To kvinder slås om en mand 1906

Oluf Hartmann made this print, "Two Women Fight Over a Man," using etching, sometime between 1890 and 1910. The tonal range of grays here is really interesting to me, like a photograph left out in the sun that’s bleached from its original vibrancy, so we're left to squint a bit to make out the composition. I love the way that the scene is rendered, almost violently, the figures scratched into the metal plate. There is a real sense of the artist’s hand in the cross hatching and energetic mark making that makes up the hair, the faces and all the writhing limbs. I love how you can see the history of the image, the labor involved in its making. It reminds me a little of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s prints; both artists were working at a similar time. But where Modersohn-Becker aimed for a certain smoothness and softness, Hartmann’s work is more raw, more full of immediacy and fight.