甲冑

By 1926 Ragnhild Keyser had been living in Paris for six years, working her way through the studios of André Lhote and Fernand Léger, the painters then teaching much of Europe to see the world as flat planes and hard edges. She was one of a small circle of Scandinavian women who carried that lesson home, into a Norwegian art world still mostly loyal to landscape and mood. This picture comes from her most radical stretch, the years around 1925 to 1927 later given the name Scandinavian Cubism. A figure holds a pale shield marked with a single red dot, close to a target. Soon after work like this she showed in an exhibition of Nordic cubism that caused enough of a stir that she gradually softened her style back toward the recognisable.