Bart van der Leck
I hope you survived the holidays (we hardly did because of the launch of DailyArt in new languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. Don't forget to update your app)! We present today's piece thanks to Kröller-Müller Museum :)
Bart van der Leck is known mainly as the cofounder of the magazine De Stijl. In 1916, like Piet Mondriaan, he opted for radical abstraction in his work and to use the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. That choice was preceded by a quest for a new visual idiom. The Cat is a good example of that.
During a visit to Paris, he was impressed by the classical Egyptian art in the Louvre. Inspired by this, he developed a style with highly simplified forms and sober colors. Consequently, in The Cat, Van der Leck depicted the animal both from the side and in profile, and used only black, white, red, and orange.
Helene Kröller-Müller was fascinated by The Cat, as she wrote to Van der Leck: “I always call her “my conscience,” because her piercing eyes follow you everywhere and sometimes we have had to put her away, to be without her relentless company for a while.”
At the Kröller-Müller Museum you can play the museum dice game, check it here.