Tone Kralj is one of the primary figures in Slovenian expressionism. The smudged year accompanying his signature is hard to make out, but we must read it correctly as 1921, since he displayed it during the exhibition at Jakopič’s pavillion in May and June of the same year, at a time when the 20-year-old budding painter was reaching the first of his artistic zeniths. Both a male and female character are carried by a foaming wave. She is reaching for a star but is held back by the man clinging to her, himself being dragged down into the depths by two white hands. The artist wove the rift between the semblance of the ideal and the reality of the actual narrative with a tragic emphasis. We can compare the stylized wave and the abstractly rippling auratic undulations with those from the graphic cycle Življenje (Life) from the same year, along with the stylization and embellishment of the faces and bodies, which are abundant in the artist’s graphics and early paintings. Both Kralj brothers constructed their compositional language from secessionist art. The subject, characteristic of both of them, is also of a symbolic and secessionist background, giving their flavor of expressionism a special flair. Especially in Tone’s oeuvre, a narrative approach serves as one of the primary building blocks.