About this
work
Object details
- Title:
- Rhythm of Light Waves: Street + Sun + Crowd
- Date:
- c. 1915-1917
- Dimensions:
- 98 × 127 cm
- Inventory number:
- 2100
- Inscriptions:
- lower left: JSCHMALZIGAUG
More about this work
Jules Schmalzigaug painted this seething street scene in The Hague, which was a place of exile for Belgian families and artists during the First World War. In the years leading up to the war Schmalzigaug had closely followed the innovations made in painting by the international avant-garde in Paris, Venice and Rome. This canvas synthesises his pictorial skills as an Impressionist, Futurist and colourist. It was exhibited at the Tentoonstelling van Belgische Kunst/Exhibition of Belgian art in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (16 December 1916-16 January 1917), a few months before his early death by suicide.
In Venice Schmalzigaug had learned to combine the atmospheric force and optical vibrations of light with the powerful colouristic dynamics of Futurism. This scene is bathed in the light of the sun, which sets up a rotating movement at top right, a Futurist technique that he employed in several compositions. The light cuts through the forms and creates a rhythm of ‘improbable colouristic chords’. It is a kaleidoscopic experience. The characteristic features are the sharp, triangular blocks of colour inspired by the style of the Futurist Gino Severini, and the free, Pointillist brushwork.
For Schmalzigaug, an energetic palette and the effect of light were the most important ingredients of ‘a new movement’ in painting. In the Belgium of his day he regarded only Ensor’s work as exemplary. Like Ensor, he made short shrift of a nuanced use of colour, the ‘delicate tint’. He mixed colour pigments as little as possible, and placed dabs and strokes of paint beside each other so as to achieve a powerful optical action of colour patterning.
In Rome in 1914 Schmalzigaug worked for some time in the studio of his most important teacher, Giacomo Balla. Together they explored the sensorial impact of colours on suggestions of motion, and thematised the experiences of light through colour that appears purely pictorial. These abstract tendencies ran in parallel with ideas about colours that were associated with musical sounds, ‘the dominion of the great optical polyphony’. Such artistic ambitions flowed from theosophical ideas that can also be found in the multidisciplinary work of the Futurist Luigi Russolo.
In The Hague Schmalzigaug tried to distil his study of the use of colour in a manifesto titled La Panchromie. By which he meant: colour all over. He studied Modern chromatics. Student’s textbook of colour of 1879 by the American physicist Ogden Rood, who drew parallels between optical and acoustic perception, and drew attention to the distinction between coloured light and coloured material. The bright use of coloured rays of light supposedly had a different visual effect from the earlier impure mixing of colour pigments. Schmalzigaug tried to retain the value of coloured light on canvas as far as possible by playing with the distinction between so-called light and felt colours. Those two kinds of colour on canvas set up an interpaly of absorption and reflection of light. Placing them beside each other stimulates optical rhythms of action and reaction. Rhythm of light waves. Street + sun + crowd is an illustrative example in which light colours like orange-red and yellow are set against felt colours like olive green, purple-blue and brown.
La Panchromie was left unfinished when the painter died, so no one picked up on the ideas it contained. The relationship between sounds and colours was explored further during the war years by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who developed a keyboard for his version of Prometheus in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1915. It could send out a different colour of light for every note played. A year previously Schmalzigaug had sketched an ideal image in a letter to the Italian Futurist
Boccioni of a ‘calculated system of coloured vibrations (comparable to musical notation) that will make it possible to "play" the suggestion of light on a keyboard’.
In Venice Schmalzigaug had learned to combine the atmospheric force and optical vibrations of light with the powerful colouristic dynamics of Futurism. This scene is bathed in the light of the sun, which sets up a rotating movement at top right, a Futurist technique that he employed in several compositions. The light cuts through the forms and creates a rhythm of ‘improbable colouristic chords’. It is a kaleidoscopic experience. The characteristic features are the sharp, triangular blocks of colour inspired by the style of the Futurist Gino Severini, and the free, Pointillist brushwork.
For Schmalzigaug, an energetic palette and the effect of light were the most important ingredients of ‘a new movement’ in painting. In the Belgium of his day he regarded only Ensor’s work as exemplary. Like Ensor, he made short shrift of a nuanced use of colour, the ‘delicate tint’. He mixed colour pigments as little as possible, and placed dabs and strokes of paint beside each other so as to achieve a powerful optical action of colour patterning.
In Rome in 1914 Schmalzigaug worked for some time in the studio of his most important teacher, Giacomo Balla. Together they explored the sensorial impact of colours on suggestions of motion, and thematised the experiences of light through colour that appears purely pictorial. These abstract tendencies ran in parallel with ideas about colours that were associated with musical sounds, ‘the dominion of the great optical polyphony’. Such artistic ambitions flowed from theosophical ideas that can also be found in the multidisciplinary work of the Futurist Luigi Russolo.
In The Hague Schmalzigaug tried to distil his study of the use of colour in a manifesto titled La Panchromie. By which he meant: colour all over. He studied Modern chromatics. Student’s textbook of colour of 1879 by the American physicist Ogden Rood, who drew parallels between optical and acoustic perception, and drew attention to the distinction between coloured light and coloured material. The bright use of coloured rays of light supposedly had a different visual effect from the earlier impure mixing of colour pigments. Schmalzigaug tried to retain the value of coloured light on canvas as far as possible by playing with the distinction between so-called light and felt colours. Those two kinds of colour on canvas set up an interpaly of absorption and reflection of light. Placing them beside each other stimulates optical rhythms of action and reaction. Rhythm of light waves. Street + sun + crowd is an illustrative example in which light colours like orange-red and yellow are set against felt colours like olive green, purple-blue and brown.
La Panchromie was left unfinished when the painter died, so no one picked up on the ideas it contained. The relationship between sounds and colours was explored further during the war years by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who developed a keyboard for his version of Prometheus in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1915. It could send out a different colour of light for every note played. A year previously Schmalzigaug had sketched an ideal image in a letter to the Italian Futurist
Boccioni of a ‘calculated system of coloured vibrations (comparable to musical notation) that will make it possible to "play" the suggestion of light on a keyboard’.
Acquisition history
Restoration sponsored by Reynaers Aluminium, 2021
donation from: Walter Malgaud, 1928
Copyright and legal
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