Stehende Dame im Abendkleid 1918

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this drawing of a standing lady in an evening dress with what looks like crayon and charcoal. It's like he's feeling his way around the form. Look at the texture, see how the strokes of blue and black build up the figure, not quite filling her in, but suggesting her shape? The blue outline vibrates around the black of her dress, giving her a kind of electric charge. Then there's that smudge of orange to the right, like a memory of a color. It reminds me of how we see things sometimes, not all at once, but in pieces. How one mark informs another, how it creates something new. Kirchner was part of the German Expressionist movement called Die Brücke, and you can see that sense of raw, direct expression in the scribbled marks. It's like he's having a conversation with the paper, and we get to eavesdrop.