Mary Wigman's Dance of the Dead 1928

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted 'Mary Wigman's Dance of the Dead' with oil on canvas and a pretty dramatic palette. The colors are bold, even lurid, which feels right for a dance of death, you know? What really grabs me is the surface. It's not trying to hide its making. You can see the strokes, the way the colors are laid down, not blended to death but left raw and vibrating. Look at the dancer on the left, the way the yellow and black stripes on their costume aren’t uniform, but kind of squiggly. It’s like Kirchner is saying, "Here's the paint, here's the gesture, here's the raw emotion." The whole thing feels influenced by Edvard Munch, maybe? That same angst, that same sense of impending doom. Except Kirchner is doing his own thing, pushing the colors, and pushing the emotion, into something new and unsettling.