Henri le Fauconnier

Le Fauconnier in the Netherlands

The contrast between the cosmopolitan city of Paris and the small town of Veere in Zeeland at the beginning of the twentieth century must have been striking, to say the least. Henri Le Fauconnier experienced the difference between these two worlds firsthand when he arrived in Veere with his wife Marousia in the summer of 1914. The French artist had come there on the recommendation of his Dutch friend Conrad Kickert, who had lived in Paris for many years and had been part of Le Fauconnier’s circle, the Cubists of Montparnasse.

Kickert was an artist and art critic and was staying in the Netherlands in June 1914; he lived with his wife in the shipyard house in Veere. Due to the threat of war, he decided not to return to Paris for the time being. He invited Le Fauconnier, who accepted his invitation: he knew Veere from a few postcards Kickert had sent him, and it seemed like a good place to work. As a resident of the most important and vibrant city in the art world, could he have imagined life in Zeeland?

The war kept Le Fauconnier in the Netherlands. After staying in Veere for several months, he settled with his wife in Amsterdam, where they lived until 1920. During the summers of 1915 and 1916, they stayed in Zandvoort, and in 1919 in Bergen.
Le Fauconnier’s cubist-expressionist style spread further in the Netherlands through the artists’ association ‘Het Signaal’, founded by him and Piet van Wijngaerdt in 1916. The artists within Het Signaal made rich use of shadow, strong colors, lines, and planes to achieve a greater degree of inner depth. Their work laid the foundation for the dark, figurative expressionism of the Bergen School. Although Le Fauconnier only lived in Bergen for a year, his presence was crucial to the development of this new style, partly because he introduced the painters in Bergen to the ideas of Paul Cézanne. The Bergen School developed independently of further international trends, as French and German art centers had been sidelined by the war. Dutch artists had to determine their own artistic direction. The influence of the new movement can be seen in artists such as Leo Gestel, Jan Sluijters, and Charley Toorop, but also in the Belgian painter Gustave De Smet, who stayed in the Netherlands during the war years and made the transition to an expressionist style of painting here.

When Le Fauconnier left Mons after a year, the Mons School had also passed its peak. The painter would return to France not long after.