Atlas 1908

Oluf Hartmann made this small print, Atlas, sometime around the turn of the century. It looks like it's made with a kind of dark, velvety ink. The figure emerges from a solid field of black, it’s hard to tell what he's doing, and the darkness is kind of oppressive. It feels like you're peering into a dense fog, trying to make out a shape. Hartmann builds up the image through many tiny marks. Take a look at the figure's back; you can see how the artist has used light and shadow to define the muscles. It’s almost like he's sculpting the figure out of the darkness, pulling him from the void. This reminds me of the way Paula Modersohn-Becker, who was a contemporary of Hartmann, used a similar approach of modelling figures from blocks of solid color. Both artists were interested in how we see, and how we construct our understanding of the world through the process of looking.