Composition by Félix Del Marle 1925
About The Work
Composition” belongs to the abstract and constructivist artistic movement, characterized by geometric shapes, parallel lines, and overlapping colors. The artwork conveys a sense of compositional balance through the interplay of rectangles and lines of different thicknesses and directions.
About Félix Del Marle
Félix Del Marle was born on October 21, 1889 in Pont-sur-Sambre to a brewer father and a housewife mother. Born October 21, 1889 in Pont-sur-Sambre (Nord) and died December 2, 1952 in Courbevoie (Hauts-de-Seine), is a French painter.
He studied classical and artistic studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Valenciennes and the School of Fine Arts in Lille. Then, he was a stoker on the liners of the Compagnie des chargeurs réunis from 1907 to 1909.
Then, Del Marle moved to Paris in 1912, where he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Gino Severini, with whom he shared his studio on rue Dutot. Close to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni, he enthusiastically adopted the Futurist precepts in 1913, exhibited the same year at Clovis Sagot's paintings that applied their principles, and published on July 10, in Paris-Jour, "The Futurist Manifesto in Montmartre", in which he proclaimed: "WE MUST DESTROY MONTMARTRE!"
In 1914, he presented, at the Salon des Surindépendants, Le Port, a painting that in a way takes stock of his Futurist experiments. Today not located, several preparatory works are preserved, notably Le Port, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Valenciennes.
Mobilized, he served in the 11th Group of Machine Guns and Autocannons[5] and actively participated in Taca Tac Teuf Teuf, a trench journal of the 17 light artillery groups. He provided at least one full-page satirical-inspired plate for each of the nine issues of the periodical published between January 1917 and March 1918.
During the years that followed, Del Marle embarked on the path of satire and social protest by producing numerous caricatures. Discovering the work of František Kupka in 1924, he became abstract and also claimed to be a musicalist. Barely two years later, he adhered to Piet Mondrian's doctrine of neoplasticism, which would have a lasting influence on him, and whose principles he ardently defended within Vouloir, an avant-garde magazine in Lille whose artistic direction he had been entrusted with in 1927.
The same year, Del Marle went to Germany, visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, and Stuttgart, the city of Weissenhof. Going through a period of doubt and questioning, he converted to Catholicism and, unexpectedly, returned to figurative painting in the early 1930s.
At the dawn of the Second World War, he evolved towards a surrealism imbued with symbolism. In 1945, he returned to abstraction, participated in the creation of the Salon des réalités nouvelles, of which he was the general secretary from 1947 to the year of his death. In his compositions and reliefs of the time, Del Marle mixed the orthogonal rigor of neoplasticism with a more lyrical constructivism.
From 1949, he produced his first constructions which betrayed his interest in the synthesis of the arts and the question of the integration of color in architecture. These led him to found in 1951, with André Bloc, the Espace group, within the framework of which he produced, assisted by Servanes and in collaboration with the architect Bernard Zehrfuss, the architectural polychromies of the Renault factories in Flins. This last point was the subject of an exhibition in 2000 at the Grenoble museum, while in 1996, the Matisse museum in Cateau-Cambrésis and the Museum of Fine Arts and Lace in Calais devoted an exhibition to his "polychromies in space".
In 1989, the Drouart gallery in Paris organized a retrospective of Felix Del Marle and published the catalogue of this exhibition.
The above text was translated via Google Translate copied from the arist's page on this Wikipedia page.
See more art by Félix Del Marle at Wiki Art.
Commentary
Since I was a child blue has always been one of my favorite colors, I'm drawn to it, like in an uncontrollable way. Same goes for geometric shapes, I just can't help myself. And this work brings them both together in on composition.
As for now, I can't find more information about this painting. I don't usually have much problem finding resources on the internet, but this one has me stumped. I've not had any luck finding details about this particular piece. For now, I assume it's simply a study piece not intended for sale or commission.