G. (GEER) VAN VELDE

Biography

G. (GEER) VAN VELDE
1898 Lisse (The Netherlands) - 1977 Cachan, Val-de-Marne (France)

Geer van Velde was a Dutch painter and one of the leading artists of the post-war École de Paris. The younger brother of Bram van Velde, he trained as a decorative painter at the Kramers firm in The Hague. After military service with the Red Cross, he settled in Paris in 1925, devoting himself entirely to painting. Initially working in a figurative-expressionist manner close to Fauvism, Van Velde's style evolved towards abstraction after a period in the South of France (from 1938), characterised by reducing reality to vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, combined with subtle colour planes and filtered light. In 1937, he met the writer Samuel Beckett, who was instrumental in promoting his work and wrote several essays on the Van Velde brothers' paintings. Van Velde exhibited at Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Kootz Gallery in New York and was awarded the first prize for a foreign artist at the 1951 Biennale de Menton. From 1944, he lived and worked in Cachan, near Paris, where he remained until his death.