Georges Lemmen

The painter Georges Lemmen is a representative of Belgian neo-Impressionism. After studying at the Brussels Academy, he joined the Belgian artists’ group “Les XX”, which also included Fernand Khnopff, James Ensor and Theo van Rysselberghe. This group had a stimulating and decisive impact on Lemmen. He also came into contact with neo-Impressionism and adopted the pointillist technique of Georges Seurat, who exhibited his works with “Les XX”. In the 1890s Lemmen started to create designs for carpets, wallpapers, mosaics, magazines and books. This also included the cover of an exhibition catalogue for “Les XX” in a style which was to have a considerable influence on the development of Art Nouveau. Thanks to his artistic and commercial successes, he received orders, among others, from Julius Meier-Graefe’s art gallery “La Maison Moderne” and from Paul Cassirer in Berlin. After the turn of the century Lemmen devoted himself entirely to painting again, moved away from the rigour of pointillist techniques and, instead, adopted a freer style with a rich textures and intense colours. Lemmen’s thematically diverse paintings, which included portraits, depictions of humans, interiors, still lifes and landscapes, were characterised by an intimacy which the artist had developed from elements of both Pointillism and Art Nouveau. The artist participated in numerous exhibitions, including – repeatedly – “Les XX” and the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Exhibitions at Galérie Druet in 1906 and 1908 and above all at Galérie Giroux in Brussels in 1913 gave Lemmen a commercial success during his lifetime.