Opstilling med krukke og æbler 1945 - 1948

This is Vilhelm Lundstrom’s “Opstilling med krukke og æbler”, or Still Life with Jar and Apples, made with graphite on paper. You can feel the artist searching for the forms. It’s all about the process of looking and responding. The jumble of lines creating the shading behind the fruit and jar, those repetitive marks feel both insistent and uncertain. I love how the apples are just circles, barely there. Are they solid or ghosts? The table that everything sits on is rendered with the most rudimentary of lines, and yet, it holds its own. Lundstrom seems to be in conversation with artists like Cezanne, simplifying and abstracting the everyday world. Like Philip Guston’s late work, this drawing reminds us that art doesn’t have to be perfect to be profound. It's in these simple marks that we see the artist's hand, his mind at work. There’s a real beauty in that.