Jeanne Rij-Rousseau
1870-1956Working in France in the early 20th century, Jeanne Rij-Rousseau influenced the development of avant-garde art. She was at the center of the Parisian artistic community of Montmartre, and it was there that she and other artists began exploring new scientific theories on color, light, vision, and the psychology of perception. She composed her paintings as expressions of the idea that colors are perceived in waves, similar to those produced by sound. Rij-Rousseau’s interest in perception informed the nascent Cubist style, and she influenced more well-known Cubist artists, such as Juan Gris and Georges Braque, whom she had befriended between 1908 and 1910.
In Abstraction: Windows, the intensity of the artist’s experiments with style and perception seem to burst from the canvas. Painted sometime between 1910 and 1915, the planar facets of color that make up the composition orbit around the fulcrum created by the central swath of flat black paint. The painting both acknowledges the flatness of the canvas and also seems to expand beyond it, as the colors’ subtle variations create an illusion of three-dimensionality. The artist exhibited her work throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, and she encouraged other women artists through her foundation of an association of female painters, called the Femmes Peintres, in 1925.