Summer's Figure 1965

Curator: Roland Petersen's "Summer's Figure," painted in 1965, presents quite the striking composition in acrylic. What’s your initial read? Editor: It's unsettling. The vibrant colors clash, and those insistent lines... There's a discordance between the playful beach setting and a lurking tension. Curator: The apparent casualness is key to its tension. Consider the context: Petersen painted this during the Vietnam War era. His brightly colored beach scenes offer a deliberate contrast, highlighting American leisure juxtaposed against global conflict and production shortages on the other side of the world. Editor: Ah, that perspective completely shifts how I perceive those parasols. Initially, I saw them solely as compositional elements, echoing shapes against the angular landscape. The intense orange-red is used liberally, directing the viewer's gaze around the scene—it feels intentionally Fauvist, you know? Curator: I'd argue that his formal use of Expressionist style with these figural elements offers a window onto how modern desires for escape and enjoyment were increasingly implicated within global structures of power and commodity production at the time. Note how figures lack distinct faces, dehumanized amidst manufactured leisure. Editor: So, what initially appears as just bright formalism is actually deeply unsettling and thought-provoking, hinting at broader socioeconomic structures. Curator: Precisely. It makes us think about whose summer this truly is. Where the raw materials for the canvases and acrylics were extracted from. Editor: Now that you point out all those material relationships and implications, that vibrant blue loses its appeal. Suddenly that unsettling sensation makes perfect, unsettling sense. Curator: Indeed. Viewing “Summer’s Figure” through its historical context gives us a glimpse of that modern life was enabled through production. Editor: Right, seeing it instead as more than color and shapes gives its historical meaning weight.