Kendall Fall Collections 2011

On the cover: Jan sluijters (1881-1957) Flowers in a Delft Vase c. 1912 oil on canvas 39 ½ x 31 ¾ inches signed lower right Provenance: Private collection, Connecticut Thence by descent Jan Sluijters was a leading pioneer of various post-impressionist movements in the Netherlands. He experimented with several styles, including fauvism and cubism, finally settling on a colorful expressionism. His paintings feature nude studies, portraits, and still lifes. In 1906 Sluijters won the Prix de Rome, the most important Dutch art award. Visiting Paris that same year, he became fascinated by modern art. Sluijters’s confrontation with the work of Neo-Impressionists, Fauvists and such painters as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Kees van Dongen resulted in sensational and dynamically modern work and made him a pioneer of modernism in the Netherlands. He assimilated the French influences into a divisionist style, characterized by an expressive use of bright dots, lines and blocks of colour corresponding to the artist’s personal view of the motif. The application of this technique shows how strongly he admired the later work of Vincent van Gogh. It was this form of divisionism, of which the chief representatives were Sluijters, Piet Mondrian and Leo Gestel, that brought about the breakthrough for Amsterdam’s avant-garde painters in 1909 and that paved the way generally for the development of modern art in the Netherlands.