Joseph VERDEGEM (1897–1957) - Lot 86

Lot n° 86
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500 - 800 EUR
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Joseph VERDEGEM (1897–1957) - Lot 86
Joseph VERDEGEM (1897–1957) “Kantonnement,” oil on panel, signed and dated 1917 in the lower left corner, approx. 30.5 x 41 cm. Note: This work belongs to one of the most distinctive and historically significant periods of Jos Verdegem’s career: World War I. Having enlisted as a volunteer in the Belgian Army, the artist joined the Belgian Army’s Art Section in 1916, which brought together several of the leading painters on the Belgian front, including Alfred Bastien, Léon Huygens, Fernand Allard l’Olivier, and James Thiriar. Created to provide an artistic record of the Great War, the Art Section accompanied the army to the Yser Front. Its artists depicted the devastated landscapes of Flanders, the trenches, and the ruins, but also—far from any heroic vision of battle—the daily lives of the soldiers, their periods of waiting, rest, and quartering. Titled *Kantonnement*, this composition is fully immersed in that world. In it, Verdegem depicts a group of Belgian soldiers at rest, gathered in the confined space of a barracks and surrounded by their equipment. The proximity of the figures, intertwined with one another, lends the scene a particularly intimate and immediate quality. The simplified forms, vigorous linework, and broad brushstrokes in muted tones already foreshadow certain artistic explorations that would later characterize his work and his place in Belgian modern art. Beyond its artistic merit, *Kantonnement* thus serves as a direct testimony to military life on the Yser Front in 1914–1918, belonging to the distinctive body of work produced by the soldier-artists and painters of the Belgian Army’s Art Section. The subject finds a particularly significant parallel in another work by Verdegem titled *Lampernisse-Kantonnement* (1917–1918), a watercolor and chalk work, which was exhibited at the Jos Verdegem retrospective at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent in 1977 and reproduced in the monograph by R. H. Marijnissen and P. Huys dedicated to the artist.
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