The Penholder 1918

Roger de La Fresnaye created this painting, "The Penholder," sometime in his short life, using watercolor and charcoal on paper. I imagine de la Fresnaye was a little restless when he made this. He’s working out the push and pull of representation and abstraction using a muted palette of browns, blacks, grays, and pinks. He's making the ordinary mysterious. Just look at that hovering dark square and the strange pink rectangle and the little pink sausage—they all float! That cluster of marks and shapes in the upper right: is it a face, a vase, a still life? There's this tension between the flat shapes and the depth they suggest. It’s like he’s winking at us. The painting evokes the earlier Cubist work of Picasso and Braque, who were constantly looking at each other’s paintings. Artists are always talking to each other, across generations, through their work. De La Fresnaye takes their dialogue in his own direction, opening up a whole new conversation.