Portrait of a Girl

This is one of the last recognizable human faces Theo van Doesburg painted before he gave up the figure altogether. Around 1915 he was still capable of a straightforward likeness, a girl looked at directly, modelled in soft light. Within a year or two the human body would leave his work for good, replaced first by stylized, semi-abstract figures and then by nothing but rectangles and primary colour. Nothing here announces that turn. It is a quiet, close portrait by a painter who, at 32, was reading and arguing his way toward a very different kind of picture. Faces like this one simply stop appearing after it.