Dressed in a striking black and white checked dress, the painter’s wife is reading within a homely interior. Brusselmans was often inspired by his immediate surroundings and certain objects appear repeatedly in his work: the conch shell, the bust and a copy of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. He arranges surfaces, lines, shapes, structures, outlines and colours into a balanced whole.
We are looking at a large-scale still life, but a human figure painted in this genre is wholly unexpected. Seated here, reading a book in a domestic interior, is Marie-Léonie Frisch, the wife of the painter Jean Brusselmans. She is wearing a striking black-and-white checked dress.
Jean Brusselmans was often inspired by his immediate surroundings, as is the case here. Many of the objects seen in this painting crop up elsewhere in his work, including the shell horn on the table and the bust, a copy of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. His wife, Marie, is also becoming an object, so to speak.
Composition is vital to the art of still life painting. As demonstrated by this canvas. Everything is carefully arranged so as to create a balanced whole. The work almost looks schematic. Planes, lines, shapes, structures, schemes and colours: this is what interests Brusselmans. Emotions, less so. Yet for many of his contemporaries who were working in the Expressionist style, painting was all about emotion. This is why the idiosyncratic Brusselmans preferred not to be part of the Expressionist movement.
The Brusselmans family often lived in poverty. Jean Brusselmans did not sell many paintings. the Kortrijk industrialist, Tony Herbert, was one of the very few people to collect his work. It is from Herbert’s collection that the museum acquired many of the masterpieces in the galleries dedicated to Flemish Expressionism.
More information about the formation of our 20th-century art collection can be found by pressing the green button. This is the same commentary that was offered earlier.