På terrassen. Figurkomposition med fire kvinder. 1879 - 1949

Editor: We're looking at "On the Terrace. Figure composition with four women." by Othon Friesz, created sometime between 1879 and 1949. It’s a drawing from the SMK – the National Gallery of Denmark. It’s pretty sketchy, almost like a first draft. What do you make of it? Curator: The power here resides in its very incompletion. Note how the stark, rapid lines carve out forms from the white background. Consider the dynamism achieved with so few strokes. It emphasizes pure form rather than attempting representation. It is almost an exercise in semiotics – what minimum signals do we need to interpret figuration? Editor: It is interesting how the lines are so spare but the figures are definitely there. So the figures are almost symbols then? Curator: Precisely. Now consider the landscape suggested in the background. Are we truly concerned with geographical specificity, or are we more interested in the visual contrast, the push and pull between near and far suggested by varied line weight? Is this drawing about figures or their relationship to form itself? Editor: It’s interesting that you focus so much on the lines. I would never think that looking at a landscape! Curator: The landscape is a scaffolding upon which to play with those structural considerations, line, depth, contrast. We must acknowledge its importance, but always keep coming back to the fundamental structure of the art. What have we gained by reducing such a scene into near abstraction? What’s amplified? Editor: That makes me see how looking at it less literally almost opens it up. I notice the foreground and background more distinctly now because of how minimal everything is. Curator: And in so doing, the material of art– the application of line–becomes, ironically, the core content itself.