The Woolworth Building 1915

Joseph Pennell made this etching of The Woolworth Building, and well, it’s an ode to process. The way he's scratched those lines into the plate, it’s like he's wrestling with the image, trying to pull it out of the metal. You can feel the grit and the grind. Look at the surface, how it catches the light. Pennell isn’t trying to hide anything, you know? The lines are raw, immediate. It's all about how he’s using the etching needle to describe form, and how light falls on the architecture. See that cluster of lines near the base of the Woolworth Building? It almost dissolves into nothing, like a mirage. It's this tension between clarity and ambiguity that gets me going, because, like, is he showing us something solid, or just a feeling? I see some Whistler in this, that same kind of poetic sensibility, but Pennell is rougher, maybe a little less precious. Ultimately, it's a reminder that art is never finished, only abandoned, and it invites us to embrace the messy, the unresolved.