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Still Life

Marthe Donas

My first painting in the Cubist style, is how Marthe Donas described this still life in a notebook. She takes forms from reality, takes them apart, and puts them back together again. Here jugs, bottles and other drinking utensils, a tablecloth with a pattern. Typically Cubist are the multiple perspectives, overlapping volumes. Donas creates a balanced whole through her use of colour by alternating cool tones with warm autumn colours. It gives the composition depth and a certain dynamism. Marthe Donas had previously honed her sensitivity to surface constructions and colours in Dublin, where she trained to make stained-glass windows.

About this work

Object details

  • TitleStill Life
  • Date1917
  • Mediumoil on canvas
  • Measurements34,5 × 53 cm
  • Inventory number2948
  • Inscriptionslower right: DONAS 1917

More about this work

Marthe Donas recorded in a notebook that this was her first painting in a Cubist style. It was an exercise in the ‘visual rhyming’ of forms and lines, a hobbyhorse of her first important teacher, André Lhotse, in which all the individual pictorial elements are given a plastic echo. The typical multiple perspectives and overlapping volumes and forms were expanded by Cubists after Picasso and Braque with fresh colours and attention to the universal laws of equilibrium, of which symmetry is one. Even before taking painting lessons in Paris Donas had sharpened her sensitivity to planar constructions and bright colours in Dublin, where she trained to make stained-glass windows. Donas’s still lifes are often characterised by curvatures, which give the composition both elegance and force. They display the sculptural influences of her two most important teachers, Lhotse and later Alexander Archipenko, her ‘friend, it seems’, as Mondrian said to Theo van Doesburg in 1919 after a visit to her studio. It was through her friendship with these leading figures of De Stijl that Donas began to refine her compositions in the early 1920s into geometrical structures and colour planes, without definitively breaking the link with reality. It was in that context that she asked Van Doesburg: ‘What shall we do after that?’ That is why for a long time she preferred the title ‘still life’ for several of her more abstract canvases. As a member of the renowned Cubist artists’ circle La Section d’Or under the leadership of Archipenko, Marthe Donas was able to exhibit in the most prestigious capitals of the international avant-garde between 1919 and 1922: London, Geneva, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Berlin and Rome. In Brussels, too, she participated in the Section d’Or exhibition at the Selection gallery. Yet almost no one knew who she was in her native country, let alone that she was a woman. Her work was exhibited and published under the pseudonyms Tour Donas or Tour D’Onasky, because according to colleagues she said that she was ‘too much of an artist to keep a woman’s name’. Michel Seuphor, the publisher and writer of the Antwerp avant-garde journal Het Overzicht, assumed that this was yet another ‘of Van Doesburg’s invented names, like I.K. Bonset and Aldo Camini’, which Van Doesburg used as pseudonyms. Paul Van Ostaijen was furious at the fact that Herwarth Walden of the German Der Sturm gallery had mentioned ‘Antwerp’ in connection with ‘d’Onaski = Polen!’ In 1922 there was a representative show of her work in Antwerp at the Second Congress for Modern Art organised by Jozef Peeters. That was when Marthe Donas first used the title Abstract composition for some of her paintings.

References

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