Conrad Kickert - Summer in the Morvan

Kickert was a self-taught artist and perhaps better known as a critic than as a painter. He initially worked in artists' colonies in Domburg and Bergen. He was one of the first in the Netherlands to embrace cubism. In 1910, together with Piet Mondriaan, Jan Sluyters and Jan Toorop, he founded the Moderne Kunstkring, with the aim of 'shaking up Dutch art'. According to Kickert, Dutch art at that time was fifty years behind the rest of Europe. In 1912, he moved to Paris, where he had already visited his friend Lodewijk Schelfhout on several occasions. With Schelfhout and Mondriaan, he moved into a studio in Montparnasse. During the First World War, he returned to The Hague, but from 1919 onwards he settled permanently in France, although he continued to visit the Netherlands regularly.
From the twenties onwards, Kickert largely renounced modernism and switched to a more naturalistic, figurative style. Themes: figures, landscapes and still lifes. However, because he often continued to work with a palette knife instead of a brush, his work retained a contemporary appearance. In France he remained successful, but in the Netherlands he fell somewhat into oblivion.
The work offered is dated (probably 1928) but in any case was created in the late 1920s, when he spent a period in the French Morvan, together with the French painter Jaques Thevenet. The work comes with a declaration of authenticity, handwritten by Kickert's daughter Anne Gard. For more information about life and work: www.conrad-kickert.org