Bosrand met afzetting 1939 - 2009

This is Bosrand met afzetting, a drawing by Kees Stoop. We don't have a date for this work, but Stoop, who died in 2019, was a contemporary artist working in the Netherlands. Stoop here gives us an image of nature, but one that is heavily mediated and controlled. We can see this in the 'afzetting', the fencing that cordons off the forest edge, structuring our access to it. The drawing thus has a certain social commentary to it. The relationship between the natural and the artificial has long been a source of tension in Dutch culture, with its landscapes having been heavily engineered by land reclamation. Perhaps there is an environmental message at play, in which the fencing off of the land, the making of borders, mirrors the artist’s own act of framing in drawing this scene. Of course, this is just one interpretation. As historians of art, we look to social and institutional contexts to better understand the meanings of works like these.