Dominique Lang

Biography

Dudelange in his painting of 1917 looks like a village: orchards, hills, not a single factory chimney and not one workers’ barracks. Yet the town was growing around its steelworks, and Lang cannot have failed to see it. He simply chose not to paint it.

He was born on 15 April 1874 in Dudelange, into a family of well-off peasants whose ancestors had worked the local land for centuries. He finished his studies in 1901. His first commissions were for churches: a fresco of the Baptism of Christ in the church at Junglinster, then paintings for the stations of the cross in the new church of his home town. The manner of these works is close to the Pre-Raphaelites. On a state grant he spent four months studying art in Florence and Rome. On his return he met with lack of money and with the disapproval of the Cercle artistique de Luxembourg, the association of Luxembourg artists in which he exhibited. Severe headaches began, followed by depression. He read Ruskin, Schopenhauer and Spengler, and his painting shifted towards a Symbolism close to that of the English Pre-Raphaelites, who answered mechanisation with medieval legends. “La jeune fille et la mort” and “La mort entrant dans la maison” date from this time. He left his parents’ house and set up a studio in a poorer quarter of Dudelange. In 1904 the Cercle awarded him the Grand-Duc Adolphe Prize.

After a few months in Paris in 1905 he entered the Munich Academy in March 1906. From 1907 he studied contemporary art and Impressionism there, and it changed his painting sharply. Back in Dudelange, Lang opened a photographic studio, which at last brought a reasonable income. In 1911 he married Anne-Marie Ney, who later appeared in many of his canvases, and in the same year he began teaching drawing: first at the girls’ lycée in Luxembourg City, then at the industrial and commercial school in Esch-sur-Alzette. He received little recognition in his lifetime, could not live on his pictures, and remained a teacher to the end.

The light in his canvases grew steadily brighter. With short brushstrokes he made generous use of blues and greens, and a young woman in white often appears in the pictures. In 1912–13 he moved to the pure colour followed by Monet, Renoir and Pissarro. About then he began to walk out along the banks of the Alzette and to paint orchards, flower picking and fruit harvesting, and the peasant houses of his district.

His last years were hard again: severe migraines and near-total blindness. To my mind, against that background the brightness of his late landscapes is all the more striking.

Lang died on 22 June 1919 in Schifflange, aged forty-five. He was buried in his native Dudelange. In that same year he received the Grand-Duc Adolphe Prize for the second time.