't Haantje 1921

Bernard Essers created this woodcut, 't Haantje, using stark contrasts and graphic simplicity. The bold black and white shapes evoke a sense of stylized elegance. Essers uses form to structure the composition, creating visual interest through patterns, such as the interplay of light and shadow. Notice how the artist reduces the figures and landscape to essential forms, emphasizing clean lines. The stylized waves and geometric foliage demonstrate this reduction, abstracting nature into patterns. This highlights a tension between natural and constructed forms. The composition uses these elements to challenge traditional perspective. Essers flattens the pictorial space, pushing the foreground and background together. This destabilization invites us to reconsider our relationship to the image, and how it represents the world. This woodcut, through its formal qualities, engages with modernism's broader project of questioning established modes of representation, leaving us to contemplate the cultural codes embedded in such visual strategies.