Niet zoozeer idealist dan wel ideoloog 1923

Curator: Immediately I see something haunted and fleeting. It’s almost as though this…essence is trying to fade away before my very eyes! Editor: Here we have Erich Wichmann’s piece, “Niet zoozeer idealist dan wel ideoloog,” rendered in pencil in 1923. That title roughly translates to "Not so much an idealist as an ideologue," and given the political climate in Europe at that time, that distinction alone tells quite a story. Curator: Ah, an ideologue, you say. That certainly recontextualizes what appears, at first glance, to be something spectral and delicate. Are we witnessing a figure burdened by their own conviction, fading perhaps because those convictions are unsustainable? Editor: Perhaps. The quick, almost frantic pencil strokes suggest the internal turmoil of someone wrestling with potent ideas. It evokes for me the broader struggles of that period to either solidify the human spirit, or calcify into dogma. There’s an almost ghostly absence where the subject’s face should be; it's replaced by shading and indeterminacy. It’s quite clever. Curator: Absence does speak loudly here. You know, it reminds me of those psychological experiments where subjects are shown incomplete images to reveal projection. Editor: Absolutely. Our minds seek completion and meaning in a world of fragmentation and the unfinished. Wichmann forces the viewer to meet him, to conjure the very idealism or ideology he depicts. Curator: Is this almost a test then, of our own subconscious, reflected back through a sketched phantom? A brilliant mirror held to society’s ideological soul. Editor: Exactly. Are we seeing the residue of fervent belief or an indictment of it? That ambiguity—the space it creates— that's what makes this more than just a historical artifact. Curator: Wichmann offers us an invitation into his intellectual fray. Looking again I'm struck not by fading but now a furious internal resistance made visible. It does still hint at impermanence, though. How heavy. Editor: Indeed. It leaves a heavy question mark dangling in the air long after we look away, about the ideas that grip us.