Elderly Woman on a Bench 1986

Edvard Munch pulled this print of an elderly woman from a plate sometime around the turn of the last century. The colour palette is very limited, isn’t it? Kind of sepia, or burnt umber. Look at how the marks swarm together to form her hunched body. Can you see how the artist has chosen to describe the figure and the space by cross-hatching and tiny marks, rather than continuous lines? The whole image flickers. Those dark marks describe the shape of the woman’s body, but they also emphasise the texture of the print. It’s almost as if Munch is saying something about the relationship between how we feel and what we see. Munch and someone like Paula Modersohn-Becker both went in for raw, emotional art. Neither was too worried about beauty, so much as some kind of hard-won truth. Art isn't about the answers, right? It's about how we look at the questions.