Ontwerp voor een doos voor een manicure set Possibly 1911 - 1928

This is Mathieu Lauweriks's 1911 design for a manicure set box, sketched in pencil on paper. Just looking at this drawing, I get a sense of the many decisions and iterations an artist goes through. The careful lines and geometric shapes feel so precise. I can almost feel Lauweriks hovering over the page, tweaking and adjusting, maybe mumbling to himself as he tries to get it just right. There’s a kind of modernist spirit at play, this reduction of forms to their most essential elements, like he’s stripping away the unnecessary to find a kind of pure design. I wonder if he saw himself as part of a lineage of artist-designers, each contributing to a larger conversation about form and function. It makes you think about the hidden labor in any creative act, and the dialogue artists have with each other, even across time.