Maurice van Essche: Congolese women at the river - SOLD
Maurice van Essche (1906 - 1977)
Congolese women at the river
Oil on canvas
62 x 52 cm
Signed bottom right
Sold - 2011
Van Essche studied at the Brussels Academy of Fine Art in 1924, interrupting his studies to earn a living working in a stained-glass design studio, and later designing wallpaper. These experiences in design and simplification of form had a lasting influence on the stylistic development of his paintings. He continued his art studies under Henry Matisse in 1933, and in the years that followed, participated in several solo and group exhibitions in both Belgium and France. In 1939, he travelled to the Belgian Congo on a year-long government sponsored painting trip. With the German occupation of his native land in 1940, Van Essche went into exile, arriving in Cape Town at the age of 34.
Van Essche remarked that his artistic approach was based on the premise that painting is an intimate dialogue between the painter and life , and interpreted African humanity and the sun-drenched landscape from this perspective. He expressed himself in broad abstract terms with an aesthetic sensibility and poetic simplicity, declaring: Having within me a passion for Form and Colour, I can go forward, free from theories and fashions. A new canvas is for me always a new adventure, a new revelation .
The artist’s preoccupation with solitude, with mysterious planes and vertiginous voids, has brought a strange, detached serenity to his paintings. Yet, from beyond their seclusion, they continue to communicate their human message .
‘Karoo sunset’ is a modern pastoral scene which conveys the atmosphere of the desolate Karoo landscape glowing red hot after a long day under the scorching sun, anticipating the cool blessing of the open night sky. Away from the blistering sun a herdsman stands in contemplation, protectively guarding over his family and goat. The whitewashed houses are the only visible shelter and place of rest, their walls tomb like in presence with chimneys pointing at the sun. The white focal points of houses and scarves are highlighted to confirm their importance as protection against the elements in this chokingly hot surround. The skyline, divided into two contrasting planes, reminds us of the Yin and Yang contrasts of day and night.
In ‘Congolese women at the river’, Van Essche captures two women fetching water from the river, a daily chore that usually goes unnoticed, but which is dramatised by the strangely lit and tense composition. The two maidens stand proud, their half exposed bodies turned to confront, rather than receive, the viewers gaze with square shoulders; arrogantly sure. The painting’s success can be attributed to the well constructed composition with its clever use of contrasts; the interplay of light and shadow, and the revealing and concealing of the sculptural figures towering over the landscape.
Carl Büchner sheds further light on Van Esshe’s portrayals of figures in his Congo paintings: Living and working among the people he becomes immersed in his strange new world, while memories reach him of the hieratic figures of Chartres, and of the civilised light of Ancient Greece; he steeps himself in the jungle lights and mists, and captures the brilliant colours, like squares of leaded glass, in lines of black. Composing the panoply of his dark figures in their Gothic simplicity, he transcends reality, and conveys the spirit, the silence and the remoteness of Africa .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carl Büchner, van Essche , Cape Town, 1967, pp 4 and 8