Marthe Donas

Marthe Donas , male pseudonyms Tour Donas and Tour d'Onasky (born October 26, 1885 in Antwerp , † January 31, 1967 in Audregnies , Quiévrain ) was a Belgian modern painter.

Life

Marthe Donas and her twin sister Livine grew up in a middle-class, francophone family. In 1902/1903 Donas attended the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten van Antwerpen and from 1912 to 1914 the Hoger Instituut voor Beeldende Kunsten in Antwerp with Frans Van Kuyck and Frans Lauwers other women in art - oppressed. When the First World War broke out and the German invasion of Belgium, the Donas family fled to Goes in the Netherlands . Marthe freed herself from the family pressures, moved to British-ruled Ireland , where she learned from Sarah Purser Glass window painting and copper engraving . After the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 , she moved on to Paris and came into contact with Cubism in André Lhote's studio . She joined the Section d'Or artist group and lived and worked for a time with Alexander Archipenko . In 1917 she made her first attempts at abstract painting . In December 1918, she took over Piet Mondriaan's Paris studio when he wanted to return to the Netherlands. Archipenko drew attention to her in 1919 in Theo van Doesburg's De Stijl magazine under the male pseudonym Tour Donas . The Geneva "Librairie Professional" taught her the end of 1919 under Tour Donas the first solo exhibition of. In March 1920 she was represented together with Archipenko, Survage , Gleizes , Léger and others in the exhibition of the re-established Section d'Or in the Salle Gaveau in Paris. Herwarth Walden showed an exhibition of her works together with those of Nell Walden in the Berlin gallery “Der Sturm” in June 1920 , and he acquired 35 works from her for his art trade. She was in contact with Walden in the following years and her work was discussed in his magazine Der Sturm . Katherine Dreier made her work known on the US market in 1921.

When Archipenko separated from her in 1920, she fell into a personal crisis and lost contact with the Parisian art scene. She married Harry Franke in 1922 and lived alternately in Paris and Ittre . In 1927 she stopped painting, had a daughter in 1931 and now lived in Antwerp, Braine-l'Alleud and Brussels . At the end of the 1940s she tried to revive her artistic activity with religious motifs, family scenes and abstract "intuitions", but received little recognition for this. She was only seen in her pioneering role as the first painter of abstraction in Belgium, for example in the Sturm retrospective in West Berlin in 1961.

Literature / exhibitions

L. De Jong: Donas, Marthe . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 28, Saur, Munich a. a. 2000, ISBN 3-598-22768-X , p. 488.
Kristien Boon: Marthe Donas. Oostkamp: Stichting Kunstboek 2004 ISBN 9789058561268
Rebecca Kruppert: Marthe Donas . In: Antje Birthälmer; Gerhard Finckh (ed.): The storm: Center of the avant-garde . Wuppertal: Von-der-Heydt-Museum, 2012 ISBN 978-3-89202-081-3 p. 333f
Peter JH Pauwels: The Belgian artist Marthe Donas and Der Sturm . In: Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and Gerhard Finckh (eds.): The storm: essays . Wuppertal: Von-der-Heydt-Museum, 2012 ISBN 978-3-89202-082-0 pp. 359–376
Peter JH Pauwels: Marthe "Tour Donas" , in: Ingrid Pfeiffer, Max Hollein (ed.): Sturm-Frauen: Artists of the Avant-garde in Berlin 1910-1932 . Cologne: Wienand, 2015, ISBN 978-3-86832-277-4 , pp. 74–93

Ingrid Pfeiffer, Max Hollein (eds.): Sturm-Frauen: Artists of the Avant-Garde in Berlin 1910-1932 . Wienand, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-86832-277-4 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt , October 30, 2015 to February 7, 2016).

Web links

Marthe Dona's website

personal data
SURNAME	Donas, Marthe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Tour Donas (pseudonym); Tour d'Onasky (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Belgian painter
DATE OF BIRTH	October 26, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH	Antwerp
DATE OF DEATH	January 31, 1967
Place of death	Audregnies , Quiévrain municipality