Kop van een meisje en een onderbeen 1874 - 1945

Curator: This pencil sketch is titled "Head of a Girl and a Lower Leg" by Carel Adolph Lion Cachet. It's dated between 1874 and 1945. What are your first thoughts? Editor: I'm struck by its incompleteness, yet the directness of its gaze is somehow haunting. It reminds me of children in my own life. Curator: Yes, the lack of full detail focuses our attention, doesn't it? We see a young girl carried in the arms of the artist’s subject, a stark study in contrast. Cachet emphasizes particular shapes, deconstructing figuration and focusing the form. The lines carry a particular weight and lightness depending on the form that emerges on the page. Editor: Right. It speaks to fragmented memories, the blurred edges of recollection, or the provisionality of care work, doesn't it? What is visible, and what remains unseen or deliberately omitted? Also, who does carry children while their images go unrecorded, unsung? The composition is powerful in the questions that the forms bring to mind regarding social identity and art history. Curator: Absolutely. And it's the interplay of absence and presence that generates such power. Cachet plays with positive and negative space—observing the composition itself through the interaction of the sketched objects. Take, for instance, the solid mass of hair at the top against the negative space in the figure’s attire, it creates a visual vibration. Editor: I wonder, given the time period, is there any indication that the subject may be a working-class domestic servant or caregiver? If so, that dynamic could influence how we read the tenderness or absence we perceive here. In looking for new directions in modernism, who and what has been sacrificed and forgotten? Curator: Interesting thought. Perhaps the figures are more intimately entwined; Cachet obscures easy answers about their precise relations through this sketch, however. Its power relies on that very tension. Editor: So true. By focusing on forms, this piece offers an intense commentary about identity. Curator: Yes. It urges me to study sketches, with all their unfinished potency. Editor: To be aware of our assumptions of care and to continue with radical social politics!