Bart van der Leck (1876-1958)

H.P. Bremmer, The Hague
Estate of H.P. Bremmer (1956-60)
Dolf Bremmer (from 1960)
H. Schone- van der Leck, Blaricum
Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne, 1979

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Overzicht van het levenswerk van Bart van der Leck, 1949, no. 91
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Verzameling H.P. Bremmer, 1950, no. 66
Amsterdam, Kunsthandel Huinck & Scherjon, Tentoonstelling van schilderijen, aquarellen, tekeningen en beeldhouwwerken uit de verzameling van Kunsthandel Huinck & Scherjon, 1953, no. 15

Van der Leck began his career as a painter of realism, but soon realized it was not the visual and perceptible glory of the world he wanted to recreate, but the spiritual background op things. The artist freed himself from drawing from life, and began to express himself in a simple series of planes with angular contours against a white background. Van der Leck felt that the optical illusion in perspective space was a strange and unreal element in art and therefore the effect of space and visual light values were eliminated.
Van der Leck, along with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, was one of the founders of ‘De Stijl’ in 1917. At that time, the artist had an enormous influence on Mondriaan and van Doesburg. His impassionate plea for the fruitful alliance of painting and architecture was his main contribution to the journal and the artists associated with ‘De Stijl’.

However, van der Leck left the movement at an early stage, in 1918, presumably as a result of his artistic differences of opinion about the application of overlaps (with Huszár), oblique lines (with van Doesburg) and separate forms (with Mondriaan). Although van der Leck painted completely abstract, non objective compositions for a period(1916-1921), the artist equally decisively embraced the use of easily legible subject –matters. The importance he placed on the (albeit abstracted) depiction of reality was not shared by the other members of ‘De Stijl’ group. Van der Leck refused to sign the groups manifesto in 1918, and decided to go his own way.

Houthakkers (1927) dates from a period in which van der Leck has found his final painting idiom. Two woodcutters on either side of a tree are recognizable despite the considerable degree of abstraction. The artist has transformed his large planes of colour into smaller, refined accents of colour that, together with black or grey lines, gave form to his motif.

The study for this painting, which is part of the Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, illustrates van der Leck's working method. The artist began with a recognizable outline rendering of two woodcutters and then over-painted the subject with white until the image was reduced to scattered accents on a white surface with just enough left to construct the original subject of woodcutters felling a tree. This technical process and the interesting tension between abstraction and depiction-so typical for the artist's work, is concealed in van der Leck’ s Houthakkers.