Two women in the garden with fountain 1905

Paula Modersohn-Becker made this drawing of two women in the garden with fountain with pencil on paper. It's so immediate, like a thought caught in charcoal, or a dream half-remembered. There's something about the economy of line here that I find so moving. The fountain, just a circle and a vertical, but it's so clearly a fountain. And those two women, huddled together, are they gossiping, or just enjoying the garden? The texture in the lower part of the image feels dense, heavy, a real contrast to the lightness of the sky and the fountain. It’s a garden that comes to life on the page. The whole thing feels like a shorthand for something deeper, a feeling, a moment, captured with the lightest of touches. I think of other artists working around the same time, like Munch, who were also trying to capture these fleeting moments of feeling. What Modersohn-Becker shares with them is the recognition that art is less about perfect representation and more about the messy, unresolved, always incomplete process of trying to make sense of the world.