The forgotten avant-gardist: Marthe Donas on view in Ghent
Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts offers a look at the work of Marthe Donas, the only Belgian woman to make it big in the international avant-garde movement
The rise and fall of ‘Tour Donas’
How she won her reputation as an artist, and then lost it, are explored in the new exhibition Donas: The Belgian Avant-Gardist at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent.
Donas was born into a wealthy Antwerp family in 1885. She was allowed to indulge her artistic leanings up to a point, but her strict father forbade her from enrolling at the city’s art academy. A spectacular accident in 1912 – she fell through a glass roof while watching King Albert’s entry into Antwerp – made her reassess her situation. She broke off a marriage engagement, went to the academy and began studying art in earnest.
The German bombardment of Antwerp in 1914 drove the family to the Netherlands, with Donas and one of her sisters later going on to Dublin. There she continued to study, eventually joining the workshop of stained-glass artist Sarah Purser, an important figure in the artistic life of the city.
Hidden identity
The Easter Rising in 1916 prompted another move, to live with a Flemish family in Eastbourne on the south coast of England. This isolation would not last long. Despite the war, boats were still running to Dieppe, and Donas was able to slip away to Paris, where she resumed her work.
There she encountered paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, but it was the lesser-known André Lhote who made the greatest impression. His work combined the novelty of Cubism with the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. “It stays very figurative, very easy, but full of colour,” observes Peter Pauwels, curator of the Ghent exhibition.
She looks, she reads, she thinks and then she puts something of her own into each painting
Donas studied with Lhote for two months in 1917 and started to produce Cubist work of her own. Then that summer in Nice, she met the Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko, at the time considered an important innovator in Cubist sculpture. They became lovers and shared a studio.
Archipenko’s interest in conjuring movement out of abstract shapes is mirrored in Donas’ paintings from 1917 and 1918, while the materials he used inspired her to create remarkable metallic effects with her paint. But Lhote’s Renaissance themes and vibrant colours also persist, giving Donas a powerful individual style.
The couple returned to Paris in 1918, and the following year Archipenko began energetically promoting his partner’s work. Told by friends that she was too much of an artist to keep a woman’s name, she was now signing her paintings Tour Donas. The cryptic first name was inspired by Purser’s workshop in Dublin, An Tur Gloine, or the Tower of Glass.
Increasingly abstract
This subterfuge is ironic given how feminine Donas’ work can be. She worked with fabrics and had a subtlety of line that many of her male contemporaries lacked. This is most apparent in a striking series of Cubist pencil drawings that put the emphasis on women’s faces and clothes rather than on their anatomy. “I think she is at her most original in these drawings,” says Pauwels.
By 1920, Donas and Archipenko were growing apart, and another set of influences took hold, this time the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg (currently the subject of a retrospective at Bozar in Brussels). Following their lead, her images became flatter and increasingly abstract, but the themes and the colours of her Cubist period persisted.
International recognition did not mean commercial success, and by 1921 Donas had run out of money
By this time, Donas was receiving a good deal of attention, appearing in group and solo exhibitions across Europe. But this recognition did not mean commercial success, and by 1921 she had run out of money. Gravely ill, she had little choice but to return to her family in Antwerp.
This was the beginning of a run of bad luck, and bad choices, that put an end to her international career. In 1922 she married Henri Franke, who was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and seemed to offer a way back to Paris. It worked for a while, but she continued to be unwell, and he failed, or lost interest, in his academic career.
Overlooked
In 1923 the couple retreated from Paris to Ittre, a village in Walloon Brabant. “They lived with Henri’s mother and two aunts, who were into art but not that kind of art,” Pauwels explains. This is borne out in the stylised sketches Donas made of the Walloon landscape, which would evolve into more conventional paintings for the sitting room wall.
Cut off from both the Parisian and Belgian avant-gardists, Donas set aside her research in abstraction and took inspiration from nature. As the years passed, she tentatively made connections with the Brussels art world, eventually moving to the city. In 1928, as part of the Assaut group, she once more exhibited in Paris.
This return was to be short-lived. In 1930, at the age of 45, she became pregnant, which, on top of the family’s continuing financial difficulties, put an end to her career as an artist. When she picked up her brushes again in 1947, it was to paint in a different style. “There are some good things, but also some very bad things,” says Pauwels, who has limited the exhibition to the first, international phase of her career.
When interest in the Paris avant-garde revived in the 1960s, Donas was overlooked. Her short career and lack of commercial success meant that few works were in circulation. Some disappeared in Germany during the war, while others vanished closer to home as the artist recycled her canvases.
The other problem with Donas is that her influences are plain to see. “She didn’t invent anything,” Pauwels concedes, “but she never copies. She looks, she reads, she thinks and then she puts something of her own into each painting.”
Until 5 June, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Fernand Scribedreef 1
Photo courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Ghent
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