Leo Gestelartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsmanWoerden 1881-1941 Hilversum

The oeuvre of Leo Gestel (1881-1941) shows influences of impressionism, luminism, fauvism and cubism. However, his talent guarantees a unique, Dutch version of these international art movements. Throughout his life he remains aware of his role as a pioneer and searches for new forms and styles to shape visible reality to his will. In the years 1900-1914, Gestel, together with Jan Sluijters and Piet Mondriaan, was one of the first Dutch moderns to join the European avant-garde in Paris around 1904. At the Salon des Independants, the trio became acquainted with neo-impressionism, fauvism and luminism and introduced the luminist landscape and female nude in provocative, bright colors in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 20th century. Amid the dark and traditional canvases that dominated the Dutch art world at the time, they caused a great stir with their explosion of colour.

Gestel is training to become a drawing teacher at the National Normal School for Drawing Teachers in Amsterdam and then takes evening classes at the National Academy of Visual Arts with August Allebé and Nicolaas van der Waay. In 1904, Gestel moved into a studio on the attic floor in the Tweede Jan Steenstraat. This meeting place for Amsterdam artists and intellectuals was soon called the Jan Steenzolder. Gestel, a gifted draftsman to his friends, is renamed 'Leo' – short for Leonardo (da Vinci). Born as 'Leendert', he soon used this name to sign his names. Life as a free artist is not easy and he earns some extra money as an illustrator for books and newspapers and with advertising assignments.

Between 1905 and 1909, after his first trip to Paris in 1904, Gestel immersed himself in the analysis of colour, following the example of the French neo-impressonists and pointillists. He works increasingly outdoors and focuses on light studies in which he applies the new painting technique of division. In Woerden, Montfoort and near Nijmegen he creates luminist landscapes that are reminiscent of the Fauvist way of painting. In bright colors and with individual keys, placed next to each other, he expresses the emotions that the landscape evokes in him.

In 1910 Gestel made a second trip to Paris, where city life inspired him to make works with the 'beau monde'. On his return he met his future wife An Overtoom, who regularly appeared as a model in his work and whom he married in 1922. In 1911, Gestel met Piet Boendermaker, whom he became an advisor and with whom he would maintain a close friendship throughout his life. From 1912 onwards, Gestel experiments with cubist formal language and creates portraits, landscapes and flower still lifes in a unique cubism. He spent a large part of 1914 in the company of An, the Boendermaker couple, Mommie Schwarz and Else Berg on Mallorca, where his groundbreaking, cubist works were created. Large canvases with earthy tones, natural forms, fragmented as Braque and Cézanne did. Immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, Gestel traveled to the Belgian border to draw the refugees there. The traveling exhibition in 1916 with these works sold for charity was a great success.

In 1919, Gestel's expressionism broke through and he worked around Koedijk near Alkmaar, where he came to know the grandeur of the polder landscape with its fields, meadows and canals in their ever-changing light and shadow patterns. In 1921, Gestel rediscovered nature in the Beemster with its blossoming orchards, frolicking and grazing lambs and calves. For the first time, animal figures appear in the countless drawings, pastels and watercolours he makes. In 1921, Gestel decided to settle in Mons, the village where Henri Le Fauconnier, Arnout Colnot, Piet van Wijngaerdt and others worked in a dark, expressionist style with sober forms in a broad brushstroke. Between 1925 and 1927 – due to a marital crisis – he lived in Flanders, where his work, under the influence of the Flemish expressionists Gustave De Smet and Constant Permeke, became increasingly flat and stylized. In 1929, a major fire destroyed Gestel's studio and much of his work was lost. After the fire, Gestel moves to Blaricum, where he will work almost exclusively in chalk, gouache and tempera. Depictions become more and more unearthly and he describes the female nude as the primeval woman depicted in more or less formed shapes. In the summers he can often be found in Zandvoort where he sketches life on the beach and in Spakenburg and Bunschoten where he works on stylized portraits and figure pieces. In the meantime, a stomach ailment from which he had been suffering since 1918 increasingly troubled him and from which he eventually died in 1941. Gestel was a hard worker and goes down in history as a restless searching artist who continuously strove for innovation, with nature as a starting point. His many travels were indispensable for this innovation.