Miss M.G. 1929

Walter Pach made this etching of Miss M.G. in 1929. It’s a tonal work, the image built up with lots of tiny, close-hatched lines. The network of lines creates areas of darker and lighter tones, building up the forms of the woman's body, the drapery of the chair and the strange, dreamlike space in the background, which could be either a window or a mirror. I'm particularly drawn to the way that line becomes tone, and tone becomes form, and form becomes space, pushing and pulling in a really ambiguous way. You see the way Pach has allowed some parts of the image to simply emerge from the accumulation of marks, whilst other areas are more defined, described in greater detail? This feels very contemporary, actually – a little like the work of someone such as Luc Tuymans, using graphic techniques in a painterly way. But also, it feels very much of its time, a kind of streamlined, art-deco take on the traditional nude. Art is always like this – an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas across time, never fixed or definitive.