Kauernder weiblicher akt (Crouching Female Nude) 1914

This is Lovis Corinth's etching, Crouching Female Nude, made sometime in the early 20th Century. Corinth scratched the image into a metal plate, and the printmaking process is kind of like a dance between intention and accident. I love the way the figure seems to emerge from a haze of tiny marks. It's all tone and texture. Look at the area around the figure’s right foot, the network of tiny marks is so dense, it almost feels like you could reach out and touch it. The way Corinth has described the foot is so lively and tactile. It's a single point of focus, everything else is suggested and ambiguous. You can see a similar, more expressionistic treatment of the figure in the work of his contemporary, Kathe Kollwitz. These artists share a commitment to conveying the emotional intensity of lived experience. It’s a quality that resists fixed meanings and encourages multiple interpretations.