Storm 1831 - 1897

Editor: Here we have Martinus Kuytenbrouwer Jr.’s etching "Storm", which historians place somewhere between 1831 and 1897. It depicts a rather turbulent scene, all rendered in incredibly fine lines. What's your read on it? Curator: Looking at "Storm," I'm immediately drawn to the etching process itself. Consider the labor involved in creating this level of detail through controlled corrosion by acid, and how it differs so drastically from the immediate gesture of painting. The act of repeated labor produces copies which creates the potential for accessibility for wider audiences who previously may have been limited in the art world through access to one-of-a-kind paintings only seen by the elite. Editor: That's fascinating, to think of it as a potentially democratizing object. Does the material also influence the subject matter, perhaps indirectly? Curator: Absolutely. The landscape genre itself, so readily reproduced in prints like this, offered a form of ownership – a vicarious experience for a burgeoning middle class perhaps excluded from owning vast tracts of land, or conversely an aesthetic affirmation of land as capital. Note the etcher’s marks, and the detail placed into describing elements within the landscape versus those sitting in the distance. What does that draw your eye to? Editor: I see the human figure on the edge now. Knowing this was a readily-produced print gives the figure’s relationship to land a social meaning I didn’t immediately gather from looking at it. It definitely opens up the piece in a whole new way! Curator: Precisely, and it allows us to consider art not simply as an aesthetic object, but a material document embedded within specific production practices and social relationships.