Portret van Dina Klaver 1916

This is Julie de Graag's "Portret van Dina Klaver," made in 1916, and look at all those lines! It’s like she’s knitting with ink, turning a face into a landscape of tightly packed marks. You can almost feel the scratch of the pen on paper. The thing about lines is they can be so descriptive, or so abstract, right? Here, they're doing both. They map the contours of Dina Klaver’s face, every wrinkle and fold, but they also flatten her out, turning her into a pattern. And those bold, dark lines around her jacket—they give her a weight, a presence. It's this back and forth, between surface and depth, that makes the print so compelling. It puts me in mind of Paula Modersohn-Becker, also interested in depicting women with a direct gaze and an economy of means. The conversation between artists across time is ongoing, constantly re-interpreting ways of seeing and understanding the world.