Jo Delahaut - Jo Delahaut - rarely offered

Titled “Jo Delahaut”
Rarely beautiful work
Color screen printing
Signed and numbered in pencil by the artist
Numbered 11/100
Period 1987
Framed in a varnished wooden frame with double passe-partout
Work and frame (high-gloss lacquer) in excellent condition

Biography
Jo Delahaut is a Belgian painter, sculptor, engraver and tapestry designer, born in Vottem in 1911. He was the first geometric-abstract artist in Belgium after 1945. He took drawing lessons at the Academy of Liège, with Auguste Mambour between 1928 and 1934. , before obtaining a degree in art history from the University of Liège in 1935. In 1939, he obtained a doctorate in art history and archaeology by defending a thesis on Neoclassicism in Belgium.
Fascinated by colour, he devoted himself for the first time to painting in 1940, in the Fauvist style. From the beginning, we can see the influences of Sevranckx and Herbin. Since 1936, he established himself as a professor of drawing at the Schaerbeek Athenaeum in 1945 in Brussels, where he switched to geometric abstraction and supported his plans of bright colours with black. We recognise his constructivist style: cold and refined. His work is characterised by the purity and precision of forms in line and colour. The order, measure, control and serenity of the formal language are at odds with the emotional shock that colour causes.
From 1946 he was a member of the Young Belgian Painting, of which he was the only abstract artist until 1950. Jo met Herbin with whom he shared the same precision of composition of simple forms.
From 1947 to 1956 he exhibited in Paris at the 'Salon des Réalités Nouvelles', where he always defended abstraction. As co-founder of the group 'Abstract Art' in 1952 he arranged U and J elements with intense flat surfaces in a repetitive pattern. In 1954 he signed the spatial manifesto with Pol Bury, Elno and Jean Séaux.
He was also one of the founders of the groups 'Formes' in 1956 and 'Art Construct' in 1960.
The formal relationships between color, plan and line are never inert and demand emotional and intellectual participation from the viewer.
This “Constructed Art” is based on an intuitive rationality and seeks its “revelatory value” in every sign.
From 1956 onwards he worked on the integration of art into social life by collaborating with architects and creating numerous monumental works (ceramics in the Montgomery metro station in Brussels in 1975).
Corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Belgium since 1978.
From 1962 to 1976 he was professor of monumental painting at La Cambre. In the eighties he made paintings on white canvas, with only a ribbon of yellow paint running through or around it. During the last years of his life, the color took possession of his work again, like a trance.

'Abstract Art': Pol Bury, Jean Milo, Georges Collignon and Albert Saverys