Yvonne Serruys: Beeldhouwer van de nieuwe vrouw
Marjan Sterckx
Universiteit Gent, cc de steiger, stad Menen & Snoeck, 2023
€39,00
During the first half of the 20th century, the French-Belgian artist Yvonne Serruys (1873-1953) made a career in Paris. Coming from an art-loving middle-class family in Menen, she received a solid intellectual, musical and artistic education. This was completed by the luminist Emile Claus in Astene and by pointillist Georges Lemmen in Brussels. From 1898 onwards she exhibited almost annually at the Paris salons. From the age of thirty she moved into her own studio and home. Around 1905, after a successful first solo exhibition in Paris, she made the permanent switch to sculpture.
She now mainly created statuettes of naked young women in spontaneous poses. At the same time she designed hundreds of models for decorative objects in glass (paste), and before the First World War two monumental groups of sculptures for the Parisian public space. During the interwar period, there were additional commissions for public monuments in Belgium, France and Tunisia, and some art integration projects in the Atlantic Pyrenees, all in an Art Deco style. Yvonne Serruys now also wanted to portray the ‘new woman’ from her own feminine perspective and experience,
and thus contribute to women’s emancipation. Perhaps inspired by her impressive network in Paris and the ‘salons du samedi’ that she organized there with her husband, the French writer Pierre Mille, she had strong views on physicality and gender. Based in part on her newly discovered memoirs, this book highlights various aspects of the life and work of this versatile artist, who experienced and helped shape a pivotal period in modern times. IN DUTCH!
ISBN: 9789461617972
