Bomen en besneeuwde daken 1918

Curator: "Bomen en besneeuwde daken," or "Trees and Snowy Roofs," a 1918 woodcut by Gustave De Smet, confronts us with its stark simplicity. It has a chillingly beautiful and subdued visual quality to it. What's your first impression? Editor: The heavy blacks against the white are really striking, there's an almost unsettling quality to the high contrast of shapes. The geometry flattens the landscape in an expressionistic style—quite unsettling and beautiful in equal measure. Curator: De Smet, as part of the Flemish Expressionist movement, was deeply affected by the social and political upheavals of World War I, so the graphic directness, the simplified forms, might reflect the instability and anxieties of the time, as a stark comment on the period in Belgium. Editor: Interesting. From a purely formal perspective, though, consider how the negative space created by the snow is just as impactful as the shapes of the trees. The varying widths and the carving itself give dynamism to the composition. Notice, for example, how the stars scattered on the top offer this almost childlike wonder amidst the ominous, inky trees below? Curator: Yes, and his exile in the Netherlands likely influenced this portrayal of domesticity. This artwork evokes ideas about safety in the midst of great difficulty. The high horizon line and compressed space almost creates the idea of impending pressure that was experienced by the artists in the early twentieth century in the build-up to conflict. Editor: Absolutely. And the geometry he uses allows you to really see and almost 'feel' the heaviness and silence of a winter landscape, right? Curator: Indeed. This is just more than a winter scene—De Smet highlights a world irrevocably scarred. There is this strange hope found within a society's darkness that transcends time. Editor: I’ll have to agree—De Smet really plays with perception here. This piece, reduced as it is, evokes such emotion through form.