Woman Of The 1930s By Barth Verschaeren

At the end of 1921, he exhibited "Women and Children" at the New York City Club, during an exhibition with seven American painters. In 1922, he also sent the large canvas "The Three Brothers" from 1920 to the Society of Independent Artists' salon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. It depicts Verschaeren with his two brothers and Theodoor's son. Verschaeren had already exhibited it at the 1920 exhibition in Brussels. In 1922, he organized a solo exhibition at the Civic Club gallery, presenting both "Flemish motifs" and works made in New York, as well as some small sculptures. The reviews were again favorable (The Evening World and New York Tribune). Within a few years, Verschaeren and his brother Karel managed to build relative prosperity in America and gradually considered a return. Karel's illness, which would leave him blind, accelerated the process. In April 1924, they arrived in Cherbourg. Return to Belgium Expressionism, a new artistic movement that was booming in Belgium, caused Verschaeren an aesthetic shock. He abandoned the Post-Impressionism he had previously adhered to and quickly developed a style with its own distinctive accents, a Flemish Expressionism: massive drawing, accentuated contours, reduction to the simplest expression, nuanced flat areas of color. A certain influence, or at least a resemblance, to Eugène Laermans was not far off at first. In 1928, Verschaeren bought an estate on the border of Walem and Wavre-Sainte-Katherine, near Mechelen. This estate became the starting point for his later works on rural life in the vast Mechelen region, which he preferably explored by bicycle. In a paperback book, he sketched motifs. Portraits of ladies and children, bathers, mothers with children, rural scenes (harvest, ploughing, field work, stables, etc.), street musicians, gypsies, fairground scenes, pilgrimages and floral arrangements then constitute his palette of motifs. From the mid-1930s, however, his palette darkened. He was one of the most active Flemish artists of this period.