GEORGES VANTONGERLOO (1886-1965)
GEORGES VANTONGERLOO (1886-1965)
GEORGES VANTONGERLOO (1886-1965)
GEORGES VANTONGERLOO (1886-1965)
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Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN COLLECTION
GEORGES VANTONGERLOO (1886-1965)

Courbes

Details
GEORGES VANTONGERLOO (1886-1965)
Courbes
signed, dated and inscribed 'Courbes Paris 1939 G. Vantongerloo' (on the reverse)
oil on masonite
24 1⁄4 x 13 7⁄8 in. (61.5 x 35.4 cm.)
Painted in Paris in 1939
Provenance
Galerie Hans Meyer, Dusseldorf.
Acquired from the above by the present owner on 8 December 1988.
Literature
J.D. Fullaondo, "Georges Vantongerloo desde El Stijl a la Aurora Boreal," in Nueva Forma, no. 75, Stijl, Georges Vantongerloo, April 1972, no. 4, p. 23 (illustrated).
Exhibited
Freiburg, Kunstverein, Max Bill, Julius Bissier, Georges Vantongerloo, September 1951, no. 65.
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Georges Vantongerloo, November 1962, no. 147, p. 24 (illustrated).
Zurich, Galerie Lopes, Georges Vantongerloo, May - July 1977, no. 147, p. 33.
Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Georges Vantongerloo, April - June 1980, no. 147, p. 119 (illlustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Dallas, Museum of Fine Arts, July - September 1980 and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October - December 1980.
Brussels, Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Georges Vantongerloo, January - March 1981, no. 147, p. 119 (incorrect orientation of the work illustrated).
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Georges Vantongerloo, April - May 1981, no. 147, p. 103 (incorrect orientation of the work illustrated).
Zurich, Haus für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Von Albers bis Paik, konstruktive Werke aus der Sammlung Daimler Chrysler, May - July 2000, no. 2, p. 96 (illustrated p. 14).
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. This lot has been imported from outside of the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

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Lot Essay

‘I have no scientific knowledge. Only my wonder stimulates my curiosity’ – Georges Vantongerloo

Painted in 1939, Georges Vantongerloo’s Courbes is a lyrical example of the artist’s distinctive expansion of the ideas of the De Stijl movement. Elegant, tapering brushstrokes materialise slender curves of green and red before a clean white ground. Shifting away from the strict primary colours of his peer Piet Mondrian, Vantongerloo’s wider palette allowed him to explore the resonances and tensions between a harmonic range of different colours; during the 1930s, he had also moved beyond the straight-line geometries of his earlier works—many of them constructed according to algebraic formulae—towards a freer, more playful expression reflective of curved space, atomic energy and electromagnetic waves. These works were born of his growing fascination with cosmology and physics, which played a key part in scientific thought during the early twentieth century. Vantongerloo believed that his compositions presented reorganisations of reality, rather than inventions of a new reality: in this composition, he is reconfiguring the forces and particles that make up our visible world.
The artist had arrived in the Netherlands in 1914, a refugee from Belgium who had been injured during the opening months of the First World War. Four years later, he made contact with the artists involved in De Stijl. Approaching Theo van Doesburg with a view to publishing his essay ‘Science and Art’ in the group’s periodical, Vantongerloo quickly became absorbed into this radical group of thinkers, architects, painters and designers, marrying their groundbreaking theories and aesthetic with his personal explorations in abstraction. Particularly formative was the friendship he developed with Mondrian, whose writings on concrete art mirrored his own. While there are clear parallels between their compositions, Vantongerloo soon diverged from the older artist in his use of varied colours and forms, which vibrated through his paintings and sculptures alike. He later joined the Parisian group Cercle et Carré in 1930, and co-founded the collective Abstraction-Création in 1931; associating with contemporaries including László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, he was a true pioneer of abstract art committed to the constant evolution of his field. Vantongerloo’s ideas would come to be especially influential on the development of Neo-Concrete art in Latin America, which shared in the lively, phenomenological approach of his later works. While informed by scientific notions, Courbes sees his departure from a strict objective, rationalism towards a metaphysics of human wonder.

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