Shirtwaist c. 1937

Harry Grossen rendered this shirtwaist in watercolor on paper with obsessive mark-making, maybe for a fashion catalogue, or perhaps as an exercise in visual thinking. I wonder if he felt trapped by the endless patterning. The red is very insistent, like a scream or a siren. There's no shading, so no dimensionality, but somehow the drawing convinces you of the existence of a body inside it. It's a feat of engineering to get the ruffles right and make the sleeves puff out just so. The buttons are so precise that I want to touch them, to feel their cool glassy smoothness. I can see the artist's hand moving across the paper, trying to record the shirtwaist in front of him. The bottom version seems like it's been discarded in favor of the top. It’s like he’s saying: this is how it works, this is how the front relates to the back. It’s so satisfying when an artist shows their process like that. We are all just trying to figure things out as we go along, artists included.