Guillaume VOGELS (1836-1896)

GUILLAUME VOGELS

6. Le Coup de vent, Machelen, 1884 — towards abstraction

Le Coup de vent, the most radical of these six works and a milestone in Belgian painting in its anticipation of abstraction, was painted at Machelen in 1884, precisely when the countryside around the village was attracting the young generation associated with Les XX. Yet Vogels is strikingly uninterested in describing the place literally. Buildings collapse into broad horizontal masses; land and hedges become bands of colour; the sky is built from colliding strokes. At the centre, a tree is reduced still further: trunk, crown and branches are attacked with the palette knife until they verge on abstraction, and yet this accumulation of scraped and loaded paint seems physically to bend and shudder beneath the gust of wind. That paradox provides the key to the picture. Wind itself has no visible form; it can only be represented through the disturbance it produces. By sacrificing description, Vogels makes movement more convincing: the less literally the tree is rendered, the more palpably it seems to move. Le Coup de ventconsequently reads almost as a lesson in painting bequeathed to the younger artists around him—Van Strydonck, Toorop, Ensor and Finch—who were themselves exploring how far landscape could be liberated from description. Across the six works presented here, Vogels has moved from depicting landscape under particular conditions to making the condition itself the subject. In Le Coup de vent, nature survives at the threshold of abstraction as movement, colour and facture.