Still Life with statue, vase and jar 1920

Theo van Doesburg made this small still life with, it seems, oil on paper, and it’s all about the push and pull of the brushstrokes. He’s not trying to trick you into thinking this is real, it’s about the feel of paint, the weight of color. Check out how he’s built up the vase on the left; it’s not just blue, it's this whole layered thing, like the memory of blue. The statue in the center is all ghostly whites and greys, looking like it’s about to disappear into the background. You can almost feel the texture of the paper coming through. It’s like he’s wrestling with these objects, trying to capture their essence, not just their appearance. Van Doesburg was part of De Stijl, with Mondrian, who was all about radical abstraction, but you can see that even in this early work, he’s playing with simplification, flattening things out. It’s a conversation, an argument, about what painting can be. It reminds me a bit of Morandi, but with a Dutch twist.