Staande vrouw met gespreide armen c. 1915s - 1925s

Isaac Israels created "Staaande Vrouw met gespreide armen" – Standing Woman with Outstretched Arms – a pen drawing on paper, sometime between 1880 and 1934. The sketch presents a figure rendered with an economy of line, almost floating within the white space of the page. This sparseness directs our attention to the essentials: the pose of the woman, arms reaching outwards, creating a sense of openness. Israels' approach to form here is less about capturing precise anatomical detail and more about conveying a sense of movement and gesture. The lines are suggestive rather than definitive. It challenges traditional notions of representation. The emptiness becomes as important as the drawn figure. This invites questions about the relationship between figure and ground, presence and absence, and the very act of seeing. It invites us to reconsider how meaning is constructed through the interplay of what is shown and what is left unsaid.