#figure

It came out of a huge doorway commission — bronze doors for a museum that was never actually built, so they never got hung anywhere. He kept picking at that project for decades and casting single figures out of it along the way, and this is one of those. The debt to Michelangelo is one he apparently never bothered to hide.

Supposedly Marinetti's Futurist manifesto singled out exactly this kind of quiet, moonlit mood as something painters needed to get over — funny seeing the movement's own future star drawing it a few years earlier.

This is chalk on paper — the kind of sheet that was a step towards something else rather than the thing itself. He's said to have burned a lot of his own drawings late in life, supposedly so nobody would ever see the working-out behind the finished stuff. Ones like this got out anyway, and now they're framed and lit the same way the paintings are.

He kept going back to the same reclining woman for something like fifty years — dozens of versions, and most of them cast more than once, which is why so many cities ended up with one. Apparently this is one of the late ones, made when he was in his eighties and running what was effectively a small factory.

He was part of a group in Dresden that called itself the Bridge — apparently they shared a studio, painted their friends fast and cheap, and wanted nothing to do with the polite art of the day. It's said the group fell apart a year or so after this, partly over a history of it he wrote himself.

Before he helped start De Stijl, van Doesburg apparently spent a stretch working through Cubism, breaking a room and a figure down into flat, overlapping planes like this one. It's one of the pieces people use to trace how he got from drawing people to painting nothing but lines and blocks.

According to what I found, it's carved from granite, around eleven metres tall and something like sixty tonnes, and it's set with its back to the town, facing out over open water instead.

According to Wikipedia he spent the first half of his career working almost entirely in black — charcoal and prints, most of it pretty grim — and only came round to colour late on. The story behind the title is the usual one: a woman, a box she's told to leave shut, and everything bad in the world getting out of it.

The man on top isn't meant to be anyone in particular — an ordinary bloke in a plain shirt, which is supposedly the whole point. You'll come across it in one of the old squares in Salzburg, hemmed in by buildings a few centuries older than it is.

From what I can find he was still teaching himself to draw when he made this — no training, just prints of an older painter's peasant scenes copied over and over until the figures came right. He kept going back to this same striding sower for years afterwards.

From what I can find, this comes from the same walk near Oslo that later produced The Scream.