Figure Composition with Bacchants 1914 - 1915

J.A. Jerichau (II) made this painting of figures, sometime before 1916. The palette feels almost like a bruise, various fleshy and bruised tones smeared across a raw surface. I like how Jerichau seems to be thinking through the paint. Look at the way the paint feels pulled around, like he attacked the canvas with a soft cloth. The paint is thin, so thin in places that the canvas shows through, giving a sense of immediacy. But this isn’t hurried, it’s more like the artist is trying to see what the material can do. See how the figures emerge, dissolving into each other, lost in the half-light of the composition. Take the figure in the middle; the dark brown strokes suggesting the lines of her torso and legs, but there’s a softness there too, a blurring of edges. It reminds me of Paula Modersohn-Becker. Like her, Jerichau is interested in the human form, but not in a classical sense. These figures are raw, visceral. They embrace the messy, the imperfect, the incomplete.