Jules Schmalzigaug, Composition with Colour Wheel, c. 1914

by Atelier Liesjes

In the centre of a white sheet of paper lies a large circle – a mathematical shape – divided into three broad segments: a cool blue-grey in the top left, a warm ochre yellow in the top right, and a soft sage green at the bottom. The circle fills the page almost entirely, with a narrow white border around it. Inside that ring, a smaller circle has been drawn, itself divided into three parts: yellow, blue and green. The segments are separated by thin pencil lines, and the paint has been allowed to bleed into one another with a wet brush, so that the edges are soft and grainy and the paper remains visible through the colour in some places.
It is a mathematical colour study, a systematic investigation into the relationship between shades, warm and cool, light and dark. Schmalzigaug used watercolour on paper and allowed the white of the sheet to function as a fourth colour; the rings are reminiscent of the colour wheels from the painting theory of those years. The style is abstract and geometric, but the execution retains a hand-drawn quality: no compass, no hard edges, but rather a thought experiment made visible. The three sections of the ring correspond to the mixed colours arising from the same primary colours, and the small circle repeats this principle on a smaller scale, as a summary. The colours have been applied with plenty of water, causing them to lighten at the edges and giving the whole a slightly translucent quality. In the bottom right-hand corner is the signature in pencil, small and slanted.
Jules Schmalzigaug (Antwerp 1882 – The Hague 1917) was the first Belgian painter to embrace the Futurist ideas of colour and movement, following years spent in Venice and his contacts with the Milanese avant-garde. His small, experimental body of work is cherished in Belgian museums, and this sheet is one of the few colour studies of his that have survived. A restrained, refined sheet that unites abstraction and colour theory, and which hangs on a modern wall like a silent colour chart.