French painter, born in 1897 in Versailles, died in 1985.
Life
As a teenager, Germain Van der Steen (or Vandersteen) was already drawing and painting in watercolour. Called up during the First World War, he was gassed and suffered lasting after-effects, including sleep disorders.
Between the wars he ran an artists’ colour shop in Paris with his wife (from 1925 according to Le Delarge, from 1931 according to the museum in Laval) and painted at night. Encouraged by the critic Anatole Jakovsky, he exhibited at the Salon d’automne from 1944, then at the Galerie Louise in Paris (1950) and at Hutter in Basel (1951). His work was later shown in France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, the former Yugoslavia, the United States, Brazil and Israel.
The work
Self-taught, classed sometimes among the naive painters, sometimes among the authors of Art Brut, Van der Steen went through three periods: a non-figurative period inspired by the music of the composers of his time; that of imaginary plants, trees or flowers with detached, many-coloured leaves and drapery stretched between the trunks; and finally that of the bestiary, above all cats and birds, which sometimes earned him the nickname “emperor of cats”. His palette is very bright.
Deprived of sleep by the after-effects of the war, he said he painted the dreams he could no longer have, seeing suffering as the source of “the true creation of the mind”.
Exhibitions and collections
- Salon d’automne, Paris, from 1944.
- Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne: Entente cordiale, before 1955, oil on cardboard, 54 x 65 cm, given by the artist to the State in 1955.
- Musée d’art naïf et d’arts singuliers (MANAS), Laval: Le Chat à la pelote, 1944, oil on plywood; Le Bureau de tabac de Chatenay, 1944, oil on panel; Oiseau fantastique, gouache and oil on hardboard; Chat, pastel.
- Croatian Museum of Naive Art, Zagreb.