Studie 1890 - 1946

Curator: Cornelis Vreedenburgh, between 1890 and 1946, captured this landscape on paper using pencil and ink. The artwork titled "Studie" currently resides here at the Rijksmuseum. What strikes you initially about this drawing? Editor: It's raw, almost fragile. Like a whisper of a landscape fading into the paper itself. It has the fleeting feeling of capturing a fleeting moment, before the artist could quite nail it down. Curator: Precisely. Sketchbooks, like the one used here, serve as intimate spaces for artists. A reservoir of visual ideas. I note the prominent inclusion of hand-lettering in addition to the landscape. Do these letters, to you, convey an additional symbolic quality? Editor: Absolutely, the lettering has a nervous energy – sharp, dark lines compared to the fainter landscape. Like the artist is urgently trying to define the feeling that this landscape is conjuring. It’s a conversation between image and word, neither quite settled. Curator: A dynamic tension is established then. One could interpret it as the artist simultaneously perceiving and labeling his perception. The act of drawing, the act of naming. This duality seems especially relevant when the word seems incomplete. Editor: Right, the incompletion lends the drawing its intimacy, because you are witnessing this in real time. Also the word itself seems important to decipher…like a clue that will fully conjure what he meant. Curator: There are indeed significant gaps, artistically and linguistically. This fragmentation is echoed across multiple artistic interpretations of the natural landscape from the modernist period. Vreedenburgh captures more than a physical place; he presents the psychology of seeing. Editor: It also strikes me as modern for being so vulnerable. Not quite being a “finished piece”. These preliminary artworks often offer such honest access to an artist’s process, maybe even more honest than more polished statements. I am happy we get to observe it in this way. Curator: A privilege it is indeed. Such initial explorations and expressions often open to us further dialogue with the self, a self reflected in time. Editor: I like that thought. Seeing these drawings makes me want to fill a notebook and maybe fail wonderfully like Vreedenburgh!