Die Hollanderin 1940

Imre Reiner made this print, Die Hollanderin, on a Saturday afternoon in 1940. The scratching and hatching of lines build a body out of black ink. She is leaning back, reclining, kind of cramped into the square, surrounded by darkness. I can imagine Reiner holding the tool, digging in, scraping away at the plate, trying to find the form. There is a real tension between the quick, expressive mark-making, and the woman’s placid pose. The marks almost seem to fight against the form, trying to break it apart, like the forces of anxiety and calm battling it out. I wonder if Reiner looked at work by artists like Kirchner, or Heckel, also working in Germany at the time. There’s a similar kind of directness, an urgency of line, to this print. It’s amazing how artists, through their marks, are always speaking to each other across time, borrowing and lending ideas. There are just so many ways to make a body, to make a world, out of a few lines.