Slipper 1935 - 1942

Melita Hofmann made this drawing of a slipper with graphite and color pencil. Look at this single slipper and how it sits on the page, not as a shoe but as a specimen. The object is carefully observed and drawn in painstaking detail. I wonder if it was Hofmann’s own slipper, a precious item she treasured and wanted to hold onto. Look at the ribbons and their delicate and elegant folds. The attention to detail and the precision with which she renders them is striking. Then there's that small line drawing hovering above, a diagram of a slipper, reduced to its barest outline, and I think, gosh, that’s kind of what art is, isn’t it? Taking something real and pulling it apart, re-seeing it in a new way. It’s like Hofmann is showing us that the slipper can be both a thing, and an idea of a thing. And it’s in that gap between the real and the ideal that the magic happens. We are all in conversation with one another, trying to capture something that is always out of reach.