Cesar Domela (1900-1992): Untitled

Artist
Cesar Domela (1900–1992)
 
Title
Untitled
 
Medium
Woodcut
 
Material
Cardboard
 
Dimensions
23 x 29 cm
 
Editor
Edition Panderma, Basel
 
Year
1966, published 1977
 
Signature
Signed in pencil
 
Provenance
Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel
Galerie von Bartha, Basel
Private Collection, Basel
 
Condition / Restauration
Mint archival condition
 
Biography
Cesar Domela (born Cesar Domela Nieuwenhuis, Amsterdam 1900 – Paris 1992) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, photographer and typographer, and one of the youngest and most rigorous members of the De Stijl movement. The son of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, a former Lutheran pastor and pioneering Dutch anarcho-socialist, he was entirely self-taught. Between 1919 and 1923 he lived in Ascona, Switzerland, where his early landscapes and still lifes gradually dissolved into geometric, Cubist-derived forms.
 
In 1923 Domela settled in Berlin, joining the circle of the Novembergruppe and painting his first fully non-objective composition of vertical and horizontal lines and planes. In 1925, aged just twenty-five, he was invited by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian to become the youngest member of De Stijl. He soon moved beyond the flat canvas into three-dimensional relief, his signature medium, combining materials such as Plexiglas, metal, wood and photomontage into precisely balanced constructions that bridged painting, sculpture and graphic design. In 1934 he opened a silkscreen studio for printmaking, and in 1936 his work was included in the landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
 
When the Nazi regime came to power, Domela fled Berlin in 1933 and resettled in Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life and became a central figure in the international constructivist and concrete-art networks of the post-war decades. His vast personal archive was bequeathed to the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), and in 2009 a room dedicated to his work was opened at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg. This signed late woodcut, issued by Carl Laszlo's legendary Edition Panderma in Basel, distils Domela's lifelong pursuit of pure, dynamic equilibrium into a concentrated graphic statement.