The Soldier 1914

Christian Rohlfs made *The Soldier* with what looks like watercolour and crayon, and right away, I’m struck by the process, this immediacy of mark making. The blue kind of smears and bleeds, like it's been rubbed in with a cloth, and look at the face, all smudged and unresolved. It's less about perfection and more about the raw, visceral feeling of the moment. The white shirt appears out of the background like a scream. The whole image has a sense of motion, of being caught in the middle of some terrible act. I keep thinking about Käthe Kollwitz, how she also captured the anguish of war, but with a different kind of intensity. Rohlfs is looser, more gestural. Both artists remind us that art isn’t just about pretty pictures. It’s about confronting the messy, uncomfortable truths of human existence, and that's why art matters, right?