Family Portraits

Family on a Sunday Stroll

2021

I felt it was time to update Bart van der Leck’s abstraction ‘Family’ from 1917 with our progress on what it means to be a family today.

Bart van der Leck (1876 - 1958) was a Dutch painter who founded the De Stijl art movement together with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. He was a leading figure in the drive towards pure abstraction, by the reduction to the essentials of form and colour. He’s one of my favourite painters.

One of his topics of disagreement with Mondrian (other than if it was ok to use diagonal lines) was that Van der Leck felt that abstract paintings should be based on representational images, rather than just the pursuit of perfect abstract harmony.

A key example of his representational abstraction, and I believe one of his most important paintings, is “Family” from 1917, an abstract representation of a father, mother and a child, the family ideal at the time. I felt it was important to expand the abstraction in this painting with our progress made since then, to celebrate the progress and challenge the classic family stereotype.