The House of Animals 1948

Editor: We're looking at Corneille's "The House of Animals" from 1948. It's an acrylic painting, and it's got this really striking, almost childlike simplicity to it. The colours are bold and the forms are so basic. What do you make of the composition and use of colour here? Curator: It's the flatness that is immediately apparent. Corneille consciously eschews traditional perspective. Notice how the planes of colour collide. The background, rendered in a vibrant rose, pushes forward, creating a spatial ambiguity. What effect do you think this has on the viewer? Editor: It makes the scene feel almost dreamlike, and sort of unreal. It feels like you can't fully ground yourself. Is that his intention, maybe, this destabilization? Curator: Precisely! By disrupting our expectations of spatial relationships, Corneille forces us to engage with the painting on a purely formal level. Consider the use of line – the crude, almost hurried outlines. Do they contribute to the same feeling of unrest you mentioned? Editor: Yes, they do. They feel raw and urgent, nothing is delicate or refined. It all sort of shouts at you at once. Everything feels very considered despite that visual chaos. Curator: And what about that spiral shape in the upper part of the painting? Is it sun, a star, or something else? How does it play within the arrangement? Editor: It's like a sun, I think. The sun has a huge importance here; I think he made it spiral to fit with his other weird geometry of the canvas, as the focal point. Curator: Indeed! Perhaps Corneille is suggesting that the old ways of seeing and representing the world were inadequate, or even obsolete, for the postwar era. We might disagree, however; this offers the perfect kind of ambiguity of meaning! Editor: That is interesting, thank you. I'll be certain to give my eyes over to Formalism a bit more. Curator: A rewarding approach to art, indeed!