Vensters, Nigeriaanse vrouwen en een speer c. 1916 - 1945

Curator: Here we have "Vensters, Nigeriaanse vrouwen en een speer," or "Windows, Nigerian women and a spear," a drawing whose creation dates back to sometime between 1916 and 1945. It currently resides here at the Rijksmuseum. Editor: Oh, it's delightfully chaotic, isn't it? Like a page torn straight from someone's dream journal. The lines are so tentative, like whispered secrets. Curator: Precisely. Note the superposition of forms; windows are rendered in almost geometric fashion, contrasting against what appears to be human figures sketched with looser lines, evoking a sense of ethereality. It shows how the artist worked through relationships between objects. Editor: Those figures...they’re so lightly drawn they could float away any second. Are they dancing? Praying? And then this rigid window frame! It's all slightly haunting, as if capturing memory struggling to stay in focus. Curator: That friction between abstraction and representation seems crucial to understanding the dynamic at play. See how line weights are varied. Lightly sketched preliminary figure shapes create tension against dark accents of geometric form as if to establish a visual hierarchy within the composition. Editor: I can imagine the artist quickly jotting it all down, trying to nail the exact position of everything, you know? Like, “Wait, where *does* the spear go in all this?” Then there's those color notes scrawled to the side. Is this from life? The window framing might support that... but where do you see these women, window, and spear together? It makes the narrative feel unstable. Curator: Consider how the drawing's incompleteness contributes. The sparse details of the figures prompt the viewer to engage more actively, co-creating meaning and engaging imagination when perceiving incomplete outlines of figurative subjects blended among perspectival exercises with limited resolution due pencil/graphite application tools utilized here: a true dance! Editor: You're right. It's that kind of puzzle that makes you want to lean closer, doesn’t it? Thanks, that gives me an appreciation for what is trying to emerge through the rough sketch form here.