Lot 456 N

Early on Servranckx devoted his artistic attention - analogously to the efforts of the international Constructivist avant-garde of the time - to the field of applied art. In 1917 he had already begun to work at the Belgian wallpaper factory U.P.L. (Usines Peters Lacroix), which was widely known at that time and was based in Haren. This is where he met René Magritte, who likewise worked there as a designer in the early 1920s. Servranckx also dedicatedly occupied himself with the drafting of interior architectural designs later on: from 1932 he held a professorship at the École des Arts Industriels et Décoratifs in Ixelles. In 1925/1926 this special focus of his talents led to a turning point between periods in his painted oeuvre. By then the artist had become the leading designer at U.P.L. and exercised a decisive artistic influence on their production, “trying out new methods of design, new relationships of forms”, as was remarked with approval in Berlin at that time. (Alfred Durus in the Spartacist magazine “Die Rote Fahne”, Berlin 1925, cited in: exhib. cat. Victor Servranckx, Bruges 1958, p. 54).