Landskab med et tospand, der løber løbsk 1921

Curator: Here we have "Landscape with a Runaway Team" created in 1921 by Niels Larsen Stevns, employing charcoal and pencil on paper. It is held at the SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark. My first impression is organized chaos! Editor: I feel that too! It's the untamed rawness of the strokes. Look at how Stevns builds up the pines using dark marks, creating form, depth, and movement with relatively few strokes. He is creating a kind of controlled frenzy. The texture is fantastic, raw, unfinished. Curator: Precisely. The apparent spontaneity masks considerable deliberation. This isn’t just about representing a scene; it’s an investigation into the dynamic tension between control and abandonment inherent in artistic labor. The paper's support is interesting in this sense as well: he is creating this piece using easily accessible and mobile material. It speaks of sketching from life and perhaps acting as an emotional register too. Editor: I like that "emotional register," because you are right. Look at that wild team of horses, all rendered in furious slashes! The artist definitely had a need to set down this energy that is about to explode right off the page! The runaway team echoes something internal. A moment of being out of control in a physical landscape. Curator: That runaway quality reflects larger social anxieties, perhaps linked to the social and political turbulence of the era after World War One. Even his quick material choices--the charcoal, the pencil--facilitated immediate expression. This resonates within the rapid industrial advancements in a country whose agricultural structure defined a vision of slower labor. It's a reflection on those contradictions within Denmark at this moment in time. Editor: Well said. It brings us back to the image of that horse, straining. Maybe all creativity has an aspect of that desperate race... it could also be that society in its new faster tempo also felt close to careening off of the track, with little agency as to stopping that gallop. Curator: That's the brilliance here; the drawing captures a potent combination of immediacy and reflection. Stevns asks a question, it doesn’t necessarily give answers, even a century later, don't you think? Editor: I do think. I now leave this image feeling both exhilarated and slightly off-kilter... definitely thinking more critically than when I walked in!