Guillaume VOGELS (1836-1896)

GUILLAUME VOGELS

3. Chemin creux, c.1882 — anecdote swallowed by fougue

At first glance Chemin creux seems almost devoid of incident. A sunken path climbs between banks of vegetation towards an opening of brilliant blue sky, beneath branches twisting violently across the composition. Only after a second or third look does a small figure, wrapped in a red scarf and pushing a wheelbarrow laden with fresh produce, emerge from the paint; other anecdotal details reveal themselves later still. Vogels has not eliminated anecdote so much as reversed its traditional hierarchy: human activity no longer provides the reason for looking at the landscape but has been swallowed by it. What occupies the foreground instead is painting itself. Foliage is scrubbed, dragged and struck into place; branches become almost calligraphic gestures; greens, browns, reds and flashes of blue collide in a fougue that contemporary observers found alternately exhilarating and alarming. Octave Maus speaks of brushstrokes “violents comme des coups de sabre”. Critics repeatedly reached for the language of physical excess—the madman, the virtuoso of the brush, even the house painter wielding his broom—to describe an art in which the painter's hand refused to disappear behind the motif. The comparison was especially pointed for Vogels, who actually came from decorative painting. Here the apparent violence is anything but arbitrary: as anecdote retreats into the distance, the painter's gesture becomes the principal event of the picture.