Landscape with Peasants and Animals 1918

This woodcut, by Heinrich Campendonk, is a black and white vision of a shared world: a landscape with peasants and animals. It feels like I'm looking at a memory, or maybe a dream, where everything's simplified and symbolic. Check out those figures: the way they're rendered, almost like paper cutouts, gives the whole scene a sense of flatness, like a stage set. And the animals— that cow has such a wonderfully lumpy form. I bet Campendonk was thinking about the relationship between humans and nature when he made this. Those sharp, angular lines of the landscape contrast with the rounder forms of the animals and people. Look at the sky! There’s a dialogue here between abstraction and representation, a push and pull. And this approach feels related to the work of other artists in the early 20th century who were exploring similar ideas. Like, what does it mean to be human in this modern world?