Shallow Compote 1935 - 1942

This is S. Brodsky's ‘Shallow Compote’, made with what looks like pencil or crayon on paper. I love how Brodsky used a limited palette of blues and greens to describe a clear glass object. Looking closely, you can see the marks Brodsky made, layering them to create the illusion of depth and light. The surface of the paper is visible beneath the marks, and the physical process of the artmaker is unobscured. The drawing has a tentative, exploratory quality, like the artist is feeling their way through the subject. See the concentric marks at the foot of the compote, they remind me of how Morandi used similar gestures to define the cylindrical forms of his bottles and jars. It's hard to say exactly when Brodsky made this, but it feels very mid-century to me, maybe a contemporary of someone like Fairfield Porter, who also had an interest in making art from the everyday. It has a similar quality of understated beauty and quiet observation. These artists show how much can be achieved with very little, embracing the ambiguity and open-endedness of artmaking.