Dr. Paul Fechter
1919
Medium
drypoint in black on laid paper
Dimensions
plate: 23.6 x 20.7 cm (9 5/16 x 8 1/8 in.) sheet: 37.4 x 27.1 cm (14 3/4 x 10 11/16 in.)
Classification
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Epstein Family Fund
Accession Number
1998.30.1
Art Historical Context
**Dr. Paul Fechter is a striking 1919 drypoint etching by Max Pechstein a leading figure in the German Expressionist movement and founding member of the revolutionary Die Brücke group. just after World War I, intimate portrait depicts Dr. Paul Fechter a prominent art critic and advocate for modern art who championed Expressionism's raw emotional power. Pechstein's, distorted lines capture Fechter's intense gaze and angular features, embodying the movement's rejection of academic realism in favor of subjective expression. The drypoint technique—scratching directly into a copper plate to produc...
About the Artist
Max Pechstein
Hermann Max Pechstein (1881–1955) was born in Zwickau, Germany, the son of a craftsman in the textile industry. He trained as a decorative painter in his home city before enrolling at the School of Applied Arts in Dresden and then transferring to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under the painter Otto Gussmann. His early exposure to the work of Vincent van Gogh proved decisive in d...