Card-Playing Fishermen 1953 - 1954

Robert von Neumann made this print of fishermen playing cards—probably sometime mid-century—and you can tell he really labored over it. It makes me wonder what sort of person Neumann was, what kind of people he hung out with? I can imagine him watching the fishermen, day after day, trying to capture the way they sat, the turn of a head, the concentration on their cards. Did he hang out with these guys, or did he sketch them from a distance? The textures are built from thousands of tiny marks. The fishermen are all hunched over their cards, with expressions of deep focus. The detail is incredible—look at the way he rendered their clothing, their hands, their faces. You get a real sense of their physicality, their lives. And the composition, the way he arranged the figures, it’s all so carefully considered, not unlike work by Kathe Kollwitz. Artists are always in conversation with each other, borrowing, stealing, riffing, and adding to the mix.