2. Artists & stock
3. César Domela
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Cesar Domela-Nieuwenhuis was born in Amsterdam on January 15th, 1900. He began painting in 1918 and devoted himself entirely to the art one year later, year following his father death, who was a Lutheran Pasteur and a famous political leader Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis. He settled down in Switzerland, in Ascona, where he joined the community of the “Mont de la Vérité”. In 1920, He started his analytical geometry. Three years later, he showed in Berlin his first abstract works of art in the exhibition named “November Group”. In 1925 he met Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg in Paris and adhered to their movement De Stijl.
However, he quit the movement very soon and its too rigorous rules, then added to his composition the diagonal line, and later the third dimension (first reliefs in Berlin in 1928). He started working with a lot of different materials, which allowed him to play with the transparency of the plans: wood, brass, copper, glass, plexiglas. He used curves lines since 1932. From 1927 to 1933 his numerous - avant-gardist activities (painting, photography, graphic art) - lead him to Paris and Berlin; César Domela adhered to the “Ring Neue Verbege stalter” founded by Schwitters and gathered Lissitzky, Heartfield, Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter… He contributed to the reviews “Cercle et Carré” and “Abstraction Creation”. Following his research on photography, he organized in 1931 for the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek of Berlin the exhibition “Fotomontage”.
In 1933, when the Nazism was in power in Germany, he settled down definitively in Paris where he found many artists friends among which Mondrian, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Arp and Antoine Pevsner; he continued his research activity and was always present among the avant-gardist : he founded in 1937, with Sophie Tauber and Hans Arp, the review “Plastique”. From the Thirties, the artist took part in the main international demonstrations of abstract art.
César Domela died in Paris on December 31st, 1992.

"I believe that, at the beginning, religion, in the broad sense of the term, and art were one. Through religion, Man tried to understand the why of things, to capture their rhythm, to hear the harmony of the spheres, and art was born from such efforts." - César Domela

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