|
The first work by Bart van der Leck to enter the collection was the 1916 poster Batavier-Lijn: Rotterdam-Londen (Batavier Line: Rotterdam-London). This poster sparked an interest in the Dutch artist, who was a co-founder of the journal De Stijl in 1917; together with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, van der Leck would become a major force in the development of abstraction. The simplified, flattened figures of Batavier-Lijn point backward to the artist’s earlier, frieze-like paintings such as Naar het vliegveld (To the Airport), 1912, and Op de Markt (At the Market), 1913; and forward to his radically reduced De Stijl work, such as the rare poster for his one-man exhibition in Utrecht in 1919. Because Van der Leck was an artist who abstracted form in stages, printing proofs and preliminary drawings were key to his process. A decade after the Batavier-Lijn poster was acquired, it was joined by a rare proof in which the blue text appears on white is reversed. Similarly, Van der Leck’s 1919 exhibition poster was united almost a quarter of a century later with a gouache showing just the central motif of an abstracted horse and rider. The group of works presented here succinctly trace the arc of Van der Leck’s quest for the reduction of both text and image to their fundamental elements during his most vibrant years.
|
