Les Baux-de-Provence 

Curator: Welcome! Today, we’re looking at Hermann Lismann’s “Les Baux-de-Provence,” an ink drawing on paper currently held in the Städel Museum’s collection. Editor: My initial impression is that it’s stark. There's a monumentality in the stark black ink that somehow communicates a sense of absence. Curator: Precisely. This landscape carries echoes of power structures and the passage of time. Consider the town itself, Les Baux, perched high for strategic advantage, a visible marker of social hierarchy and control throughout history. How does that legacy manifest in this piece, do you think? Editor: For me, the ruins convey this fragility. The ink application feels almost rushed in places, creating texture that resembles eroded stone. You sense the constant push and pull between human ambition and material decay. Curator: I agree. And in this representation of architectural decay, there's a deeper reading concerning labor, power, and inequality throughout history. These locations witnessed everything from medieval feudalism to modern tourism; this work silently speaks to a long arc of exploitation and change. Editor: Interesting. I see the material’s agency, how the fluidity of ink captures the very texture of the landscape—the roughness, the striations in the stone. The choice of materials seems integral to communicating its story. I wonder how the labor of depiction is related to the labor involved in extracting materials from the land to build a place such as Les Baux. Curator: Yes! Think of all the social factors embedded within the making: from quarrying to sketching—the act of mark-making mirroring acts of building. We could explore class, the gaze, and ideas of nation-building... There is so much contained in what seems, at first glance, like a straightforward landscape. Editor: Absolutely. I hadn't considered all of these layers, but this ink sketch has opened up new questions about our relationship with material resources and the histories etched into the landscape itself.