Spiritisme Possibly 1923 - 1924

Erich Wichmann made this small drawing, Spiritisme, probably with charcoal, in 1923. I feel a kind of kinship with him; this image feels like a fever dream, a kind of automatic drawing where figures emerge from the shadows. I wonder if he worked quickly, trying to capture an idea before it faded. Did he smudge the charcoal with his fingers to get that hazy, ethereal effect? It reminds me of some of Odilon Redon's drawings, those ghostly figures emerging from dark backgrounds. But there’s also something very personal here, a vulnerability in the way these forms are so tentatively rendered. Maybe he was thinking about the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious. It makes me wonder, what spirits was he trying to conjure? These artists are all in conversation, you know, across time, space, influencing each other.