Sluit menu
Sluit menu
The self-taught César Domela was born in 1900 as the youngest son of the socialist politician Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. He grew up in Hilversum and at the age of 18 he travelled to the Swiss Ascona, where an alternative artists' colony had emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. Painters, philosophers, musicians, writers and thinkers were attracted by the opportunities and inspiration that this community offered in their desire for freedom, expression and harmony with nature. Among them were illustrious names such as Herman Hesse, Paul Klee, Hans Arp, Rudolf Steiner and the Dutchmen Pieter Jelles Troelstra and Adriaan Roland Holst. Domela came into contact with various avant-garde artists and would live and work there for about four years.
During a stay in Berlin in the years 1922/1923, Domela devoted himself entirely to abstract art. He made paintings in a constructivist-abstract style, which were exhibited in 1923 at the exhibition of the Novembergruppe, a group of mainly German expressionist visual artists and architects. He then traveled to Paris where he met Piet Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg and in 1924 became the youngest member ever to join the De Stijl movement. In the second half of the 1920s he worked in a style closely related to that of Mondriaan.
After a period in Amsterdam, Domela lived and worked in Berlin again from 1927 to 1933, but with the rise of Hitler he returned to Paris for good in 1933. There he devoted himself to making reliefs, which he called ‘Tableaux-objets’, composed of various materials placed on top of each other, in which the diagonal played an important role. He also experimented with photographs that he assembled into compositions for advertising purposes. His work was well received and in 1936 he took part in the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In Paris, Domela joined the group Cercle et Carré, which after its break-up was succeeded by Abstraction-Creation, both founded to create a platform for constructivist and abstract art. Together with Hans Arp, the initiator of Abstraction-Creation, and Sophie Taeuber, he founded the magazine Plastique in 1937. Domela used his knowledge of mathematics to create his balanced, abstract compositions. These were visually very captivating due to their combination of form and colour and formed the basis for his stylistically very consistent oeuvre. Domela was a pioneer in geometric abstraction and once said himself: ‘I am not concerned with the forms of life, but with the life of forms.’
In 1960, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag purchased his work and organised a retrospective. A second retrospective exhibition was also held there in 1980. In 2007/2008, his two daughters donated thirteen reliefs from their father's estate to the museum. They are an important addition to the existing Domela collection and provide a complete picture of the artist's development. At the same time, the RKD opened the extensive Domela archive, which had already been donated to them.
