Brücke im Wald bei Königstein 1916

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this drawing, Brücke im Wald bei Königstein, with pencil, and maybe a bit of crayon or pastel. It’s super scribbly, right? I mean that in a good way, because you can really sense the artist moving the pencil around and figuring things out as he goes. See how the lines are layered on top of each other, creating a dense thicket of marks? It’s almost like he’s wrestling with the image, trying to capture the essence of the forest. The brown and blue lines create a subtle contrast. Look at the way he uses short, choppy strokes to suggest the texture of the trees and leaves, and how the lines become more fluid and gestural as they move across the page. It feels like a raw, unfiltered expression of Kirchner’s experience. This reminds me a little of Cy Twombly. Like Twombly, Kirchner embraced the idea of art as an open-ended process of exploration, where ambiguity and uncertainty are not just tolerated, but actively embraced.