Marthe Donas

Marthe Gabrielle Donas was born on 26 October 1885 in Antwerp, Belgium, into a French-speaking bourgeois family; her grandfather was a realist painter. Around age seventeen, in 1902, she enrolled against her father's wishes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, but he withdrew her within months. She returned to art study in 1912, this time at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp, a course for young women taught by Frans Van Kuyck.

During the First World War, Donas went to Dublin, where she trained in stained glass and copper engraving in the cooperative studio An Tur Gloine, run by Sarah Purser, and received commissions for church windows. At the end of 1916 she moved to Paris, taking a studio in Montparnasse at 9 Rue Campagne Premiere and continuing her studies at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Ranson. It was in Andre Lhote's studio that she encountered Cubism directly.

From around 1918 she began signing her work "Tour Donas," "Tour d'Onasky," or simply "M. Donas," names that obscured her gender in a male-dominated milieu. She became associated with Alexander Archipenko, who recommended her to Herwarth Walden as his best pupil, and through the Section d'Or circle she exhibited in London, Geneva, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Berlin, and Rome between about 1919 and 1922, including the landmark Section d'Or show at Galerie La Boetie in Paris on 5 March 1920. Theo van Doesburg wrote about her work for the journal De Stijl and placed one of her abstract drawings on its cover, an unusual mark of recognition for a woman artist in that circle.

Donas largely stopped painting after about 1923, though she resumed later in life and, according to the foundation that manages her legacy, continued working until roughly a year before her death. She was included in mid-century tribute exhibitions, among them a 1959 Antwerp survey of Belgium's first abstract artists, a two-room overview of her own work at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1960, and a 1961 Nationalgalerie Berlin exhibition on Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm. She died on 31 January 1967 in Audregnies, in the municipality of Quievrain, Hainaut, Belgium, at the age of 81.

Within her own lifetime, Donas's standing rested on endorsement from the Cubist avant-garde rather than commercial success: Archipenko recommended her to Herwarth Walden as a modern painter of great talent, and Van Doesburg's De Stijl gave her abstract work cover placement and repeated coverage. French-language art history has since described her as one of the major figures of European modernism, a status reflected in her inclusion in the 1959, 1960, and 1961 tribute and survey exhibitions organized in Antwerp, Brussels, and Berlin. Recent English-language press, including coverage tied to the 2025 KMSKA retrospective, has framed her explicitly as an overlooked woman modernist whose Cubist and abstract work deserves reassessment alongside better-known male peers of the Section d'Or and Der Sturm circles.

Donas's market is small and not well documented in public auction records. The highest price identified in available sources is EUR 135,375 for the painting La musique, cited by the French valuation reference Mr Expert as her record sale; the auction house, city, and exact date of that sale are not stated in that source and could not be confirmed elsewhere, so this figure should be treated as provisional. Her work appears periodically at European auction houses, including Sotheby's, Christie's, and Belgian regional houses such as Antenor, De Vuyst, and Kunstveiling, sometimes catalogued under variant names including Marthe Donas, Marthe Tour-Donas, and Tour-Donas. A 2019 Sotheby's Paris lot, Abstraction d'une statuette, carried a pre-sale estimate of EUR 20,000 to 30,000, giving a rough sense of typical mid-market pricing for smaller works. The 2025 to 2026 KMSKA Antwerp retrospective and the declaration of her 1917 painting Still Life as an official Flemish masterpiece are the clearest recent signals of rising institutional attention, though neither has yet translated into a large public sales record.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Marthe Donas; the Marthe Donas Foundation, formed in 2003, is preparing one, and attribution questions should be directed to the Foundation or the Musee Marthe Donas (MiMDo) in Ittre rather than resolved from auction listings alone. Works can appear under several names, including Marthe Donas, Marthe Tour-Donas, and Tour-Donas, so provenance research should account for all of them. No gallery holds documented exclusive representation of the artist or her estate, though Group 2 Gallery in Brussels regularly exhibits and deals in her work, and the public auction record is thin enough, with only a small number of documented sales, that any single price point should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable market indicator.