Floris Jespers

Congolese women's at the market

signed: Jespers 1952

Size 82 X 63 cm.

Price: 6,000 €

If you are you interested in adding a Jespers to your collection or have any question please send me an email and I'll get in touch with you, or call +32 3 227.35.40.

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Floris Jespers, (1889-1965). Belgian.

Jespers abandoned his training in Antwerp to paint landscapes, but in order to live, he played the violoncello for some fifteen years in music-halls and theatre orchestras. After World War I, he energetically took part in the modernist movement of the young Antwerp artists. .An well-established and successful artist, he was flooded by official orders, between 1952 and 1958 and was sent repeatedly to the Belgian Congo. He returned with a unique style, which he distanced from the Africanism of an amateur ethnologist. Jespers was fascinated by his ideas of the African woman.

After WWI he energetically took part in the modernist movement of the young Antwerp Artists. In the 1920s, he became a virtuoso of a difficult technique of painting under glass, then designed tapestry cartoons, shown at the International Exhibitions of Paris (1937) and New York (1939). In 1951-52, he travelled in the Belgian Congo, where he returned in 1954-56 and 1956-57. For Jespers, women resumed all Africa. These he painted in different manners, from a stylized realism to rhythmic angular forms, where interesting lines formed a coloured mosaic.

” I am at this moment living in a small, humble village in Katanga – just a few trees and some sliding shadows of women going home and carrying on their mysticism in infinite silence and solemnity. They walk in succession, floating swans alike, up to their “Cite Indigene” a world of beauty - of mystery. I am not interested in seeing nor knowing which tribe has a flatter nose, more prominent cheek bones or thinner or thicker lips. It is the infinite mystery, the compassionate erotic eyes and the movements that make them all so pretty.

So, in my new work I eliminate every detail – everything that could be surplus, a picture to the Congo – I want to only put the abstract, for which you need to know much and to have seen much, very much, before you can express it.”




Jespers was a Cubist and is considered by many to be as accomplished as Pablo Picasso. He sought to depict the spirit and the soul of African women, their ‘mysticism’ as he described it. This looks musical to me as you can see rhythm in the interplay of the image. The women look like music notes, not unlike the work of Jackson Pollock.
Freddie Booker-Carson, collector

‘In my new work I eliminate every detail – everything that could be surplus, a picture to the Congo – I want only to put the abstract.’
Floris Jespers

Exhibitions with works of Floris Jespers:
In 1999 an important exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, in Ostend, Belgium.
Seeing Africa. Tate Modern
22 July – 29 October 2006

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If you are you interested in adding a Jespers to your collection or have any question please send me an email and I'll get in touch with you, or call +32 3 227.35.40.

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