Vaandel en figuur 1889

Curator: Alright, let's dive into Karl Meunier’s 1889 drawing, “Vaandel en figuur.” It's primarily a pencil and pen sketch on toned paper. What strikes you first? Editor: There's such an ethereal quality, isn't there? It's a ghostly procession, as if conjured from memory. A wisp of smoke more than a concrete image. Is that the artist exploring or just barely grasping a nascent idea? Curator: Definitely feels like a formative exploration, perhaps for a larger, more realized composition. Notice the inscription "Dolle Charité" near the top; "Wild Charity?" "Mad Charity"? And then, you’ve got what looks like a figure holding a flag – 'vaandel' in Dutch means flag or banner – next to some architectural feature, like a spire. It is just wonderfully unresolved, right? Editor: Absolutely. The architectural element evokes stability and the state; against the figure holding what appears to be some flag, though it isn't particularly clear that the banner evokes rebellion as much as some desperate, personal quest. I wonder if the notion of "mad charity" challenges our assumptions of civic generosity, turning the idea of charity on its head? I see a critique. Curator: Or perhaps a personal act that has been inflated beyond recognition into something bigger? Think of "street art." Though very fine art and clearly of some status here, but it's got this initial sketch intimacy. What is captured versus released into the world, becomes both intimate and strange at once. It’s like capturing a ghost on toned paper with these initial pencil lines and this inscription of Charité just off-set from everything else on display. Editor: True, the "initial" qualities, combined with its classical sketch art training style—very typical of academic art of that period—heighten that sense of an elusive narrative or feeling that hangs just beyond our grasp, doesn't it? As if, at any second it would dissolve and fade away from the paper into something we can only barely see in its completed stages. Curator: Exactly! It's a work pregnant with potential. And its incompletion grants the viewer that rare glimpse into the messy, exciting, frustrating moments of creation. What lingers with you the most from this sketch? Editor: Definitely how that raw exploration—that feeling that all artwork has initially to start—opens up new emotional terrains between artist, figure, and their world on toned paper, like opening one's notebook to reveal that secret which could still come to fruition but only with the combined will of artist and viewer.