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Estella den Boer, dutch painter/ceramist/graphic designer (1912-2010)
Estella den Boer was born in Middelburg, the Netherlands in 1912. Father Willem den Boer ran a book and music trade plus an art trade there. Her mother Josephine came from the Antwerp entrepreneurial family Jeronimus. Estella received violin lessons and the family regularly played music together. Through the art shop the family was in contact with well-known painters from the local area of Walcheren, such as Jan Toorop, Jim Frater and Willem Schütz. A much valued customer of the bookstore was poet P.C. Boutens.

In 1918 the family moved to Bussum and in 1926 to Baarn, where Estella would live for nearly the rest of her life. It was in this Gooi area that Estella’s longing for a future in the arts grew. Her parents did not like her childhood dream, the stage. The remaining options were music and drawing and she chose the latter. Estella took lessons with Karel van Dapperen, an artist from Baarn, who advised her to apply for the Institute for Applied Arts Education (the current Gerrit Rietveld Academy) in Amsterdam, to study graphic arts. She started her studies in 1929.

Education
Already during her studies her works caught the eye. She made advertising illustrations for Artis, Oud’s Kinawijn and Kreymborg. She drew the calligraphy and illustrations of a brochure for the National Association of Nurses and designed a logo for the “Baarnse Kunstnijverheidshuis In den Uijl” (image 1). In 1930 she won the second prize in a drawing competition at the Colonial Institute for her drawings of a buffalo head and a frog, made in Amsterdam zoo Artis. As finger exercises she made postcards for holidays and other occasions, drawings, but also linocuts. A beautiful example of her sense of balanced surface division and rhythm is the lithograph Ladies prefer brooches, which she made in 1932.

In 1933 Estella den Boer obtained her diploma in Graphic Arts. The crisis was in full swing and she was unable to find a job as a graphic designer. At that time her younger sister Corrie (‘Pruukje’) got engaged to Anton Duval Slothouwer. Through her future brother-in-law Estella came into contact with painter Louis Cardinaals (1895-1948) from Amersfoort. He encouraged her to paint un-commissioned. From him she learned how to create landscapes and portraits, first in Indian ink, watercolor and gouache, later in oil.

After the war, she had great success designing liberation postcards that looked fairly conventional, considering Estella’s style in other works from that era. She established herself as an independent artist and moved to Giethoorn, where she collaborated with the painter Hendrik Broer (1886-1968). She had her first exhibition, at the Artists’ Association De Onafhankelijken in Amsterdam. Estella, who still signs her works with S. den Boer, turns out to be a self-assured young woman during this time, as can be seen in her moderately modern self-portrait from 1947.

She only lived in Giethoorn for a short time. In 1949 she returned to Baarn to support her sick mother.

Expressive and abstract works
In 1950 Estella met painter Else van der Feer Ladèr-Lohmann (1867-1984), who was fifteen years older. A worldly, educated woman with whom she becomes good friends. Before her marriage to the Dutch art collector and agent Cees van der Feer Ladèr, the German Else was a very creditable expressionist artist in Bielefeld. The friends travel together to Sweden and Italy, where they also paint. It is Else who urges Estella to let go of visible reality and to apply colors brightly and maybe even unnaturally. During this period the line becomes increasingly important to Estella, she herself saying: ‘The line that encloses the subject, that indicates how one gets its value through the other.’ She makes expressive and abstract work, drawings, paintings and ceramics. She finds absolute freedom in constructive art. A visit to Piet Mondriaan’s retrospective exhibition in 1955 in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague made an overwhelming impression on her. Her conviction that geometric arrangements are the most appropriate visual language to act out of material limitations and find a way to a larger space is confirmed here.

At the exhibition she speaks to artist César Domela (1900-1992) who knew Mondriaan well. Like her friend Else he advises her to opt for complete abstraction. And that’s what she does from that moment on: she experiments with compositions of straight and circular lines, geometric shapes and clear, flat colors. After the death of her parents in 1958 and 1959 she has to work to earn a living. She takes on a job at the tourist office in the town of Soest and has little time for free work and exhibitions. She does design printed matter and posters and makes linocuts and monotypes. The geometric, constructive compositions prevail in the years that follow. After 1973, when she stops working at the tourist office, she returns to painting. It is not until 1974 when she changes her signature from S. de Boer to Estella.

Music is an important source of inspiration for Estella, just like for Mondriaan, and also for the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky. She compares the third, fourth and fifth intervals in music with the triangle, the square and the circle on her canvases. She attaches importance to intuition instead of mathematics, which is a guideline for many other constructive-concrete artists. Her worldview is dynamic, with geometric shapes shifting and tilting around imaginary axes. Overlaps make the color jump, dynamics and tension dominate the image.

Estella is being influenced by the Russian Constructivists, such as the aforementioned Kandinsky. In later works we see influences from the Italian Futurists, such as Gino Severini. In playfulness and use of color her painting is sometimes related to that of the artist Sophie Taüber-Arp. Her connection with Mondriaan was also noted by the art world. In 1994, fifty years after the death of the pioneer in non-figurative art, there was another major retrospective in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. In the slipstream of this Estella’s work made a successful tour along Dutch galleries with the exhibition “Three generations of constructivists”, together with work by the younger artists Henk van Trigt and Hans van Rhoon.

Idiosyncratic optimism
Until the end of her life Estella continued to paint, which she does at the kitchen table in her tiny apartment in Baarn. Clusters and rhythmic and sharp, triangular shapes with a strong optical effect determine her later work. She filled in the inspection areas with endless patience. Her eyes worsened, but her hand remained steady. Estella in a nutshell: an idiosyncratic optimist who could not do anything other than create.

Timeline
1912 Estella Johanna Emérance den Boer is born on 24 May in Middelburg

1918 Moves to Bussum

1926 Moves to Baarn

1929 - 1933 Education at the Institute for Applied Arts Education in Amsterdam, Graphic Arts

1933 Painting classes with Louis Cardinaals

1947-1949 Lives and works in Giethoorn

1955 Starts to paint more abstractly after a visit to the retrospective exhibition of Piet Mondriaan in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague

1957 First constructive compositions

1962 - 1973 Works at the tourist office in Soest. Designs many posters and printed matter, linocuts and monotypes

1973 From this year onwards she works consistently in the constructive-concrete direction. Colors and lines follow the composition

1974 Co-founder of the Association of Visual Artists Baarn (VBKB)

1994 Traveling exhibition “Three generations of constructivists”

1997 Exhibition at the Mondriaanhuis

1999 Exhibition of new work in Kasteel Groeneveld in Baarn

2001 Exhibition in Mondriaanhuis (house of Mondriaan) in Amersfoort

2004 Exhibition in Mondriaanhuis (house of Mondriaan) in Amersfoort

2010 Estella den Boer dies on 28 May

2010 Farewell exhibition in “Historical Circle Baerne”

2014 Exhibition in Mondriaanhuis "Tussen tijd en eeuwigheid" in Amersfoort Category:Painters