Firemark c. 1937

Herman Bader made this drawing called Firemark. The dark shadowy grays and blacks almost feel like looking at an old photograph, or a soot-covered artifact pulled from a fire itself. I wonder what Bader was thinking as he rendered this image. It seems like a rendering of a sculpture or relief, two hands clasped together. It’s so somber, all these gradations of gray, that the handshake feels almost…funereal. A goodbye, a pact broken. The light source at the top of the image, like a window, gives a feeling of hope, or maybe a sense of being watched. The interesting thing about drawing versus painting is that drawing is almost always about touch—the feeling of the graphite rubbing against the page—it’s a different kind of intimacy, one of pressure, darkness and light. In that way it reminds me of the sculptures of Kollwitz. Artists build on each other, responding to each other, across time. We can never really know what an artwork means. We can only guess.