Studier af køer 1864 - 1941

Curator: Looking at these studies, one feels a sense of quietude, doesn't one? A simplicity that's rather disarming. Editor: Yes, almost like a half-remembered dream, gentle. It’s funny though; when you glimpse this piece by Niels Larsen Stevns titled "Studier af køer", or Studies of Cows, rendered in pencil and colored pencil on paper somewhere between 1864 and 1941 at the Statens Museum for Kunst, I’m sort of thrown by how much empty space is involved here! Curator: I can see what you mean. So much negative space almost seems like the main subject. What’s interesting to me is that we might initially think of artists doing studies of people but we see something radically different on display here – there’s a long history, socially and artistically, in how livestock get envisioned. This comes at the rise of Danish agriculture but Stevns presents studies focusing simply on line. He is more concerned with their contours. The question that seems to appear is less one of economic means and how farming reshapes Danish land and society – but whether Stevns could envision the simplest possible version of each figure through his artmaking! Editor: Hmmm... maybe it's about finding a different language for landscape paintings, as the economic models were challenged. I do not know if that translates into practice from just pencil line, though, given that they were merely ‘studies.’ Also, with those materials it can seem so casual, too. A fleeting moment caught from the mundane aspects of farm life— the animal reduced to essential lines. Did they see themselves in a long tradition? Is it pastoral vision on paper that fits into their time and context? Curator: Perhaps! Stevns reduces those forms so he can examine the idea behind the figure of the cow; a certain ‘essence-of-cow-ness’. What I find especially affecting is just the vulnerability of each pencil line on that paper. Almost ghostly, like seeing memories in the making. These are fleeting impressions of moments passed—there's such beauty to that idea. Editor: Indeed. This teaches you about seeing… about finding the sublime within the ordinary sketches. And understanding a whole other tradition on paper and its future development from sketch to form, whether they imagined the world would someday come around, too! Curator: Precisely, there are multiple meanings waiting between these barely drawn, intimate lines! Editor: Very true. Thanks for revealing the story and the meaning.