Geer van Velde

Geer van Velde , actually Gerardus van Velde (born April 5, 1898 in Lisse , Holland , † March 5, 1977 in Cachan , France ), was a Dutch painter .

Geer van Velde was an autodidact as an artist . He is considered one of the most important representatives of abstract painting after the Second World War, which became known outside the Netherlands. He is the younger brother of the artist Bram van Velde (1895 to 1981). The brothers experienced a childhood and youth full of hardship and poverty.

Bram and Geer van Velde went to Paris in 1925 . Geer worked as a freelance painter and created expressionist landscape painting , pictures of figures and still lifes .

In 1938 a radical change in his painting took place. During a stay in southern France , in Cagnes-sur-Mer , he developed his own abstract-geometric style, which he retained from then on. He was influenced by the abstract artists of the École de Paris . His friend Samuel Beckett gave him the possibility of a first solo exhibition in 1938 in the gallery of Peggy Guggenheim in Cork Street of London .

With some important exhibitions, on the recommendation of Pierre Bonnard , in the renowned Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1946, 1948 and 1952, his reputation as a painter was consolidated . It received international attention. In 1951 he was awarded first prize at the Menton Biennale . In 1959 he was a participant in documenta 2 in Kassel . The Amsterdam art dealer ML de Boer discovered him in 1971 and organized his first solo exhibition for him in his native Holland.

In 1978 his art was exhibited in Amsterdam along with the works of his friend Roger Bissière and Serge Poliakoff .

Web links

• Examples of his work (1)
• Examples of his work (2)
• Materials by and about Geer van Velde in the documenta archive