Belgian Avant-Garde Cubist Collage, follower of Kurt Schwitters.
An early 20th century Cubist Belgian Avant-Garde collage in the style of Kurt Schwitters. This work is also highly reminiscent of the early works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, such as 'Counter with Fruits, Violin and Glass'.
The work is apparently unsigned however it carries an exhibition label to the back for Gallerie L. Manteau.
En 1923, Louis Manteau (1886-1968) opened at number 62, Boulevard de Waterloo in Bruxelles, a gallery where he wanted to expose the works of then lesser known young artists such as Marcel Louis Baugniet, Elie Borgarve and other leading exponents of the Belgian Avant-Garde movement.
The Belgian Avant-Garde movement ran from 1917 till the early 1930's. Some of it's major exponents were:
Marthe Donas ( 1885 – 1967 ) was, with Sonia Delaunay, Gontcharowa, Popova and some other Russian artists, one of the first female abstract painters in art history. Settling in Paris in 1916, she discovered Cubism in the atelier of André Lhote. There she made her first abstract paintings early 1917. Later that year Donas met Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko with whom she lived in Nice. She joined the group of "La Section d’Or", which had a.o. Léger, Braque, Gleizes, Brancusi, Villon, Kupka and Archipenko among its members. Theo Van Doesburg devoted several articles to Donas in the art magazine "De Stijl". In 1920 Herwarth Walden invited Donas to exhibit in his famous Gallery Der
Sturm in Berlin. The American artist-collector Katherine Dreier bought five works at this show. With the help of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Dreier created a unique collection called "Société Anonyme", which she later bequeathed to Yale University. This collection has been shown in several American museums in 2008-2009. In 2015 Donas was well represented in the exhibition "Sturm-Frauen : Women Artists of the Avant-Garde in Berlin 1910-1932" in Frankfurt-am-Main and in 2016 the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent hosted a major retrospective of her work.
Paul Joostens was a very individualistic avant-garde artist, experimenting with oil paintings, drawings, collages, assemblages and poetry. After his training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he experimented with several new pictorial tools. Joostens is a.o. one of the first collage artists in Belgium. In 1919 he discovered the Dada movement, which will influence his work throughout his later career. His assemblages created a sensation in the early 1920’s. He became a member of the group around poet Paul Van Ostaijen, along with sculptor Oscar and painter Floris Jespers. Though considered as one of the pioneers of abstract art in Belgium, Joostens never abandoned the link with figuration and the narrative in his work. After his Cubist and Dadaist period, he distanced himself in 1926 from the avant-garde in order to paint in a ‘Neo-Gothic’ manner, inspired by the Flemish Primitives. In the 1950's he resumed making Dadaist
work, wherby two themes dominated his work : the female and the mystique. Woman, at times depicted as the holy virgin or as a prostitute, played a central role in many compositions, such as in the series of the "Poezeloezen", as he called the prostitutes from the Antwerp red-light district.
Jean-Jacques Gailliard, son of impressionist painter Franz Gailliard, was born in Brussels in 1890. In 1903 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and in 1907 he followed the drawing lessons of symbolist painter Jean Delville, who was fascinated by mysticism, esoterism and occultism. As an adept of swedish theologian and mystic Swedenborg, Gailliard decorated the chapel of the "General Church of New Jerusalem" in Ixelles in 1915. During that period his work was symbolist and he used a pointillist technique. During the interbellum, his works became abstract. From 1920 to 1924 he moved to Paris where he met artists a.o. Isidora Duncan, Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Eric Satie. From 1922 onwards, he took part in the "Salon des Indépendants in Paris". When "7 Arts" was founded in 1922, he participated at several exhibitions of this avant-garde group. In 1923 he was present at the Salon of "La Lanterne Sourde" in the Egmont Palace in Brussels and in 1925 he was a member of "Les peintres constructeurs", with Baugniet, architect Stanislas Jasinski, Servranckx, Flouquet, Xhrouet and Maes. In 1925 he co-founded the modernism group "L'Assaut". In his abstract works of the 1920's a certain humor is present, which distinguished him from his fellow "constructivist" artists. Keeping in mind the interdisciplinary character of different art forms, he illustrated books, published engravings and designed theater decors. With L'Assaut he organized an open-air exhibition in Brussels in 1927. In 1927 he also signed a contract with Gallery "Le Centaure" in Brussels. Gailliard started making at that time figurative paintings which he called "surimpressionist", focusing on the reality behind the visible world. The fantastic element became essential in his oeuvre, at times in combination with words or texts. Throughout his long career he made figurative drawings and paintings of places in Brussels and Ostend and portraits of fellow artists and writers : Maurice Maeterlinck, Fernand Khnopff, James Ensor, Michel de Ghelderode and many others.
Marcel-Louis Baugniet was born in Liège in 1896. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1915 to 1918, where he met a.o. Magritte, Flouquet and Delvaux. His first works were influenced by the symbolists Klimt and Khnopff. In 1921 he studied at the "La Grande Chaumière" Academy in Paris, where he met a.o. Zadkine and the Lurçat brothers and where he discovered the russian constructivists Malevitch and Lissitzky. Baugniet admired most of all
Czech artist Frantisek Kupka. Back in Brusels, he joined in 1923 the "7 Arts" Avant-Garde magazine founded by painters Flouquet and Karel Maes, the Bourgeois brothers (architect and poet) and composer Georges Monnier. Baugniet published many articles and manifests in this magazine, whereas his art gradually moved from cubism to geometric abstraction. In 1923 Baugniet met the ballet dancer Marguerite Acarin, who became his wife and whose name he changed into "Akarova". In 1925 Baugniet participated at the "Decorative arts" exhibition in Paris, where he discovered the russian pavillion with works by Popova, Tatlin, Maïakowski, Lebedev and Stepanova. Much impressed, he decided to study the russian language. In 1927 Baugniet formed with dutch architect Van Tonderen a company called "Modern Interior". Together they signed a manifest in eight parts, a.o. "Le beau c'est l'utile" (The beautiful is the useful), "La fonction crée la forme" (The function creates the form) and "We preach the triumph of the machine".
Victor Servranckx, born in 1897, claims having made his first abstract work, a gouache/collage, in 1915 and in 1917 several of his non-figurative works were exhibited at Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels. Artist Michel Seuphor, author of "Abstract art in Flanders", wrote at the time that this was the very first exhibition of abstract art in Belgium.
Servranckx was in touch with international masters such as Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp and the italian futurist Filippo Marinetti. His "Pure plasticism" works were selected by the New York gallery "Société Anonyme" for the International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1927. As a member of the Avant-Garde movement in Brussels, Servranckx wrote articles for the magazine "7 Arts". In 1922 he published with René Magritte the manifesto "L’art pur. Défense de l’esthétique". Servranckx is best known for his geometric abstract works from the 1920's. Typical for his non-figurative oeuvre is material imitation and the suggestion of mechanical movement by machines in a highly stylized form close to French Purism. Servranckx gave his works neutral titles (Opus, followed by a serial number), which was in the spirit of the idea of ‘collective art’. In 1925, Servranckx momentarily ceased painting and devoted himself to architecture and design in his studio "Cubist Home". With architect Huib Hoste he designed an office space for the "Exposition Internationale des arts décoratifs" in Paris. When he resumed painting a year later, he distanced himself from the constructivist style, using a very diverse mixture of styles in his oeuvre. His work became "abstract surrealist" whereby organic elements are combined with geometrical forms. In visionary paintings with biomorphic figures, Servranckx experimented with new techniques and materials. However, the design element remained part of his visual means of expression. After WWII, he returned to a formal abstraction and actively collaborated with a new generation of abstract artists such as Jo Delahaut and Paul Van Hoeydonck...
Category
Early 20th Century Cubist Mixed Media
MaterialsBoard, Magazine Paper