Jules Romains 1921

Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac scratched this portrait of Jules Romains onto a plate, and then printed it. You can almost feel the scratch of the etching needle! There’s an intensity here, right? The density of marks around the brow give a sense of concentration, like Romains is really thinking. I wonder what Segonzac was thinking, too, while he made this. Maybe he was aiming for a likeness, or maybe he was interested in something else—how to turn a face into a pattern of lines. The marks build the form of the face in a really interesting way, with certain areas dissolving and others being quite solid. You can see how one artist looks at another and gets ideas that ripple out across time. I look at this and I want to go make something! It’s all one big conversation, artists talking to artists.