Kors- og steleformer 1864 - 1941

Curator: Here we have "Kors- og steleformer" by Niels Larsen Stevns, likely created sometime between 1864 and 1941. It’s currently part of the collection here at the SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst. The medium is listed as drawing, specifically pencil on paper. Editor: Immediately, what strikes me is the intimacy and directness. It feels like stepping into the artist's workspace, observing his raw process. There is an intense scribbling to the shapes, almost obscuring them, despite their architectural quality. Curator: Precisely! The "cross and stele forms" point to a preoccupation with symbolic structures, perhaps delving into the emotional weight these shapes carried for him—the cross, of course, laden with Christian significance and ideas of suffering and redemption, while the stele suggests memory and commemoration, acting as an almost primal record. Editor: And I find it revealing, seeing these forms roughed out in pencil, not refined, but caught mid-thought, so to speak. It underscores the artist’s engagement with the physical act of creating, the very hand-to-paper motion involved in imbuing these recognizable structures with their charged significance. Also the handwriting scattered through the sketchbook spreads seems just as much part of the act. Curator: Indeed, and thinking about what he might have been reading, what ideas occupied his thoughts as he sketched these forms... The interplay between word and image would unlock even further insight. The text could have worked to prompt his artistic renderings. Editor: And that relationship underscores how the creation of meaning isn't some ethereal process but a material one, rooted in everyday actions like mark-making and note-taking, using readily available resources of paper and pencil to translate an abstract concept into concrete visual forms. Curator: Thank you, that really underlines the profound interplay within such a humble sketch. It’s more than meets the eye. Editor: Absolutely! Now I see this small sketchbook as containing its own world and language—which challenges my pre-conceived notions. It is never JUST sketching and jotting in this material process, always also something more.