小丑的头像

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.