Gezichten en een vrouw met een hoed c. 1930

Curator: Looking at this drawing, “Faces and a Woman with a Hat,” created around 1930 by Carel Adolph Lion Cachet, the immediate impression is one of incompleteness, wouldn’t you agree? Editor: Absolutely! It's like stumbling upon someone's private thoughts spilled onto paper. There's a certain intimacy to it, as if we're peering into the artist's subconscious as they toyed with the image of figures with charcoal strokes and the blank spaces that somehow speaks volumes too. Curator: Well put. This ink drawing allows us to delve into the complexities of portraiture during that period. The figures rendered through such a spontaneous sketching approach—speak to interwar anxieties and emerging notions about the self. Do the portraits perhaps reveal a search for something less stable and less easy to describe in terms of personal identity? Editor: Identity feels very unmoored here. The faces, or fragments of faces really, swim on the page. The woman in the hat is barely there; the line that becomes her almost vanishes before the hat starts scribbling out of her head. It seems like Cachet asks, "What really makes the face recognizable?" It almost looks like automatic drawing in some respects. The simplicity is deceiving though, I'd wager. Curator: Exactly. Cachet was deeply immersed in the societal changes impacting the individual at this point. Examining his utilization of negative space, it underscores the fractured nature of human representation. Each floating facial feature is isolated but yet exists collectively and creates a conversation about how identity in turn might also be just as unstable. It’s not a fixed object. It is the very dialogue happening now. Editor: It is like, he just captured a fleeting moment, and lets the incomplete drawing stand in for so many larger considerations of identity and place and time, doesn’t it? It gives a rawness and also this lightness and kind of humor to contemplate such ideas here. It makes these portraits memorable! Curator: Indeed. This sketch gives us not only faces but glimpses into Cachet's social commentary of the period. Editor: It's less like a record, more like a feeling—I leave it intrigued!