Night landscape with the Gas Plant Schlieren 1951

Max Gubler painted this night landscape, with the Gas Plant Schlieren, with oil paints, though we don’t know when. It’s easy to get lost in the layers of blues and greens, how he lets them mix and mingle, like colors underwater. The paint isn’t trying to hide anything; you can see the texture, the way the brush must have dragged across the canvas. There’s this wonderful tension between the heavy, dark silhouette of the factory and the luminous sky above. Notice the red sun – or is it the moon? – hanging there like a question mark. The contrast is so sharp; it makes you wonder what he was feeling, seeing this industrial scene with such vibrant, almost childlike colors. This piece reminds me of some early Kandinsky paintings, that same raw energy and emotion, before things got too geometric. Art’s like a conversation across time, different voices chiming in, agreeing, disagreeing, always pushing the boundaries of what we think we know.