Bart van der Leck (26 November 1876,

Utrecht Utrecht ( , , ) is the fourth-largest city and a municipality of the Netherlands, capital and most populous city of the province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, in the very centre of mainland Net ...

– 13 November 1958,

Blaricum Blaricum () is a municipality and village in the province of North Holland, the Netherlands. It is part of the region of Gooiland and part of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (Metropoolregio Amsterdam). It is known for its many monumental farm bui ...

) was a Dutch painter, designer, and ceramicist. With

Theo van Doesburg Theo van Doesburg (, 30 August 1883 – 7 March 1931) was a Dutch artist, who practiced painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. He was married to artist, pianist and choreographer Nell ...

and Piet Mondrian he founded the

De Stijl ''De Stijl'' (; ), Dutch for "The Style", also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term ''De Stijl'' is used to refer to a body ...

art movement. Son of a house painter, he started his career learning how to make stained glass in a shop in Utrecht. An example of his later stained glass work is in the

Kröller-Müller Museum The Kröller-Müller Museum () is a national art museum and sculpture garden, located in the Hoge Veluwe National Park in Otterlo in the Netherlands. The museum, founded by art collector Helene Kröller-Müller within the extensive grounds of ...

in Hoge Veluwe, Netherlands. After having met Mondrian and van Doesburg and having founded the Stijl movement with them, his style became completely abstract, as did Mondrian's. But after disagreements with Mondrian his abstract style became based on representational images. His painting Triptych is an example, in which he transformed sketches of a mine in Spain into seemingly abstract shapes. In 1919-1920 he created the interior design for St Hubertus Hunting Lodge, in the Hoge Veluwe estate. The hunting lodge was designed by

Hendrik Petrus Berlage Hendrik Petrus Berlage (21 February 1856 – 12 August 1934) was a Dutch architect. He is considered one of the fathers of the architecture of the Amsterdam School. Life and work Hendrik Petrus Berlage, son of Nicolaas Willem Berlage and An ...

. In 1930, he was commissioned by Jo de Leeuw, owner of the prestigious Dutch department store Metz & Co. to design interiors, window packaging, branding and advertising. For these print materials van der Leck developed a rectilinear, geometrically constructed alphabet. In 1941, he designed a typeface based on this alphabet for the avant garde magazine ''Flax''.

Architype van der Leck Architype van der Leck is a geometric sans-serif typeface, based upon the 1941 typeface designed by Bart van der Leck for the Dutch magazine ''Flax,'' a journal of the De Stijl art movement. The face is geometrically constructed, and based upon a ...

, a digital revival of that face by David Quary and Freda Sack of The Foundry, was released in 1994. Bart van der Leck claimed to be the father of the

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

movement. In his own words he said: "Mondrian came to my place one day with Doesburg, whom I had never seen before. When Doesburg noticed an abstract painting right on the easel, he exclaimed: 'If that is to be the painting of the future, may I be hanged right now!' Well, a few months later, he was painting in precisely that manner. That's the sort of person Doesburg was. No ideas of his own. And a cheat in bargain..."

Public collections

Among the public collections holding works by the artist are: *

Museum de Fundatie Museum de Fundatie () is a museum for the visual arts in Zwolle, Netherlands. Museum de Fundatie forms part of the Hannema-de Stuers Foundation, to which Kasteel het Nijenhuis in Heino also belongs. Museum de Fundatie possesses a collection of vis ...

Zwolle Zwolle () is a city and municipality in the Northeastern Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of Overijssel and the province's second-largest municipality after Enschede with a population of 130,592 as of 1 December 2021. Zwolle is on ...

The Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

References

*Haley, Allen. ''Type: Hot Designers Make Cool Fonts.'' Rockport Publishers Inc, Gloucester; 1998. *Hoek, Els, Marleen Blokhuis, Ingrid Goovaerts, Natalie Kamphuys, et al. ''Theo van Doesburg: Oeuvre Catalogus.''

Centraal Museum The Centraal Museum is the main museum in Utrecht, Netherlands, founded in 1838. The museum has a wide-ranging collection, mainly of works produced locally. The collection of the paintings by the Northern Mannerist Joachim Wtewael is by a lon ...

: 2000. . *Toos van Kooten (ed.). ''Bart van der Leck.'' Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, 1994 (in Dutch).

External links

Short biography at Codart

Longer biography at Instituut voor Nederlandse GeschiedenisWorks in the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leck, Bart van der Abstract painters Modern painters 1876 births 1958 deaths De Stijl Dutch male painters Artists from Utrecht 20th-century Dutch artists 20th-century Dutch painters 20th-century Dutch male artists