Portrait of a girl

Floris Jespers abandoned his training in Antwerp to paint landscapes. In order to live, he played the violoncello for some fifteen years in music-halls and theatre orchestras. After World War I, he energetically took part in the modernist movement of the young Antwerp artists. In the 1920s he became a virtuoso of the difficult technique of painting under glass, and then designed tapestry cartoons, shown at the International Exhibitions of Paris (1937) and New York (1939). In 1951-52, he travelled in the Belgian Congo, where he returned in 1954-56 and 1956-57. For Jespers, women resumed all Africa. These he painted in different manners, from a stylised realism to rhythmic angular forms, where intersecting lines formed a coloured mosaic. In 1999, an important exhibition of his work was held at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst (PMMK) in Ostend, Belgium.