painting
Sibyl
Paul Joostens
About this work
Object details
- TitleSibyl
- Date1920
- Mediumoil on canvas
- Measurements108 × 78,5 cm
- Inventory number3329
- Inscriptionslower right: P. Joostens 1920
More about this work
In 1919-1920 Joostens painted abstract compositions with deconstructed female figures amidst sliding planes. As a result this Sibyl has points of contact with synthetic, sensual and decorative French Cubism, as well as with multi-coloured stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals, which often featured Sibyls. Such eclectic, post-modern couplings of modernity with the mysticism of the Middle Ages became a recurring narrative in Joostens’s art in the decades that followed, as well as evidence of his continuing Dadaist (disruptive, iconoclastic) ideas.
Sibyl is part of a series of female portraits in which the visual idea of a coalescence of cocottes, elegant Muses, courtly ladies, female Mephistos and Sibyls, which were originally ancient Greek virginal prophetesses. The composite female image, often tinged with a mechanical, mildly erotic to highly perverse side, is the principal motif from Joostens’s iconography. At the end of the 1930s this led to his nymphets, in which the idealistic image of slender adolescent girls, Madonnas, film stars and prostitutes fuse into a symbolism that is as mysterious as it is misogynistic, in which the erotically tinged content acquires a purely spiritual connotation.
In 1919 Joostens expanded his knowledge of Cubism during a trip to Paris with Oscar and Floris Jespers: friends from the Bond Zonder Gezegeld Papier that was founded in 1917 under the leadership of Paul van Ostaijen. The poet hammered away at the study of theoretical writings like Cubistes, Futuristes, Passéistes (1914) by Gustave Coquiot, or Du cubisme by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (1912). The palette of Sibyl is not very convincingly linked to Robert Delaunay in some of the earlier publications. The yellowish colours contrast with the cool blue, the pink with the green. The black blocks emphasise a cruciform and static figure, the contours of which stand out through the use of subtle light contrasts that are paler than the more darkly rendered background. The clearly recognisable human forms are limited to the head, the high stiletto shoes and the arm with the raised, clawing hand. Sibyl consequently seems to be more a partial recollection of the elongated portraits of women from the metropolis of the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
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