Paul Joostens

PAUL JOOSTENS (Antwerp, 1889 - 1960).
"Tout secret est en son pouvoir", 1957.
Collage, watercolor and pastel on board.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Attached to the back a label of the gallery Guillaume Campo (on account of an exhibition of 1982).
Measurements: 66 x 47 cm; 101 x 80 cm (frame).

The Dadaist painter Paul Joostens had a complex personality that was reflected in his work. In this collage with watercolor and pastel, the artist arranges an urban landscape, evoking the city of Antwerp, in which he traces in a certain way a cartography of his mind, with his encounters and disagreements with religion, together with his satires to the consumer society. His collages were often provocative and cryptic. This work belongs to a stage of maturity, in which he returned to early avant-garde experiments, but filtered with a whole tumultuous log.

Born into a French-speaking bourgeois family in Antwerp, Paul Joostens initially wanted to be an architect, but after studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and the NHISKA, he joined the avant-garde. Around 1916 he painted cubist works and, from 1919, Dadaist collages and abstract objects with waste materials in the style of Kurt Schwitters. Along with the Belgian Dadaists (Paul Neuhuys, Willy Koninck), he was a fierce critic of the established order, whatever it was. In 1922 he published a Dadaist text entitled Salopes - le quart d'heure de rage or Le soleil sans chapeau. His friends at the time were the poet Paul van Ostaijen and the brothers Floris and Oscar Jespers. Together they founded De bond zonder gezegeld papier. Around 1925, he turned his back on the avant-garde, broke with his friends and created his own style, the "Joosten Gothic". Inspired by Hans Memling and the Flemish primitives, he painted numerous Madonnas and religious scenes. He joined the religiously inspired artistic circle De Pelgrim (The Pilgrim), whose aim was to promote Catholic art in all its forms. However, he also painted and drew sensual young women from the working-class neighborhoods of Antwerp, whom he called his Poezeloezen. This theme haunted him throughout his life. He made collages of photographs and wrote poems, diaries and other texts that have generally remained unpublished. In the 1950s, he returned to his Dadaist assemblages. In 1976, more than fifteen years after his death, a retrospective exhibition was held at the International Cultural Center (ICC) in Antwerp.