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Lot Essay
Angela Thomas Schmid has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Belgian sculptor and painter Georges Vantongerloo trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (1900-1904) and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1906-1909). Conscripted into World War I, he was wounded in a gas attack and discharged from the army in 1914. He soon moved to The Hague as a refugee, together with his brother and fellow artist Frans Vantongerloo. In 1916, Vantongerloo met Theo van Doesburg, and the following year he was a co-signatory of the first manifesto of the De Stijl group. In its asymmetry and red, yellow and blue colours, the present lot is typical of Vantongerloo’s colour studies of this period, as he and his fellow De Stijl members explored pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour, simplifying visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colours.
Belgian sculptor and painter Georges Vantongerloo trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (1900-1904) and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1906-1909). Conscripted into World War I, he was wounded in a gas attack and discharged from the army in 1914. He soon moved to The Hague as a refugee, together with his brother and fellow artist Frans Vantongerloo. In 1916, Vantongerloo met Theo van Doesburg, and the following year he was a co-signatory of the first manifesto of the De Stijl group. In its asymmetry and red, yellow and blue colours, the present lot is typical of Vantongerloo’s colour studies of this period, as he and his fellow De Stijl members explored pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour, simplifying visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colours.