Curatorial notes
Czobel Bela made this drawing of a peasant girl in 1940. The limited palette, the grays and blacks, it almost makes you feel the weight of history. The texture is really something here; it’s like you can feel the charcoal or whatever dark medium he used dragging across the paper. There's a real push and pull. I mean, look at the way he renders her hands – so gestural, so quick, but they still manage to convey this sense of quiet labor. And that headscarf, it's like a dark cloud framing her face, but there's also a softness to it, a tenderness. It reminds me a little of Kathe Kollwitz, that same empathy for the working class, but Czobel has his own unique way of capturing the humanity in his subjects. What do you think?
