Czóbel Béla Still Life 1959. 1959

Bela Czobel made this still life in 1959 with a brush and a muted palette, but there's a certain frenetic energy to it. I can imagine Czobel as he paints, maybe he’s standing, looking down. See how he’s put down these marks, one after the other, figuring out the relationships between the objects. The textures in this painting are a real treat – thin washes of color layered with darker, scratchy marks. It gives the whole scene a kind of ghostly presence, like you could almost reach out and touch it but it might just disappear. Look at that bowl, just a few strokes of blue suggest its roundness, its depth. It reminds me of other painters like Morandi, or maybe even some of the early Cubists. They were all in conversation, wrestling with similar questions about how to represent the world around them. What's so inspiring about painting is the way artists keep talking to each other across time, remixing and reimagining what's come before.