IMAGE DETAILS

Galerie de la Présidence

Geer van Velde (The Netherlands, Lisse 1898-1977 Cachan, France)
Composition - atelier, circa 1951
Oil on canvas
134 x 148 cm
Signed lower right with initials
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Geer van Velde - Painted Work, currently in preparation by Pierre François Moget, son of Piet Moget
Provenance: Galerie Hautefeuille, Paris; private collection, Brussels

In 1945, after two decades without a proper studio or decent housing, Geer van Velde and his wife Elizabeth settled in Cachan, in the former Paris studio of the Dutch painter Tjerk Bottema. It was in this essential 'tool' of the artist that, beginning in 1947 and continuing for about ten years, the period known as the 'ateliers' began. For this series, Geer favored large, almost square canvases (134 x 146 cm) to create its most significant works.
This Atelier, painted in 1951, at the heart of this fertile period, belongs to that format. The figurative elements that were still vaguely present in the 'ateliers' of the 1940s (a vase, fruit, a model, an easel…) gradually gave way to the chromatic tones and rhythmic structures of his workspace. The light and space of the Cachan studio became the only 'realities' to be translated onto canvas. In 'Composition', only a few vertical lines remain, along with the colors of the floor and walls, the blue of a Parisian sky seen through the glass roof, and the green of a garden glimpsed through a window - offering to viewers an indescribable sensation of light and space. The artist’s studio now becomes, for Geer, the almost exclusive focus of his visual repertoire and the central theme of his path toward abstraction.
Calmly, and without concern for the postwar artistic trends around him, Geer van Velde forged his own path toward a unique form of abstraction: neither expressionist, nor lyrical, nor even geometric, but one that is optimistic and profoundly human.