van Velde Bram

Bram van Velde was a Dutch artist who was born in 1895 in Zoeterwoude-Rijndijk and who died in 1981 in Grimaud in France. He was a painter, graphic artist and illustrator. He developed from house painter and decorative painter to painter. He settled in Worpswede in Germany in 1922 and then worked, from 1925, in Paris, where his brother Geer van Velde joined him for some time, and on the French island of Corsica. In the 1930s, the brothers met the Irish writer Samuel Beckett in Paris, who published about both artists. This contact, which intensified after the Second World War, sparked interest in their work and they were invited to exhibitions, first in Paris and later in New York and elsewhere. Works by Van Velde can be found in museum collections in England, France, the Netherlands, the United States and Switzerland. Bram van Velde's later work is considered lyrical abstraction, in which he built up non-figurative compositions by placing color surfaces against each other with a contour line. Initially, he did incorporate figurative elements in his work, which still seemed to refer to the expressionism of members of the artists' colony Worpswede, where Van Velde stayed for a short time. But unlike the artists of CoBrA, from the 1950s onwards, no figurative elements or references to figuration can be discerned in Bram van Velde's paintings. His compositions, which he also regularly realized in gouache or in the form of lithographs, have no titles and are then only made up of flat surfaces and shapes in colours. (RKD, Wikipedia)