Kitchen Chair c. 1940

Editor: This is Edward Bashaw's "Kitchen Chair," a pencil drawing on paper, created around 1940. It feels incredibly meticulous; there’s such precision in the rendering of the chair's form. How do you approach this piece from a formalist perspective? Curator: Observe the tonality – the restricted palette of browns and creams creates a muted effect. The sharp delineation of lines, a cornerstone of academic art, constructs form, and creates visual weight. How do the varying line weights contribute to the overall structure? Editor: It gives it depth and makes certain areas stand out. Like how the seat seems almost convex because of the darker shading around its edges. Curator: Precisely. Bashaw has a fine understanding of line and shadow play. He manipulates the values to construct three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional plane. Do you notice how the structure creates repeated forms? Editor: Yeah, there are sets of horizontal lines and sets of diagonal lines... Curator: Absolutely. How would you relate its sharp, objective portrayal of the familiar subject to modernism? Editor: Perhaps the mundane subject matter elevated through such precise rendering, aligning it with some modernist principles of portraying everyday life? Curator: An astute observation! This is the kind of contradiction formal analysis loves to discover. We see both the embrace of realist technique and an almost diagrammatic investigation of form in a modernist key. Editor: That tension between realism and modernism really opens up the work for me! Curator: Indeed. It is an object lesson in observing the intersection between artistic aims.