100 – Engelbert L'Hoëst

In 1919, on 15 September, Engelbert L'Hoëst was born a stone's throw from Museum Flehite, on the Coninckstraat. Now, a hundred years after his birth, Museum Flehite commemorates the colourist and expressionist, who died in 2008, with a hundred of his works, on display until 26 January 2020.

Previously unseen work

Specially for this exhibition, former museum director Onno Maurer had the honour of selecting a hundred works from the private collection of widow Heleen L'Hoëst. The selection consists largely of previously unseen early work (1940–1960). During this period, Engelbert L'Hoëst (Amersfoort, 15 September 1919 – Soesterberg, 9 December 2008) worked from his free imagination, creating primitive and abstract art in which he used colour as a means of expression. The influence of Flemish Expressionism and Cobra — the artists' group that included Karel Appel and Corneille, among others — is clearly recognisable.

"I have no style, because every moment in life is different." (Engelbert L'Hoëst)

Villa Pictura on the Soester Eng

Engelbert L'Hoëst grew up without his parents and was raised in a foster family. At the age of fifteen, he showed a portfolio of drawings to the Soest painter A.C. Sleeswijk. Impressed by his talent, Sleeswijk took the young L'Hoëst into his home, Villa Pictura on the Soester Eng. There Engelbert received a thorough classical training in painting and became a member of the Amersfoort artists' society De Ploegh. His mentor Alexander Sleeswijk died during the Hunger Winter and left L'Hoëst his house and studio. With a wide view over the fields of the Soester Eng, he created impressions of evening skies, still lifes, landscapes with fiery cloud formations and portraits.

Colourist and expressionist

Under the influence of modern painting, particularly Cobra, L'Hoëst arrived after the war at colourful and expressive paintings. For a large part of the post-war years, L'Hoëst lived and worked in countries such as Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal. Like Van Gogh, he was drawn to the Mediterranean light of southern Europe. He became increasingly a true colourist and expressionist. From the 1980s, the Dutch river landscape became the central theme in his paintings and works on paper.

A second life as a painter

In 1959, Villa Pictura burned down, and much of L'Hoëst's oeuvre was lost. From 1960, he began a second life as a painter in Soesterberg, where he would remain until his death in 2008. L'Hoëst had major retrospective exhibitions at Singer Laren (1989) and Museum Flehite (2006 and posthumously in 2011).

Portraits of L'Hoëst by Modlmayr

A special addition to the exhibition are the portraits by artist Maria-Margaretha Modlmayr. Over the course of three years, she made no fewer than forty portraits of L'Hoëst — drawings, watercolours, sketches, oil paintings and chalk, from his earliest years as an artist to shortly before his death.

Maria Modlmayr (1967, Hopfen am See, Germany) studied painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1992 to 1999. She is known as an artist whose work focuses primarily on the human face. This part of the human body plays the greatest role in any encounter with another person. Much can be read in a face — it is not just about beauty and age; a facial expression reflects the effects of external and internal processes. In Modlmayr's work, the focus is not on the recognition of a face, but on the approach to the moving, fluid, variable nature of a face.

Author: Annebeth Felet