Bart van der Leck
Architectural Painter and Fine Artist
It must have been particularly difficult for Bart van der Leck to make it clear that he saw his painting not as a separate discipline, but rather as an element alongside architecture. For him the painter and the architect complemented each other. The architect provided the space and the painter provided colour to define that space. Van der Leck did not succeed in winning much support for this point of view, to which he held uncompromisingly throughout his life. The public knows him as the artist who painted a few well-known works such as The Cat (1914) and Horseman (1918) in which abstraction was made to seem natural. The architects with whom he worked often gave him only a subordinate role.
In 1919, after a period of working with De Stijl which was cut short because of his uncompromising attitude, Bart van der Leck withdrew to a house which he built himself and where he could follow his own principles as a painter. His subjects, which until then had been mainly aimed at society, now took on a more homely character, with still lifes, portraits and even nature motifs. He went more in search of reality, while remaining true to his principle of monumentalism. He was never exclusively a painter of pictures. He created murals and also gave colour and shape to space with floor coverings and ceramics, as a glass painter and interior decorator.
This was in fact the way Bart van der Leck had begun his career. After attending junior school he became an apprentice at a glass workshop in Utrecht, where he had been born, the fourth of a family of eight children, in 1876. He worked for eight years in various studios, using bright colours in precise shapes, isolated within the black contours of the lead against the background. Afterwards he attended an industrial art school and the Amsterdam National Academy of Fine Art.
As an artist, Van der Leck restricted himself after 1904 to flat surfaces and almost entirely to primary colours. Like several of his contemporaries, he was excited about Egyptian art and also about the poor social conditions of workers in his own society.
He translated this interest into figure studies, in which the individual increasingly gave way to common features in groups of people, such as workers leaving the factory or four soldiers in a row. He placed these against a realistic background, which after 1912 was replaced by a monochrome surface. In this way Van der Leck took the first steps towards a new style of painting which could be used in architecture. His experiments with casein paint on asbestos cement were also part of this process. The paintings increasingly developed into murals. Form and colour were gradually reduced to pure elementary proportions and primary colours: red, yellow and blue as well as black.
During the course of this development, Van der Leck was given his first monumental commissions for posters, mosaics, typographical designs and particularly colour construction designs, for the company Müller and Co and Mrs Kröller-Müller. While living at
Bart van der Leck, Horseman. 1918. Canvas, 94 × 40 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.
his new home he also met Piet Mondrian, who had a different background as a landscape painter but was also moving along the same path towards abstraction. From this time on, Van der Leck called his work ‘composition’ and began to break open the shapes into fragments of geometric elements. Through the ‘destruction of the plastic natural’, as he himself called it, reality was transformed into separate areas of primary colour against a white background. Van der Leck did not follow Mondrian in limiting himself to a horizontal and vertical division of the surface; diagonal and sloping lines continued to suggest some movement. Mondrian took over the white background from Van der Leck, but did not completely abandon spatial suggestion. Mondrian remained too much a painter to do this, and mixed the background in various shades. Van der Leck preferred to use the surface and positive colour as he strove to compensate for architecture and its definiteness with open, spatial areas of colour. The two articles which Van der Leck published in
De Stijl were entirely devoted to a plea for fine art and architecture to come together. However for Bart van der Leck this did not mean that he wanted completely to abandon reality as a starting point.
Van der Leck's eccentric attitude quickly distanced him from De Stijl again. In his own home in Blaricum