Communist Lou de Visser 1925 - 1935

Patricq Kroon made this drawing, Communist Lou de Visser, with pen and ink. Imagine the scratch of the nib on the paper. The artist really digs into the pressure and the line seems like an act of insistent repetition, again and again. I wonder what it felt like to be Kroon, drawing this image, poking away at Lou de Visser? Was it infuriating, funny, an exorcism? The wiry agitation of the drawing seems to say so much about the state of mind of the artist, the spiky agitation of the political moment. Lou de Visser sits amidst a tangle of thorns, but has shoes for feet. Amazing! There’s something about the way the artist works the political and the personal together that you see also in someone like Grosz or Heartfield. Artists are always in conversation with each other, whether they know it or not. What do you think?