Notater om forholdet til døden 1913 - 1914

Curator: Welcome, I’d like to draw your attention to a work by J.A. Jerichau, titled “Notater om forholdet til døden”, or "Notes on the Relationship to Death", created circa 1913-1914. It’s an ink drawing on paper. Editor: My immediate reaction is of intimacy, of a personal space. The page is filled with handwritten notes, giving it the feeling of a private journal entry or a letter. The pale color of the ink also makes it ghostly and faint as though these sentiments are just barely clinging to the page. Curator: Indeed. Jerichau, within the Symbolist movement, was grappling with profound themes, particularly existential anxieties regarding death. This drawing serves as a portal into the artist's inner thoughts at a pivotal moment in European history. This notebook reflects on mortality but it must be read within the backdrop of a continent edging closer and closer to war. Editor: Formally, it's a fascinating dance between legibility and abstraction. While the calligraphy is evident, it verges on becoming pure mark-making. Notice how the rhythm of the lines create an almost musical score, or how areas of the composition are quite airy and empty of notation. I find this intriguing from a semiotic point of view, in that the viewer confronts something on the cusp of dissolution—both textually and figuratively. Curator: This blurring between text and image is precisely what lends it such potency. The very act of writing, of trying to articulate something as amorphous as our relationship with death, inevitably leads to a kind of linguistic breakdown. Words falter. Meaning frays at the edges, revealing the raw emotional core. It mirrors our social and psychological vulnerability at that time. Editor: A kind of epistemic crisis represented in aesthetic form. The texture of the paper itself becomes significant, as the material presence is undeniable and integral to understanding that relationship to death. It shows us this meditation on death through both textual and material strategies. Curator: Looking closer at Jerichau’s composition we begin to decipher meaning from this chaos and find new ways of confronting what, since Jerichau's era, have been recurring anxieties about identity and impermanence. Editor: For me, it's a potent reminder that the formal qualities are inseparable from the existential inquiry.