Tracing Technique 1935 - 1942

Curator: Immediately, the stark, almost clinical presentation strikes me. There’s something inherently unsettling about the severed portraits. Editor: Indeed. We're looking at "Tracing Technique," a mixed-media work including drawing and collage on paper, believed to have been created between 1935 and 1942 by an anonymous artist. What are your immediate thoughts on how it functions as a kind of "portrait"? Curator: Well, portraits are usually about faces, aren’t they? About capturing something essential. Here, we have these fragments— a model wearing a garment in a photograph, juxtaposed with these rather ghostly drawn versions of what appear to be very similar designs. It feels… incomplete, like trying to remember a dream. There is a disembodiment to the work as a whole that captures something true, at least to me, and true portraits, especially of women of this era, weren’t always truthful portrayals of a living, breathing human, as much as an ideal or a role in life. Editor: I think that your reading emphasizes how this collage brings attention to historical costume—especially women’s fashion, both materially in the central photographic cut-out of a stylish bead-trimmed garment worn by a figure cropped just below the nose and expressively, as rendered in the careful sketching. It really allows the viewer to trace lines, details, pattern, and shape and see them reflected from one mode of representation to the next, which draws your attention. Curator: Exactly! There’s a dialogue happening, isn’t there? The photograph speaks of the real, the tangible. The drawings, like echoes or memories, perhaps attempt to capture that ephemeral elegance, translating that richness into simpler lines, highlighting how such finery is also artifice. Editor: And perhaps that is the intent. As a preparatory work, maybe related to costume design, this “tracing” of a photograph into different modes of drawing really lays bare the relationship between craft and mechanical reproduction in fashion itself. It underscores how so much that appears fixed, natural, and authentic is also, in its own way, copied and traced over and over, even unconsciously. Curator: Beautifully said. This seemingly simple work opens a fascinating conversation about memory, fashion, representation, and maybe the roles that we are endlessly retracing. Editor: Absolutely. It's a piece that reveals more with each layer you peel back.