Swearing to the right 1912

Editor: This is Ferdinand Hodler's 1912 drawing, "Swearing to the Right". It’s a fascinating piece, rendered simply in pencil. I'm immediately struck by how skeletal and unfinished the figures seem. What's your interpretation of this rather eerie work? Curator: Eerie is spot on! But maybe not in a spooky ghost sense, more like…a truth serum kinda way. It’s raw, isn't it? Stripped bare. Hodler, bless his symbolic heart, he’s getting down to the essence here. Those figures aren’t meant to be pretty. Think of them more as, oh, archetypes caught mid-oath. I mean, the right hand is important, of course, because we’re “swearing to the right,” aren’t we? How do you read that compositionally – with one figure looming over the other? Editor: I guess I see the taller figure as maybe representing an ideal or authority figure that the shorter figure is, well, swearing allegiance to. It feels unbalanced though, maybe a little sinister. Curator: Sinister! Ha! You read my mind. Look how rigid they are, barely sketched but full of implied weight and responsibility. What were the "rights" people swore to in Hodler's time, I wonder? Probably varied quite a lot… It’s that contrast, you see? Fragile lines representing ideas meant to be set in stone. Irony is an odd thing. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Editor: It definitely does. I was so focused on the visual simplicity, but you've shown me the conceptual depth that Hodler packed in. Curator: Glad to shake loose some inspiration. Art should get the brain’s juices flowing. Don’t you think? Always look beneath the pencil lines! There’s an idea – the pencil, the line, that's our portal!