La Catastrophe 1907

Steinlen’s ‘La Catastrophe’ is made with dark lines that cut and slash the image. I imagine him, charcoal in hand, bearing down on the paper, trying to get something out. It makes me wonder what the artist was thinking as he created the work: was he thinking about the history of line, of image making, of mark making? Maybe he was thinking about what it meant to render form and emotion with just charcoal and paper. The artist is in an ongoing conversation with other artists across time. There is so much tone and shading, and the texture is built up with these dense layers, creating the feeling of being right there, in the thick of things. Painting is this embodied expression, right? It's about embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple readings. And just like that, a disaster becomes a moment of shared humanity.