THE SPARKLING OF THE LIGHT - Reflection on the Light in Artist Colonies

Lecture by Francisca van Vloten, in the series of lectures related to the exhibition Masterpieces from European Artist Colonies 1830-1930 (Febr. 6 until May 22, 2005), Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Atlanta GA, April 19, 2005

Reflections on the Light in Artist Colonies

"It is so beautiful outside of color, color, color and sun … One gets intoxicated. The quiet is beyond words here. Your inner beauty keeps you so occupied, and outside the sun is contending with all the autumn colors …"

These words, ladies and gentlemen, were written by the Dutch artist Jan Toorop (1858-1928) in the autumn of 1908. They were meant for his friend and colleague Kees Spoor in Amsterdam and referred to the small seaside resort of Domburg on the former island of Walcheren, in the Dutch province of Zealand.

Dutch light - though as an art-historical concept it only acquired its name later – goes back to the 17 th century, the time of Spinoza (1632-1677) and Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), of the great discoveries in the field of light and perception, and of the painters who started to work with it.

The light in Zealand – Zeeuws licht - formed part of the Dutch light. Objectifying the landscape and the human exp erience in it, there was often a historicist or mythological staffage of the landscape in the relevant paintings, the light being used in a metaphorical way to bring about a mystical or sacred atmosphere.

It was not until the artists went outside to paint, that things in this respect changed.

The Zealand light came into being then. It had its cradle in impressionism – and as a concept in art-historical sense it got its meaning at the beginning of the 20 th century.

The painters began to concentrate on nature in a personal way, first the use of light became more earthly, focused on the endless variation of hues and colors that plein air observation offered, next they looked for an interpretation of what they observed.

In words of the famous German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), who wrote about many things, among them music and art: ‘The artist cannot copy nature, he must translate it.' ( ‘ Optisches über Malerei', in: Vorträge und Reden, Braunschweig 1903 [1871], 96.)

Like Monet did in his painting Impression, soleil levant (1872), which gave the impressionist movement its name, thanks to a rather sarcastic critic (Louis Leroy, at the first exhibition of the impressionists in Paris, in 1874).

Among others, the artists of Barbizon, painting en plein air, had paved the way for the impressionists. Paris was the hometown of this new direction in art, which in the continually changing world of the 1870s and following years, wanted to record the fleeting moment, indeed, to render an impression.

In spontaneous strokes and juxtaposed touches, these artists tried to depict the atmosphere and the working of the light. Their method was based on the effect that small smears of paint, seen from a distance, to the eye do mix together.

The neo-impressionists (ca. 1886) have carried this technique further and approached it scholarly – in particular as a reaction to the dissolving of the form that went with it.

It was not the fleeting moment they wished to catch, but an impression of standing and durability. They began to break down their motifs in separate patches of pure unmixed colors and to put these as dots, very orderly and systematically, on the canvas. From such teeming with light and delicate dots of color the forms to the eye came into being with great brightness and concision. Such a color dissection proved itself to be very appropriate for rendering glittering, vibrating light and an all-embracing harmony.

First the neo-impressionists used it in a strict pointillist [little dots], then a more forceful divisionist style [long strokes]. This French-based current was also called luminism, after the Latin word lumen for light.

But luminism got its own interpretation elsewhere, for instance in the Netherlands, where as a matter of fact it also was used in relation to the 17th century, to characterize the work of Rembrandt and his contemporaries.

Tonight I'd like to tell you something about the influence of modern luminism upon some European artists and the reflection of it in their work. First I'll focus on the birthplace of Dutch luminism as a new movement within art, the sea-side resort and artist colony Domburg, and then I'll compare it to the Nordic coastal colonies of Skagen in Denmark and Ahrenshoop in Germany.

Jan Toorop (1858-1928) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who belonged to the artist colony of Domburg and were the leading representatives of modern Dutch luminism, will get extra attention.

In the Dutch Modernism of the first decades of the 20th century, there are two main streams: the Amsterdam School, which was defined by cubism, German expressionism and futurism; and a Parisian-Domburg School, which is characterized by luminism and an onset to cubism. Dutch luminism, which had its peak between 1908 and 1911, was inspired by French impressionism, pointillism, divisionism, fauvism and by Vincent van Gogh.

Fauvism as a movement existed from about 1905 to 1907. Its followers used color in a completely arbitrary way – emotionally and decoratively. They expressed themselves powerfully, simplified forms, neglected details and left out the working of light and shade. ‘Fauves' – wild animals – became a name of honor.

The charismatic and internationally renowned artist Jan Toorop stood around 1900 at the peak of his fame. His very exceptional symbolist works of those days were on show in the whole of Western Europe.

After following the Art Academies in Amsterdam and Brussels, the Indonesia born Toorop moved in Belgian and French art circles until 1890, when he settled in the Dutch coastal village of Katwijk.

It was he, who introduced Seurat and Signac to the Netherlands and who stressed the importance of Van Gogh.

Susceptible to (eastern) fatalism, he turned symbolist and then moved from the Belgian and French art circles to German and Austrian ones.

At his first exhibition in Munich, in 1893, there was a lot of laughter over his symbolist work, but at the end of the decade the critics and art dealers realized the importance of it. He had left the domain of representation far behind him and had almost unwittingly reached the field of ornamental experience and rendition. The ornamental way of filling in the drawing, indicated a relation to Eastern art – Japanese and Chinese, and for Toorop Egyptian influences also played a role, as well as – and in this he differed from his art brothers and sisters – memories from his Indonesian childhood, which brought him to the use of Wajang-motifs, with an enormous emphasis on the line and the innate life of it. So much so, that the line turned fragrance and sound – for instance in The Three Brides the lines in the middle of the drawing, which rise from the roses, and the ones at the top which flow from the bells.

In a letter to a friend Toorop explained, that he wanted to bring together the sentiments and ideas of ‘All-nature' in one grand form. The Brides are stylized expressions of the different mysteries in the shape of a human being. In this drawing Toorop, not for the first time, took up the old theme of Good versus Evil, in the form of asceticism versus lust, both in the figure of a woman. The young and naïve Bride, flanked by - in Toorop's words – “the suffering of the soul which leads to the highest-purest, the mystical love” on the one hand – you can see this also in the bells at the topsides of the drawing, being held by the hands of Christ – and on the other side “the unquenchable thirst for deeply sensual and material longings”, symbolized by the Bride who holds a cup which catches the blood that comes from a large urn. The urn is carried by the hands of women whose heads and bodies are being repressed by the Bride's other hand. They represent, in Toorop's meaning, “the weak to eternal matter doomed world.”

It is notable, that the different aspects of this drawing loose their sharpness, in so far as the styling of the symbols contributes to the high aesthetical level of the total.

From impressionist, Toorop had turned pointillist. His symbolist period was followed by an also spectacular divisionist one.

After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1905, he was from about 1910 onward to paint mainly portraits and religious scenes for the rest of his life – but before that, the Dutch art critics hailed him as “the luminist pre-eminently”.

Between 1903 and 1922 he spent longer or shorter periods in Domburg almost every year, often working with the woman artist Mies Elout-Drabbe (1875-1956), who lived in Domburg.

In 1908 Toorop exhibited several of his luminist Domburg works in Amsterdam. They had an enormous impact. In them, he not only rendered the working of the light but at the same time, in bold strokes and intensified colors, his sensations.

Jan Toorop, Kanaal Middelburg-Vlissingen / Canal Middelburg-Vlissingen, 1907, oil on cardboard, 31 x 41 cm, Haags Gemeentemuseum.	Jan Toorop, Zee en duinen bij Domburg / Sea and Dunes at Domburg, 1908, oil on canvas, 26,5 x 31,5 cm, Haags Gemeentemuseum.

Mondrian, who had seen Toorop's works in Amsterdam, came to Domburg for the first time in September 1908. Educated in the tradition of the Hague School, he gradually had begun to paint more freely, flowingly and schematically, and also, because of his interest in theosophy, symbolist. His forms became more and more simple, and color contrasts became sharper.

Fauvism had its influence on him, but in particular luminism inspired him. The theosophical antithesis male/female and mind/matter, which in the evolution of awareness of man had thus to be placed in a mutual coherency that equilibrium was the result, led Mondrian to accentuate and, in the end, to radicalize the antithesis vertical/horizontal.

In 1909 he spent the summer and a big part of the winter in Domburg. His early neo-impressionistic dunes and seascapes were basically exercises in form and color. Stunned by the beauty of his surroundings, which was enhanced by the reflection of the light, Mondrian started to study the working of that special light and the right way to express the monumentality of what he saw and felt. The latter he achieved for instance by using a broad pointille and avoiding depth in the picture.

It was already a process of abstraction, a tread on the long road from The Hague School to Neo-Plasticism. Indeed step by step the character of his work spiritualized, starting with a quest for the “pure” instead of the natural color and next the pure instead of the natural form. Ultimately every aspect of a composition – including working method and material – would be put at the service of beauty: the perfect harmony of opposites, [which are] reduced to the greatest simplicity (“the universal”).

Between 1908 and 1916 Mondrian spent admittedly almost yearly some time in Domburg. Mies Elout, whom he liked visiting, followed his evolution at close quarters.

In 1912 Mondrian moved to Paris; shortly after arriving there, he sent Mies Elout a letter which – and that is rare - gives an insight in his ideas about his own evolution at that stage. And - in this letter the difference is already apparent between the male and female awareness, as Mondrian felt it and later would express in his writings.

The letter has a double meaning for me, first of all it gives a lot of special and new information about Mondrian, but also I happened to be the one who discovered it in a shoebox in the Royal Library at The Hague. I was doing some research then, around 1990. The shoebox was filled with torn up pieces of letters to Mies Elout. Someone had written in pencil upon the letter: ‘sent by a certain Piet'. Seeing the handwriting and reading the contents, I was immediately convinced that this letter had been written by Mondrian. I went to the librarian and, feeling quite excited, told him: ‘Sir, I rather believe this letter was written by Piet Mondrian'. I explained to him why I thought so, and, well, the rest is history.

I'm afraid my translation of the letter is slightly off-hand, but I'll read part of it to you all the same: “ … I do agree on the whole with everything you wrote, but yet I, for myself, don't fear that the beauty one sees in someone, by things of the ordinary human being will get less, or seem less. – But that's what you are a woman for, and I can well imagine it. First of all, I am never scared – not even of the devil – (pedantic, isn't it?) and secondly, to me all the ordinary things of the ordinary human being are also so beautiful. I think that to you they are such as well, only something or other seems to be placed in a strong light, when we write about it. Like you wrote it, it is very idealistic, so to speak.” …

And he continues:
“[..] I think life, as it is being lived, is always beautiful, when it is done honestly and strongly. The degree of beauty depends on the degree of evolution of the human being. As soon as a human being does live above his evolution-stage, it isn't really beautiful anymore. It only gets beautiful (then) by willing the good and seen as a means to get more beautiful. So the difficulty is, I think, on the one hand not to want to be too much and to be what one is and at the same time to have a will to grow, and trouble oneself about it. It is a two-in-one that cannot be changed.” And Mondrian concludes: “I am not yet far enough to meditate, I try to get there – A lot of it is in me, but I am not yet far enough. [...]"

The temptations of Paris were manifold. The avant-garde galleries, the artist parties, the wine-bars, the cabarets and the nightclubs. But for Mondrian his art, his work always and often exclusively came first. The summers he spent in Domburg again.

During the First World War, when he could not return to Paris from another visit to the Netherlands, Mies Elout in Domburg witnessed part of that exceptional development that made him one of the greatest innovators of 20th century art.

Not until 1919 Mondrian returned to Paris. The Second World War brought him from Paris to London (1938) and ultimately to New York (1940). In the last phase of his work Neo-Plasticism asked for dynamics, for the Jazz-lover Mondrian it needed more “Boogie-Woogie”.

In the USA the artist Mondrian for the first time was widely respected.

Jan Toorop and Mies Elout, supported by some of their colleagues, organized the Domburg Exhibitions which took place between 1911 and 1921. At first only artists who worked on Walcheren were allowed to join, but later artists from elsewhere also were invited.

Starting as a stronghold of Dutch luminism, through the years a great variety in style was presented, from naturalism to impressionism and neo-impressionism. As the light was caught in luminist works, cubism came over with Parisian friends and expressionism was tasted through German, Dutch and Flemish contacts – all styles had free play. The linking factor was not quality, but mutual friendship, love for the land of Walcheren and the shared pleasure of painting.

For example the following paintings in a nutshell can be characterized as follows:

Jan Toorop's Portrait of the Writer Arthur van Schendel has a tendency to cubism, Lodewijk Schelfhout's Trees also tends to cubism …

… Henri le Fauconnier's Zealand Farmer's Wives inclines to a subdued expressionism, Paul Schultze's Woman and Dog is a mixture of Jugendstil and symbolism …

… and, finally, Mies Elout's Frozen Sea tends to abstraction, including a trace of theosophical principles.

Not only painters, but also writers, poets, representatives of the music and theatre world, art lovers, patrons and critics for years spent their summers in Domburg.

During the First World War, artists from Belgium – among them the Hungarian painter Maurice Góth (1873-1944) and his family - added to the number.

Maurice Góth, like his wife Ada Löwith, had studied at the famous School of Simon Hollósy in Munich and at the Academy in Vienna. He spent many working summers in the artist colonies of Nagybànya and Szolnok, both in Hungary. In 1906 he went with his family to Paris and Brittany. There his colorful and heavy form of impressionism changed to the clear and more airy approach of French impressionism, the colors adapting to the light of the coastal areas. From that moment on, he was torn between his homeland and Western Europe.

In 1914, the Góths were in Belgium. At the outbreak of the First World War they fled to the neutral Netherlands and ended up in Domburg.

Maurice, his wife Ada, and later also their daughter Sárika, participated in the Domburg Exhibitions.

Maurice's Beach Scene was on show in the exhibition of 1915. Its coloring and unusual composition – the high horizon and the chair placed against the sand which was overflowing into the hazy sea - added a new aspect to the variety of exhibited works. Ada is the woman in the chair.

By nature melancholic and prone to depressions, Góth was yet to paint many beach and dune scenes radiating a languid mood, happiness and warm sunlight. Whether he included his wife, daughter or some friends as subjects, these paintings never had the degree of enjoyment, complacency and abandonment - the impression of feeling completely at one with the surroundings - which he achieved in such a seemingly easy way in the 1915 Beach Scene.

French influences were paramount in the colony Domburg itself, but there was also a link to German expressionism through the painter Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876-1923) and her friend and patron, the art collector Marie Tak van Poortvliet (1871-1936), who owned a summerhouse in Domburg. Both women from theosophist turned anthroposophist.

In Domburg Jacoba van Heemskerck first came under the spell of luminism, but she gave up the possibilities of color dissection and, in her case, the onset to cubism for the possibilities of line and color by themselves.

In 1913 she came into contact with the Berlin group Der Sturm.

Among these German expressionists she found her own style; simplicity and austerity of form, but a layered approach to color. In later years she studied the emotional working of colors, which brought an inner light to her paintings that was far removed from the dazzling, directly reflected light of luminism.

To what extent do the Dutch luminist paintings in neo-impressionistic style differ from, let us say, the French ones?

Well, that's simple: apart from the variation in scenery, it is in the reflection of the light by the use of the colors, that there is a difference.

Is it to be understood that this light, which nowadays in Holland is often described as “Zeeuws licht”, is specific to Zealand, to Walcheren?

Zealand belongs to the northern regions of Europe; following the coast, artist villages are to be found in among others Katwijk, Bergen (NL), on the Dutch and German Frisian Islands, along the Danish coast for example in Skagen and along the Baltic coast in Ahrenshoop.

I leave out those coastal places which have a large hinterland and focus on the “island”-places, taking Domburg, Skagen and Ahrenshoop as an example.

All sorts of factors affect the working of the light. The salinity of the sea, the pureness of the coastal area, the height of the dunes, the expanse of the hinterland, however small, the cultivation, the climate, the warmth of the water and the air, the salinity of the air, the position of the moon, the position of the sun, the motion of the water, and - these days - the pollution.

What Domburg, Skagen and Ahrenshoop first of all have in common is the seawater nearly surrounding them, which plays an important role in the reflection of the sunlight, as a relatively high salinity of the air can make the light almost transparent - the sparkling thereof on flat, open land is dizzying. The abovementioned factors mingle in certain proportions and affect the artist, who lets loose his own reflection on the perceived reflection.

Take for instance Summer Evening on the Southern Beach of Skagen, painted in 1893 by P.S. Krøyer (1851-1909), the undated Evening Mood on the West Beach by Paul Müller-Kaempf (1861-1941) and Mondrian's Seaview from 1909.

In these oils there is a similarity in color and light, in the special blue and yellow and in the tenuity of the atmosphere, for that is what the artists in their regional and geographical circumstances had in common. The technique varies.

In the second half of the 19th century many Danish artists travelled to France, as before they went to Germany. Initially they were more interested in realism than in impressionism, but in the end these isms mingled. As an artist colony Skagen had its heyday in the 1880s; artists from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany and England formed part of it. They focused on figures mostly, in sea- and landscapes or in portraits.

Paul Müller-Kaempff – the Toorop of Ahrenshoop – discovered this village at the end of the 1880s as a possible artist colony. In 1892 he established a professional art school there, concentrating primarily on landscapes and figures, but also on marines and still lifes.

Mondrian, in 1909, went much further. His Seaview renders the essence, but the sensation defines the image. Figures only in some periods of his life played a role in his work, in varying degrees of importance.

In Skagen and Domburg it was the French influence which led to innovation. Around 1915 Anna Ancher, who belonged as an artist to the colony in Skagen, painted Street in Østerby . Striking is the almost nacreous and also pastel-like application of the colors, and the magnificent incidence of light. The work reminds one a bit of Mondrian's Church in Domburg, even though the colors thereof are partially based on theosophical principles.

Ahrenshoop had close connections to Berlin and thereby to German expressionism and sometimes French fauvism; in a few cases with a revolutionary tendency, as in Domburg.

The work of Dora Koch-Stetter (1881-1968) counts as an example of that trend. She got her schooling in Berlin with the German artist Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) and later with the Romanian-German artist Arthur Segal (1875-1949). At Corinth's she acquired an impressionistic touch. The influence of Segal, who in those days was developing into a post-impressionist, is clearly perceptible in her expressive oil The Red House in Althagen. Here again a hardening of the colors to render the sensation; not with the nacreous or pastel-like effect which one often saw in Domburg or Skagen, but in this case with a warm and direct, almost vehement use of color. In a way historically defined, so to speak.

Ahrenshoop has more in common with Domburg. As an artist colony they both existed until about 1921 and in both representatives of a variety of disciplines gathered. In addition either village was known as a health plus a holiday resort and the tourists regularly included wealthy art lovers.

Examples of the same working of the light can be found in several other “island”-places along the Nordic coast, but what concerns me, is the consequence that the special light in Zealand – allowing for small differences in nuance – is shared with a number of other northern places. The light in Zealand turned “Zeeuws”, because in its reflection the effect irrevocably counts.

It is the artist, who lends it the final – his or her - touch.

Thank you.