De Boeck Felix

Felix De Boeck was a Belgian artist, born in Drogenbos in 1898 and died in Drogenbos in 1995. He was a painter and draftsman. His mother, Louise van Breetwater, was the daughter of the mayor of Drogenbos. She was a cultivated, French-speaking and strongly religious woman who, against the wishes of her family, married Jan De Boeck, an almost uncultivated farmer from Sint-Kwintens-Lennik. Felix De Boeck had already completed a complete training as a draftsman when he decided in 1916 to pursue a full-fledged career as an artist. With pencil and charcoal he drew figures, portraits and landscapes from nature. He did not want to be financially dependent on his painting and decided to become a farmer on his parents' farm. During the week he worked in the fields and on Sundays he devoted himself to his art. He took art history classes at the University in Brussels. Light played a major role in his works from the beginning. In 1916 he painted Fauvist landscapes and in 1918 Van Gogh became his role model. After a short futuristic period, his forms became increasingly simpler and ultimately non-figurative in the years 1919-1920. He is considered one of the founders of abstract art in Belgium. In 1924 he married his cousin Marieke. They had five children, four of whom died in their first year of life. The fifth, Marcelleke, survived, but was mentally and physically handicapped. Partly due to the death of his parents and his first child, he took a different path from 1930 onwards. His work became increasingly characterized by a deeply religious experience of people, animals and nature and by a symbolic vision that radiates a strange luminous glow in a structure of circles and monochromes. Lines and volumes were initially reminiscent of mathematics, but later he increasingly added a light point to the intersections of his diagonals. In turn, abstraction had to make way for visionary images in which the circle keeps returning, the cosmic circle as a symbol for the spiritual core of man. His chosen themes were: motherhood, beginning and end, self-giving and portraits. He contributed to the magazines 7 Arts and Het Overzicht. The Museum Felix De Boeck in the Kuikenstraat in Drogenbos was inaugurated by the Flemish Community in 1996. It is mentioned in BAS I and Two centuries of signatures of Belgian artists. (Piron)