Pale Face with Red Hair

Jules Schmalzigaug was a Belgian painter of Jewish German descent, born in Antwerp in 1882 with scoliosis that would cause him physical pain his entire life. He lived in Paris, then moved to Venice, where he became the first and only Belgian artist to participate in the Italian Futurist movement. He was close friends with Umberto Boccioni and exhibited alongside the Futurists in Rome in 1914. When the war started, he was declared unfit for military service and moved to The Hague, where he wrote a treatise on color theory called La Panchromie. Boccioni died in 1916. Schmalzigaug's work became increasingly figurative and isolated. He killed himself in 1917 at thirty-four. Pale Face with Red Hair is from the late period — a figure built almost entirely in thick white paint against bare tan board, with auburn hair and faint traces of yellow and blue showing through.