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Lot Essay
"I don't make a painting. I try to make visible the phenomena of our epoch." (Bram van Velde, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1989, p. 35). Bram van Velde, a self-confessed painter of his inner life, which was dramatically affected by his experiences, created in Sans Titre, Mont Rouge, ('Sans titre, MontRouge') one of the most powerful expressions of the torment he suffered in post-war Paris.
Having spent a deprived and unsettled life enduring numerous financial and artistic upheavals forcing him to move from place to place, van Velde remained in Paris throughout the war. During these years he was self-consciously isolated and unable to paint, his creativity numbed by despair, his life reduced to bare necessities.
Sans titre, MontRouge, is one of the first examples from the period in which he reached a more mature abstract style. The Liberation of Paris accelerated artistic development from van Velde and others, following years of isolation from the more structured academic artistic movements and established museums and galleries of Paris. This work illustrates how, particularly from the 1950s, his paintings challenged the formal structures of cubism, negated figurative imagery and experimented with line and colour.
Throughout his life van Velde remained sceptical about his position in the world and about the significance of his own work, and it was out of this insecurity that such powerful works as this were born. "The world is a mystery that my paintings help me to penetrate. What I feel is too strange, too violent for me to capture in a word or thought. It demands to appear and I paint." ( Bram van Velde, quoted in Exh. cat., New York 1968). A fundamental link can be drawn between the existentialism that became the 'lifestyle philosophy' of Post-War Paris and the work of van Velde. Van Velde's intimate friend and supporter, the playright, Samuel Beckett recognised the insufficiency of words for understanding and elucidating the visual arts, and spoke of the 'curious effect' that van Velde's work had in inducing silence upon its spectators. Beckett wrote of a sense of the incomplete in his works, not distinctly of an unfinished quality but of an unfinishable situation.
Van Velde's own personal confusion is communicated in this simultaneously expressive yet restrained application of paint to canvas. Abrupt, harshly applied brushstrokes of thick paint fuse with seemingly incompatible lightly applied fluid strokes of colour into a harmonious, if enigmatic composition. This work combines polar opposites; simple at first yet complex in detail, precise yet spontaneous, delicate yet violent. Sans titre, MontRouge is a striking example whose inconsistencies and awkwardness offer a sense of being suspended and lost. A product of the artist's immediate experience, it is forcefully in tune with the dislocations and instabilities of Bram van Velde's epoch.
Having spent a deprived and unsettled life enduring numerous financial and artistic upheavals forcing him to move from place to place, van Velde remained in Paris throughout the war. During these years he was self-consciously isolated and unable to paint, his creativity numbed by despair, his life reduced to bare necessities.
Sans titre, MontRouge, is one of the first examples from the period in which he reached a more mature abstract style. The Liberation of Paris accelerated artistic development from van Velde and others, following years of isolation from the more structured academic artistic movements and established museums and galleries of Paris. This work illustrates how, particularly from the 1950s, his paintings challenged the formal structures of cubism, negated figurative imagery and experimented with line and colour.
Throughout his life van Velde remained sceptical about his position in the world and about the significance of his own work, and it was out of this insecurity that such powerful works as this were born. "The world is a mystery that my paintings help me to penetrate. What I feel is too strange, too violent for me to capture in a word or thought. It demands to appear and I paint." ( Bram van Velde, quoted in Exh. cat., New York 1968). A fundamental link can be drawn between the existentialism that became the 'lifestyle philosophy' of Post-War Paris and the work of van Velde. Van Velde's intimate friend and supporter, the playright, Samuel Beckett recognised the insufficiency of words for understanding and elucidating the visual arts, and spoke of the 'curious effect' that van Velde's work had in inducing silence upon its spectators. Beckett wrote of a sense of the incomplete in his works, not distinctly of an unfinished quality but of an unfinishable situation.
Van Velde's own personal confusion is communicated in this simultaneously expressive yet restrained application of paint to canvas. Abrupt, harshly applied brushstrokes of thick paint fuse with seemingly incompatible lightly applied fluid strokes of colour into a harmonious, if enigmatic composition. This work combines polar opposites; simple at first yet complex in detail, precise yet spontaneous, delicate yet violent. Sans titre, MontRouge is a striking example whose inconsistencies and awkwardness offer a sense of being suspended and lost. A product of the artist's immediate experience, it is forcefully in tune with the dislocations and instabilities of Bram van Velde's epoch.