A special exhibition of the work of the Belgian abstract sculptor and painter Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965) will be opening at the The Hague Gemeentemuseum this Saturday. It was already hosted at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (Germany), and in a way it’s a pretty unique and remarkable event. A bit of a piquancy, actually, since no exhibition of Vantongerloo’s work was ever to be held in the Netherlands according to the terms of his will.

De Stijl
Vantongerloo spent time in The Hague as a refugee during the First World War, where he befriended Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondrian. In 1917 he joined the ranks of the De Stijl movement and the associated magazine. At this time he relinquished his former figurative style and switched to purely geometrical abstract compositions. He morphed into an artistic jack-of-all-trades: painter, sculptor, designer, architect, but also a theoretician and art critic who once wrote about his own work and his unwillingness to be either a crowd-pleaser or a fashionable slave to success: "I work in and for truth". He was also a bit of a recalcitrant within De Stijl (from which he broke away in 1921), as he defied the austere authority of the straight line by his frequent use of circles and ovals. Later on he would settle in France where he became the co-founder of the cosmopolitan Abstraction-Création movement in 1931. A few years later, he would be part of the 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Forgotten
A major retrospective of Vantongerloo’s work was on show in 1962 at the Marlborough New London Gallery, but he fell into oblivion over the years for a number of reasons. His infrastructural designs for airfields, bridges and housing estates, for one, were never executed. But the people from Duisburg and The Hague who assembled the exhibition are correct in their opinion that as one of the founding fathers of geometrical abstraction and constructivism he fully deserves this fresh accolade.

Incidentally, this exhibition does not only have work by Vantongerloo on display, but also pays attention to contemporaries such as Max Bill and Mondrian. The exhibition in The Hague runs until May 16.

[Illustration: Georges Vantongerloo, Study, 1920. Oil on canvas, 52 x 61.5 cm]