Waistcoat c. 1936

Melita Hofmann created this pencil drawing of a waistcoat, at some point in the twentieth century. What strikes me is the attention to detail here, but the colour palette, such as it is, is quite restrained. You can see the artist's process unfolding before you, in the ghostly lines around the main form, in the faint sketch of the back view floating above the main event. The texture of the paper seems to be part of the image. The eye of the artist here is not concerned with creating a photorealistic image, but rather with describing the object, the waistcoat, from a certain point of view. I'm reminded of the almost forensic-like drawings of clothing by the artist, photographer and ethnographer Alphonse Bertillon, a kind of proto-conceptualist whose work, like Hofmann's, reminds us that art can be as much about inquiry and process as it is about answers.