Lippens Piet
Piet Lippens is a lesser-known Belgian painter who was born in 1890 in Gentbrugge and died in 1981 in Ghent. He left for New York at the age of 17 and later stayed a few times in the United States, where he did all kinds of jobs. During his military service, he learned to draw and paint in his spare time at the Academy in Tournai, in collaboration with Chantry and Pion. Then went back to the USA, this time to Chicago. After the First World War he took lessons for a few months at the Academy in Ghent, conducted by J. Delvin and at Sint-Lucas. Realized landscapes, city and village corners. His works from the 1920s and 1930s, considered to be his best, are rather bleak: factories, slums, barracks, prisons, shipyards, windmills and caravans under a metallic gray sky, set in generous paint paste. His works appear monumental, powerful, sometimes hallucinatory. All his life he would remain faithful to the realistic impressionistic style that he had learned to appreciate in the work of A. Baertsoen, although his work became more colorful and less melancholic in later years. Then he painted countless farms, castles and chapels. From the press: “He draws a pessimistic view of the world, yet not devoid of lyrical flare-ups in some moments. His affection goes to weathered facades, wasteland and spooky factories on the border of the suburb." Work among others in the Museum in Ghent. Listed in CRICK, BAS I and Two centuries of signatures by Belgian artists. (PIRON)