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拍品專文
A self-confessed painter of his 'inner life,' Bram van Velde maintained that the artist must 'obliterate the world' with what he makes. In this sense, Van Velde's carefully crafted paintings can be seen as recepticles of the artist's life. Indeed, for Van Velde, who only achieved recognition in the 1960s and who had for the majority of his life suffered varying degrees of poverty, the 'invisible life depicted on the canvas' was for him, 'more real than what people regard as real life' (Bram van Velde as quoted in: C. Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, Leiden, 1995, p. 5).
The untitled composition was painted during the years of torment Van Velde endured in post-war Paris. Having spent the wartime self-consciously isolated and unable to paint, the subsequent years during the late 1940s and 1950s, were his most productive. Experimenting with line and colour in compositions like the present work, he attempted to convey his confusion about himself and his work, trying to express that '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 as quoted in: Exh. cat., Galerie Knoedler, Bram van Velde, New York 1968).
Untitled is an early example 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, since particularly from the late 1940s and early 1950s, his paintings challenged the formal structures of cubism, negated figurative imagery and experimented with line and colour.
Incorporating a wide array of delicate colours, the complex structure of the work betrays an intense struggle on the artist's part in the attempt to balance the picture's disparate elements while maintaining the integral nature of the composition as a whole. A powerful painting that clearly reflects the artist's strength of purpose, Untitled is an eloquent example of the kind of work Van Velde had in mind when he described his art as 'an effort to get at the source, an inquiry into the mystery of life undertaken with one's entire being' (Bram van Velde as quoted in: C. Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, Leiden, 1995, p. 8).
The untitled composition was painted during the years of torment Van Velde endured in post-war Paris. Having spent the wartime self-consciously isolated and unable to paint, the subsequent years during the late 1940s and 1950s, were his most productive. Experimenting with line and colour in compositions like the present work, he attempted to convey his confusion about himself and his work, trying to express that '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 as quoted in: Exh. cat., Galerie Knoedler, Bram van Velde, New York 1968).
Untitled is an early example 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, since particularly from the late 1940s and early 1950s, his paintings challenged the formal structures of cubism, negated figurative imagery and experimented with line and colour.
Incorporating a wide array of delicate colours, the complex structure of the work betrays an intense struggle on the artist's part in the attempt to balance the picture's disparate elements while maintaining the integral nature of the composition as a whole. A powerful painting that clearly reflects the artist's strength of purpose, Untitled is an eloquent example of the kind of work Van Velde had in mind when he described his art as 'an effort to get at the source, an inquiry into the mystery of life undertaken with one's entire being' (Bram van Velde as quoted in: C. Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, Leiden, 1995, p. 8).