Skitser af ramme- og dørprofiler 1919

This small drawing of frame and door profiles was made by Niels Larsen Stevns sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It’s made with a kind of dry, scratchy graphite pencil on a small piece of paper. I can really feel Stevns figuring something out here. He’s playing with arches and rectangles, with straight lines and curves. What kind of feeling was he trying to get across? There’s something so lovely about seeing an artist working out the bare bones of a design. It reminds me of the drawings of Philip Guston, who took inspiration from Renaissance frescoes. There's a really interesting lineage here of artists looking back in time, considering art history, and seeing how they might take something old and make it new. In the end, artists are always in conversation with one another, riffing on ideas, borrowing and lending. It’s exciting to feel part of that continuum.