Eintreiben von Ziegen 1921

This etching by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner captures a moment of rural life with an edgy, nervous energy. It feels raw, like he attacked the plate with a needle, scratching out these goats and figures with furious, angular lines. I can imagine Kirchner, hunched over the plate, driven by some inner urgency. He's wrestling with the image, trying to pin down the fleeting chaos of animals in motion. The figure seems to be fighting to keep the goats from escaping the composition. Look at the frantic marks around the animals, the way they dissolve into a whirlwind of lines. It's like he's trying to capture not just their appearance, but the very feeling of herding unruly goats. His work reminds me a little of Heckel's woodcuts, the same kind of jagged intensity. These Expressionists, they were all talking to each other, pushing each other to find new ways to express the anxieties of modern life. And for Kirchner, it seems like even a simple scene of goat herding could become a site of intense, almost violent, feeling.