where the brother’s cheek should be – it's just a dab of green, but it changes everything. It’s like Kirchner is saying, "I don't need to explain everything to you. You can fill in the blanks." The paint is thin in places, almost transparent, and thick in others, giving the whole thing this uneven, urgent feel. It's like he couldn't wait to get it all down. I see some of that same restless energy in the work of someone like Francis Bacon, who similarly used broken color and smeared forms to express the fraught complexities of the human condition.