Kauernder weiblicher akt (Crouching Female Nude) 1914

Lovis Corinth created this etching, Kauernder weiblicher akt (Crouching Female Nude). The rapid strokes create a world of tonal variation, smudging the boundaries of the figure. I can imagine Corinth hunched over the plate, scratching away with his etching needle, lost in the flow of mark-making, almost like automatic writing. What might he have been thinking as he made this? There’s an intimacy to the work, a vulnerability in the way the figure curls inward, looking up. The lines are tentative, searching, as if Corinth were trying to capture a fleeting emotion. This reminds me of other figurative artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker who are also preoccupied with capturing the interiority of the human form. Artists are often in dialogue across time, borrowing, responding, and riffing off one another's ideas, and in that way, they keep the conversation going. Each work invites new questions, new possibilities, and new ways of seeing.