Josephine and Adam 1947

Curator: Oh, this jumps right out. I'm getting a very private moment caught in a whirlwind of frantic lines, you know? Like peering through a keyhole into someone's…interior world, maybe. Editor: You’ve certainly captured the essence of immediacy! What you are looking at now is Ivan Albright's "Josephine and Adam" created in 1947. The work, executed with ink, invites a somewhat less intimate perspective, one centered more broadly in considering changing genre convention during and after World War II. Curator: See, that’s what I love, you always zoom out! Intimacy interests me because here you get that sensation that something unspoken is about to be laid bare. Look at the way the forms are outlined in such an intense, almost violent black, and then softened from within by…peach? Flesh tones? I feel I can almost taste this drawing. It tingles on my tongue, slightly acidic. Editor: You read this "intimacy" as almost accidental, then? Is it, in a way, too real, perhaps a raw representation in the historical context of shifting representations of women, a break from earlier idealized portraiture. In some ways, I wonder if it resists sentimentalism to critique, perhaps not intentionally, the place of women after WWII? Curator: I resist a clinical read of the portrait's purpose, not of its content. Intentionality isn’t the question when you're communing with an artwork on an aesthetic level, no? When the artist is simply baring what they are seeing? To my mind, the fact that Albright refuses to flatter his sitter becomes its own strange form of intimacy. To acknowledge and lay bare. Editor: It’s interesting that you focus so heavily on “seeing”. I think the act of showing itself, who does that work benefit or hurt and, therefore, can seeing in the manner you express it truly transcend the social milieu? Perhaps instead we could sit together with these considerations while we still observe this linocut print experimentation together and find more common ground… Curator: Indeed! More common ground for each of us…to find.