Potiphar's Wife (Potiphars Weib) 1914

This is Wilhelm Lehmbruck's "Potiphar's Wife," an etching. It's all in monochrome, like a memory half-faded, yet sharp with feeling. I imagine Lehmbruck hunched over the plate, scratching in those furious lines, driven by the story's raw energy. You can almost feel the woman's desperation, the panic in the man’s attempted escape. Look at how those etched lines define her reaching arm, it’s a gesture of longing, but also of fierce determination. The thing about etching is that the artist has to plan the image in reverse. It’s as if he's wrestling with the story himself, inverting it, digging into its hidden corners. What was Lehmbruck thinking as he made this image? Painters are always having a conversation, you know? Lehmbruck reaches back to biblical stories but also to Goya, and forward to artists working today who grapple with the human figure. Painting is a way of understanding and responding to each other across time, even when the story is as old as this one.