Figuur met snorharen 1969

Curator: Right now we're looking at Rein Dool's, "Figuur met snorharen" from 1969, a drawing made with pen and ink on paper, now held at the Rijksmuseum. It's a work that immediately strikes me with its dreamlike and playful quality. What are your first impressions? Editor: Whimsical and surreal are words that spring to mind. It feels like looking into the subconscious, all flowing lines and half-formed figures. Almost unsettling in its strangeness, would you agree? Curator: Absolutely. Dool’s work often explored the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, and we see that interplay vividly here. The figure with the whiskers—we assume it’s some kind of cat-like creature—is rendered with a minimal yet expressive line. Editor: That's a very good way to explain that tension of representing figures. It almost feels political. Dool made this toward the end of the 60s. There's a counter-cultural current in its subversion of traditional forms, right? An almost Dadaist sensibility, given how society viewed the war at the time? Curator: I agree that the cultural context is important. However, while one could argue for Dadaist influences, the work to me has a more personal, psychological dimension. The ambiguous forms, the floating objects, the somewhat disconnected imagery—they seem to hint at the complexities of the human psyche, of internal states made visible. The whiskers may even act as conduits to an emotive source? Editor: An emotive source indeed. These shapes become modern carriers. That's interesting because in an art historical context, this challenges typical academic art training through the playful and quirky nature. There are few other art pieces similar that I could directly compare it with during this time. Curator: I think that ultimately its power lies in its ability to tap into our own imagination. Dool provides us with a framework, a set of visual cues, but it’s up to us to construct our own narrative, to find meaning in the enigmatic forms. Editor: And perhaps that very act of finding personal meaning is what makes this piece resonate so profoundly. It mirrors the political climate, pushing us towards individualism even more during the 1960s.