Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965)
Lot 253

Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965)

Etude de couleurs

Closed1 March 2017

Price Realised

GBP 37,500

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Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965)
Etude de couleurs
gouache on tracing paper
image: 3 5/8 x 3 1/2 in. (9 x 8.8 cm.)
sheet: 4 3/8 x 4 1/8 in. (11.2 x 10.5 cm.)
Executed circa 1917-1919

The artist's estate.
Max Bill, Zumikon.
Private collection, Switzerland, by descent from the above.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Specialist note

Angela Thomas Schmid has confirmed the authenticity of this work.

Belgian sculptor and painter Georges Vantongerloo trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (1900-1904) and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1906-1909). Conscripted into World War I, he was wounded in a gas attack and discharged from the army in 1914. He soon moved to The Hague as a refugee, together with his brother and fellow artist Frans Vantongerloo. In 1916, Vantongerloo met Theo van Doesburg, and the following year he was a co-signatory of the first manifesto of the De Stijl group. In its asymmetry and red, yellow and blue colours, the present lot is typical of Vantongerloo’s colour studies of this period, as he and his fellow De Stijl members explored pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour, simplifying visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colours.