To mænd, der slås 1907

Oluf Hartmann made this small etching, "Two Men Fighting," at some point in his short life. The image itself feels like it's emerging from some dark, primordial soup. The lines are so raw and scratchy; you can imagine Hartmann hunched over a plate, wrestling with the metal as much as the figures in his picture are wrestling with each other. What was he thinking as he made this? I imagine him channeling Goya, or maybe even Daumier, finding a kind of brutal beauty in the human struggle. Look at the way he's rendered the muscles, the tension in their bodies – it's all there in the furious cross-hatching. It's like he's digging into something deep and visceral, not just depicting a fight, but exposing something about the human condition. Hartmann died young, but you can see him here in conversation with all the artists who came before, grappling with similar themes of conflict, power, and vulnerability. It's a conversation that continues to this day.