Landskab med høstfolk. 1909 - 1912

Othon Friesz made this landscape with harvesters with graphite on paper. Look at how Friesz moves between bold, certain lines and more tentative, searching marks. I can imagine Friesz outside, in a field, trying to capture the scene before him, the harvesters moving in and out of view. Friesz may have been inspired by earlier painters like Courbet, who also showed ordinary people doing everyday work. Friesz’s figures aren’t sentimentalized or heroic. The people here are captured with a kind of immediacy. See how the bent figure on the right seems to struggle under the weight of a heavy load. This gesture has so much emotional weight and brings a sense of human effort and maybe even a little struggle into the image. I think, too, of Van Gogh’s drawings of laborers, capturing the human experience through a quick sketch. It reminds us that artists are always in conversation, borrowing from the past to express something new.