Benen van een zittende figuur, een hoed en een antropomorfe kop in profiel naar links Possibly 1943

Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita made this pencil drawing of a figure, a hat, and an anthropomorphic head sometime before 1944. The artist has delineated a world made of simple outlines and shadows. The sitting figure’s legs are crossed, but the perspective is tilted, flattened. It’s like a diagram, a set of instructions, or a plan for something. I wonder what Mesquita was thinking when he made this sketch. Was it a preliminary study, or an end in itself? What was he trying to figure out? I imagine him looking, looking, looking, and then translating what he saw into a system of lines. The hat, too, is reduced to its simplest form, a circle and a few curves. The anthropomorphic head, tucked away in the corner, is a bit more mysterious. Is it a portrait? A caricature? Or just a figment of the artist's imagination? Artists throughout time have played with the idea of abstraction, with the reduction of form to its most essential elements, and this feels part of that wider conversation.