Snowy Landscape
Artist / maker
Jean Brusselmans (painter)Date
1938Period
20th centuryCollection
Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
Brusselmans painted ‘genres’ in which time appears to stand still. In Snowy landscape he depicted the absolute essence of a winter view near where he lived. He depicted it countless times, in all the seasons of the year, structured like latticework, with tilted perspectives and interfaces, or shapes in bold, clearly outlined colours. Starting in the 1920s, his oeuvre is…
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Brusselmans painted ‘genres’ in which time appears to stand still. In Snowy landscape he depicted the absolute essence of a winter view near where he lived. He depicted it countless times, in all the seasons of the year, structured like latticework, with tilted perspectives and interfaces, or shapes in bold, clearly outlined colours. Starting in the 1920s, his oeuvre is typified above all by constant repetition of those blocked motifs, formal adaptations, and a ‘blunt’ manner of painting and outlining. What is particularly striking in Snowy landscape is the way Brusselmans reduces the sky, the snowy landscape, houses and trees to their figurative essence through the use of broad, blunt, clearly visible brushstrokes.
This constant ‘assembly’ of the same or very similar visual motifs enabled Brusselmans to construct a very recognisable and personal figurative vocabulary. As a result, his oeuvre has no reference point within European modernism, and it is difficult to designate, categorise or retrieve it. Even today, the oeuvre still appears to be maturing. As a painter of country life he was nevertheless quite quickly categorised as an Expressionist related to the Flemish Expressionism of artists in and around Latem. It is a stylistic label that the artist himself resisted. Throughout his career, for instance, he had more systematic ideas about composition and colour. For him, it was invariably the composition ‘that orders, that shows each figure or object to its place, that apportions straight, horizontal or oblique lines’.
Robert Hoozee classified Brusselmans more confusingly as a ‘constructivist Expressionist’ artist with post-Cubist influences. Perhaps Brusselmans’s art can be seen above all as an attempt to reposition the rules of figurative art in a constructive way. That is why his work corresponds amazingly well – as an atypical modernist – with the famous aphorism of Maurice Denis, one of the patriarchs of modernism: ‘a picture [...] is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’.
‘I am the painter of the Cold Hearth’ (Koudenaerd), wrote Brusselmans in 1947 in a play on words in reference to his stay-at-home nature. His choice of the landscape of Koudenaerd (in Dilbeek, Brabant) as a conceptual pars pro toto was not just a necessity – he did not have enough money to travel much – it was also a deliberate artistic choice.
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