Pretenders: Ordeal by Fire II 1927

Edvard Munch made this black and white woodcut, Pretenders: Ordeal by Fire II with a knife to carve lines into the wood. Imagine the physical work, and the many stages of trial and error! There's a figure in the middle with a long dress, like a ghost, with a crowd of ghostlike figures surrounding her. The whole image flickers with white marks, a nervous energy which agitates the surface. I'm thinking about other artists who have taken on the black and white, like Käthe Kollwitz or even Ad Reinhardt. You can feel Munch’s inner turmoil, and his process feels like a form of therapy, like the artist is thinking through feeling. All of these artists are in dialogue together. And now we can have a dialogue with them.