Petrusjka 1948

Jakob Weidemann made this painting, Petrusjka, with oil on canvas. I can imagine him in the studio, building up a scaffold of blues, blacks, and whites, with little darts of yellow and red. These colors and shapes feel almost architectural, but the way they lean and intersect gives the whole image a sense of movement, like a dance. Maybe Weidemann was listening to Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name – a tragicomedy about a puppet brought to life? There’s a kind of push-and-pull here that I recognize from my own painting process. The stripes seem to want to hold things in place, but the triangles are all angling off, eager to escape. It makes me wonder about the conversations he was having with other painters at the time, and how he was pushing and pulling against the ideas of the day. Painting is like that, an ongoing dialogue.