Tête de clown

Joseph Kutter was Luxembourg's foremost modern painter, an expressionist who put the human face at the centre of nearly everything he did. He started painting clowns around 1935, after a visiting variety show came through the city. At first they were simply performers. Then, from about 1936, the clowns changed. They grew anxious and sorrowful, and this heavy, close-up head, all thick paint and bruised colour, comes from those years. By then Kutter was gravely ill. The clown had become a way of putting his own fear on the canvas without naming it. He died in 1941, not yet 50 years old.