The painting presents us with a woman, extravagantly dressed in a bright red dress and grey fur cape, with a fur muff and a red plumed eye-catcher. She has a hand out to steady herself against a tree as she stretches out one shiny black-shod foot and turns her head. Her bleary gaze meets ours. To the left of the woman is a café, brightly lit by electric light. In the top right-hand corner, the perspective opens into the night: points of light float in the darkness, and we can just make out a figure. The warm light from the café meets the weaker, colder light of the gas street lighting outside the image, resulting in a peculiar play of light and shade on the ground. The mix of warm and cold light also plays on the woman’s made-up face.
The woman appears to have got dressed up for the occasion, but seems uncomfortable in her dramatic outfit. She seems to be swaying drunkenly. Perhaps she has just caught sight of the viewer, another night wanderer in the big city, and is making him an invitation. Her clothing indicates that she is a prostitute.
The painting is seemingly fluid and spontaneous, carried out with quick, bold brushstrokes. Study it more closely and we find evidence of reworking, which suggests that the artist worked on it for a long time, and that the lightness of touch was a style that Zorn had had to perfect. Night Effect was painted at a time when many Swedish artists were preoccupied with the Nordic twilight. Zorn instead sought out the bright city lights that illuminated la vie moderne, with its late-night bars, cafés, and theatres. Zorn had moved into a studio on the boulevard de Clichy, one of the Parisian entertainment districts, and he regularly headed out into the night armed with a sketchbook. There were prostitutes aplenty. The scene in question was set in the Place Pigalle. One or more meetings with such ladies of the night may have provided him with his inspiration. Electric light was a novelty that had only recently begun to be installed in cafés, and it made a strong impression on Zorn.
Unlike many of Zorn’s pictures of women, he has not attempted to give this one an erotic edge. Perhaps instead there is a social pathos to the depiction of a woman forced to sell her body. Night Effect shows the exploitation of women in modern society. Yet it is not a campaigning image of the kind created by Christian Krohg. Zorn was more ambivalent, and described his own interest in the subject only in terms of an interesting »lighting problem«.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
