To kvinder slås om en mand 1907

Oluf Hartmann made this small, dark etching of struggling figures sometime around the turn of the last century. It's a scene alright, but the inky blackness makes me wonder about what it might have been like to create, scratching into that plate, and wiping away the excess. Those two women wrestling over a man, it's a classic theme, like something you might find in an old myth, full of raw emotion. I feel for Hartmann, he died so young, so you wonder what he was thinking, what he was feeling when he made this. Was he caught between two lovers? Or maybe he was just trying to capture something about the human condition? I want to see this tiny image blown up big, and made out of gloppy oil paint. You can almost feel the energy, the tension in those lines, and it makes you think about all the other artists who have grappled with similar themes over the years, from the old masters to contemporary painters.