The Couple in the Crowd 1917

Ernst Barlach made this drawing, The Couple in the Crowd, with charcoal, and it's the kind of piece where you can almost feel the artist working, reworking, building up the image bit by bit. The texture in this piece is amazing, isn’t it? You can see the charcoal strokes, thick and smudgy in some places, light and feathery in others. Look at the faces in the crowd, each one rendered with a few quick lines, yet so expressive. And then there's that couple in the center, drawn with such tenderness, yet surrounded by all this chaos. It's like Barlach is saying something about intimacy and isolation, how we can be so close to others, yet still feel so alone. Notice the contrast between the smooth planes of the woman’s dress and the frenetic, almost scribbled marks that define the crowd, how does that make you feel? Barlach reminds me a little of Kathe Kollwitz, both artists with a deep sense of empathy and a willingness to tackle difficult subjects. But where Kollwitz is all about stark contrasts, Barlach has this way of finding beauty in the midst of ugliness, hope in the face of despair. It’s all just marks on paper, but it adds up to so much more.