Knoppen van een paardenkastanje 1918

Curator: Here we have "Knoppen van een paardenkastanje," or "Horse Chestnut Buds," a 1918 print by Julie de Graag. What are your first impressions? Editor: There’s something undeniably still about it. Despite being a floral study, it feels almost architectural with that strong central stem, its stillness really emphasizing its formal qualities, its constructed reality. Curator: Indeed. De Graag, situated within the Dutch Art Nouveau movement, used this linocut print to engage with a renewed interest in nature, but I see within it an almost proto-feminist engagement, a declaration of woman’s presence using images of women and their material worlds to reveal identity, and in particular De Graag's complex subjectivity within this specific moment in art history. Editor: It’s a linocut, isn't it? That shifts things for me, thinking about the material involved, that shift from wood, to lino, to paper in production, that repetitive, blocky geometry imposed by the process itself—that's really speaking to something distinct in the industrial landscape. Curator: Absolutely. Considering that Julie de Graag produced this piece around the end of the First World War, this artwork, and its creation through repetitive gestures in turn reflected in its content, makes the natural object feel very separate to itself. It’s nature filtered, almost tamed, perhaps to provide some semblance of order amid unprecedented social and geopolitical turmoil. Editor: And given the limitations of the printing process and those strong lines it lends a bold clarity, each line deliberately placed. Curator: I couldn’t agree more. This bold clarity provides insight into the intersection of historical context, material practice and gender studies that converge through these horse chestnut buds. Editor: Absolutely, it gives an intimate study of material practice. This really exemplifies her understanding of material relationships! Curator: A beautiful marriage between subject, technique, and historical moment, creating something incredibly compelling. Editor: A quiet radicalism in the heart of this botanical print.