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Lot Essay
Once De Smet was at ease with his mature style it hardly changed over the next twenty years. In the 1920s his palette began to brighten and De Smet reverted to the subject matter of the villagers, the farm and the fields. The very soil on which he lived and which his neighbours tilled to earn their bread, became the very heart of his paintings and led De Smet to paint in these years some of the greatest masterpieces of Flemish Expressionism. "These heroes are at the same time passionate, quiet and elementary. In the esthetic he invents, the same characteristics are found: robust simplicity, internal vigour, obsessional motionlessness. The alliance between those three qualities give the work its pictural magic, its enchanting powers, its plastic shining (...) his work is a transposition of the popular existence" (see: P. Haesaerts, Laethem-St. Martin, Le village lu de l'art flamand, Brussels 1965, p. 283).
By so doing he was able to create his own world full of the expressive quality of the hard-working Flemish farmer and his family. Extreme simplification gave his work an evocative power and force of expression of rare intensity. The present lot is probably a preliminary work for the painting The Ballroom, now in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (see: P. Boyens, cat.no. 570, p. 364). In composition the works are very similar. In comparison the colours of the gouache are much brighter. Influenced by Fernand Léger he organised a group of figures in a complicated and extremely daring composition. The blue column in the middle splits the image in two and it seems, there are four different scenes in one painting. During his life, De Smet made several works with a full packed crowd, such as De Herberg, Blues and Het Grote Bal (see: P. Boyens, cat.no. 662, 706 and 891). The voluminous and monumental size of the figures might, as Boyens stated, have been inspired by the Neo-Classical style that was en-vogue in the 1920's by artists such as Picasso. The present lot was his first major challenge towards a new and mature style.
By so doing he was able to create his own world full of the expressive quality of the hard-working Flemish farmer and his family. Extreme simplification gave his work an evocative power and force of expression of rare intensity. The present lot is probably a preliminary work for the painting The Ballroom, now in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (see: P. Boyens, cat.no. 570, p. 364). In composition the works are very similar. In comparison the colours of the gouache are much brighter. Influenced by Fernand Léger he organised a group of figures in a complicated and extremely daring composition. The blue column in the middle splits the image in two and it seems, there are four different scenes in one painting. During his life, De Smet made several works with a full packed crowd, such as De Herberg, Blues and Het Grote Bal (see: P. Boyens, cat.no. 662, 706 and 891). The voluminous and monumental size of the figures might, as Boyens stated, have been inspired by the Neo-Classical style that was en-vogue in the 1920's by artists such as Picasso. The present lot was his first major challenge towards a new and mature style.