Woman Bathing by the Oven 1919

This is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's 'Woman Bathing by the Oven'. It's a print, so Kirchner would have been working with chisels and gouges to carve into a block, inking it, and then pressing it onto paper. I can imagine him wrestling with the woodblock, scraping away at it, trying to find the right balance between light and dark. It’s all angular and intense, the red figure almost floating against the black, which is full of weird little details, like the cat. You can see Kirchner trying to make sense of the world around him, grappling with the gritty realities of urban life. The marks feel urgent, as if he's trying to capture a fleeting moment, a raw emotion. The awkwardness of the pose, the scratchy lines—it's all part of the language. It’s Expressionism, after all. Like Munch and those guys, Kirchner's not just showing us what he sees, but how he feels. These prints are like a diary entry, a window into his psyche.