Theo van Doesburg loved women, and before he converted to abstract-geometric art he liked to paint them. But I did not yet know the painting that an auction house from Brussels showed me. During my work on the biography of the world-famous Van Doesburg, published in 2022, I had seen a black and white postage stamp-sized image in the catalog raisonné that Els Hoek published in 2000. The painting was considered lost.
The painting that has now surfaced is unmistakably this canvas Naked.
I did not recognize the woman depicted, but it is clear that the work dates from his early period, when Van Doesburg still painted traditional portraits, somewhat in the style of Jean-François Millet and Vincent van Gogh. The catalog raisonné provides an explanation: “Female nude/torso/1904/technique and dimensions unknown/current location unknown.”
And also that he took the painting “to Weimar in 1921, where he had it photographed by Paula Stockmar.”
The technique (oil paint) and whereabouts are now known, as are the dimensions: 43 by 27 cm. Van Doesburg stayed in Weimar in the early 1920s to join the Bauhaus college for art and design, where the photographer Paula Stockmar studied. She took a course with Van Doesburg on De Stijl. According to his third wife Nelly van Doesburg, that course was a great success. In a letter dated March 7, 1922, she wrote to a friend in the Netherlands: “They stopped him on the street to ask when it started, by people we don’t know at all.”
Stockmar has photographed at least twelve works by Van Doesburg. Most have not been preserved and survive only as photographs. Van Doesburg left for Paris permanently in 1924. He never lived in the Netherlands again until his death in 1931. The auction house remains vague about the provenance of Nakedand announces that it comes from the bankrupt estate of a French auction house.
But who is the woman in this painting? Van Doesburg stayed as a conscript in Apeldoorn from the end of July 1904. There he met Agnita Feis, his later (first) wife. He made many portraits of her, but the painted woman does not resemble Feis.
It’s a guess, but I think Agathe Wegerif-Gravestein (1867-1944) is depicted here. Feis worked in the studio of Wegerif, a batik artist who led a free-spirited life. “The fact that she, an enterprising, sophisticated woman, who had achieved international fame with her own work, followed her own path in her marriage to the architect Chris Wegerif, which was certainly not monogamous, was more or less an open secret at the time,” wrote C. de Wit in a monograph by the Wegerifs.
She organized soirees for artists. Van Doesburg probably met Agnita Feis on such an evening, and Wegerif of course. He never saw Feis again after his divorce in 1917, but he remained in touch with Wegerif throughout his life.
Whether she has been a model for Naked or not, it is important that an original painting by Theo van Doesburg has surfaced. It will soon be auctioned in Brussels at the Soudant auction house.
Hans Renders wrote Van Doesburg’s biography together with Sjoerd van Faassen: ‘I am completely alone. Theo van Doesburg 1883-1931’, published by publisher De Bezige Bij.