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Bart van der Leck (26 November 1876 – 13 November 1958) was a Dutch painter, designer, and ceramicist. WithTheo van Doesburg andPiet Mondrian he founded theDe Stijl art movement.[1]
Van der Leck was born on 26 November 1876, inUtrecht. Son of a house painter, he started his career learning how to makestained glass in a shop in Utrecht. An example of his later stained glass work is in theKröller-Müller Museum.
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.[1]
In 1919-1920 he created the interior design forSt Hubertus Hunting Lodge, in theHoge Veluwe estate. The hunting lodge was designed byHendrik Petrus Berlage. 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 magazineFlax.Architype van der Leck, a digital revival of that face by David Quary andFreda Sack of The Foundry, was released in 1994.
Bart van der Leck claimed to be the father of theavant-garde 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... ."[2]
Van der Leck died on 13 November 1958, inBlaricum.
Among the public collections holding works by the artist are:
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