Amalfi 

Curator: Fritz Bamberger's pencil drawing, "Amalfi," captures a cityscape with a wonderful interplay of geometric forms. Editor: My immediate reaction is its delicate, almost ethereal quality. It feels like a memory or a dream captured lightly on paper. The faint pencil strokes evoke a sense of transience. Curator: Right. Consider the means of production here. The pencil, the paper, the artist’s hand… These materials represent not only Bambergers’s perspective, but all the people who mined the graphite and manufactured and sold the art supplies, allowing the creation and circulation of imagery that reinforced power structures and colonial fantasies. Editor: That’s a very layered way to think about this seemingly simple landscape. I am struck by how the artist uses these basic materials to portray a real place in a very accessible and direct manner. The focus seems less about artifice and more about conveying an authentic experience. What is so very authentic about sketching such location as the Amalfi Coast? What positionality allowed him that travel opportunity? Curator: Precisely! And the absence of color, the monochromatic palette, heightens the geometric composition. There’s an interesting contrast between the organic forms of the trees and the jagged coast against the hard lines of the buildings perched upon the cliffs. It's like a dialectic between nature and human construction. Editor: True. There's this stark juxtaposition evident. I almost wonder what a photograph of this scene, if possible at the time, might have captured. Curator: Perhaps it's this feeling of the hand-drawn that gives the artwork a deeply intimate quality that no photo would capture. It feels deeply human. But what power structure did Bambergers adopt when appropriating this human location as artistic theme? What perspective and agenda did Bamberger reinforce during sketching of Amalfi? What were local interpretations? What are other positions? Editor: It seems we are coming at this artwork with equally valuable, if different questions, no? I appreciate how examining its materiality and potential for critique creates such an interesting narrative around the subject and what the scene represents. Curator: Indeed. Understanding those different perspectives can, in their dialectical contrast, lead us to new, even deeper understandings of Bamberger’s “Amalfi”.