Altwinkel: Wintsch Stabbed to Death (Altwinkel: Der niedergestochene Wintsch) (in-text plate, page 321) from Neben der Heerstrasse (Off the Main Road)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
German, 1880–1938
1923
A small woodcut illustration by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner for a 1923 book, aiming to dramatize a violent episode through stark, carved black-and-white imagery.
You notice immediately the jagged, angular figures hewn in bold black against pale paper—hands thrown up, anguished faces circling a fallen body, and a compressed, flattened space that makes the moment feel urgent and theatrical.
It illustrates how Kirchner and other Expressionists revived the woodcut’s crude immediacy to amplify emotion and bring the raw energy of modernist painting into widely distributed book illustrations, reshaping narrative visual culture.
Medium
Woodcut from an illustrated book with twenty-four woodcuts
Dimensions
composition: 2 11/16 x 3 1/8" (6.8 x 8 cm); page: 7 1/2 x 5 1/8" (19 x 13 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of G. David Thompson
Accession
210.1964.20
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
