Round #3 c. 1935 - 1943

Alex Monastersky made this drawing, Round #3, with pencil on paper. Look at the marks! They build form and space, but the texture they create becomes as important as the image itself. The pressure of the pencil on the page gives each area of the drawing a slightly different feel. The build-up of the shading is especially beautiful in the figures, their forms built up from a swarm of marks. See how the light seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once? The crowd seems to writhe and shift in the background, a mass of shadowy figures. The drawing reminds me of some of those early twentieth-century social realist painters. Artists like Kathe Kollwitz, or maybe even a bit of Max Beckmann, trying to capture something of the struggles of everyday life. But Monastersky doesn't get bogged down in the grit. Instead, he seems to use the scene as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of mark-making. The scene is both the subject and the method.