Circus 1935

Vilmos Aba-Novak painted this circus scene with what looks like oil paint but with the lean, almost translucent texture of watercolour. Look at the way he's built the composition with loose, sketchy marks, like he was drawing with a brush. He gives us the whole shebang, right? The performers, the audience, the big top itself. There's a real sense of immediacy, of capturing a fleeting moment. It feels like a memory. The colours, though muted, have a strange intensity, particularly the yellow of that performer's costume, which really sings against the darker tones. Those vertical strokes depicting the tent poles and lighting fixtures create an unusual sense of depth and almost threaten to break through the picture plane. It reminds me a little bit of Max Beckmann, in its chaotic energy, although Beckmann tended to be a bit more, shall we say, "buttoned up" in his compositions, but both artists embrace a kind of raw, unfiltered expression. Art isn't about perfection, it's about that messy, beautiful, and utterly human process of trying to make sense of the world around us.