The Geometry of a Broken World
Charles Filiger was the kind of strange that made Paul Gauguin stop and stare. In 1893 Paris was still arguing about how light hit a haystack. Filiger was in a room by himself turning the world into a stained-glass window.
La montagne noire de Thann is a small thing, barely bigger than a piece of notebook paper. But it feels massive because it doesn’t care about your eyes, it cares about your soul. Filiger took the landscape and broke it down into pieces. He reduced the earth to geometric zones and heavy black lines that look like lead pipes holding back a flood of color. It was 1893. Picasso was still a kid and Mondrian was painting trees that actually looked like trees.
He debuted this at the Salon de la Rose + Croix, a magnet for the mystics and the rejects. Filiger fit right in. He hated the soft fuzzy light of the Impressionists. He wanted something harder and more ancient. Gauguin saw it and knew exactly what was happening. He called Filiger a rare mystic who understood the power of the flat plane.
It is gouache and charcoal on paper but it feels like it belongs in a cathedral from a thousand years ago. There is no air here. There is only geometry and a crushing sense of the divine. Filiger died broke and forgotten in 1928 but this little scrap of paper shows he was already living in the future.
References
Filiger, Charles. La montagne noire de Thann. 1893. Gouache and charcoal on paper. Salon de la Rose + Croix, Paris.
Pincus-Witten, Robert. Occult Symbolism in France. New York, Garland Publishing, 1976.
Jaworska, Wladyslawa. Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School. London, Thames and Hudson, 1972.