Model for the Tomb of the Writer Paul van Ostaijen

Oscar Jespers and his brother, the painter Floris Jespers, belonged to the avant-garde movement centred on the poet and art critic Paul van Ostaijen in Antwerp. Initially Oscar Jespers experimented with a purely abstract visual idiom, but this gave way to a constructive expressionism after 1921. He here sought to synthesise elements of primitive art, especially African art, with Cubism…

Oscar Jespers and his brother, the painter Floris Jespers, belonged to the avant-garde movement centred on the poet and art critic Paul van Ostaijen in Antwerp. Initially Oscar Jespers experimented with a purely abstract visual idiom, but this gave way to a constructive expressionism after 1921. He here sought to synthesise elements of primitive art, especially African art, with Cubism and Expressionism. The 1932 Memorial Stone for Paul van Ostaijen is carved out of bluestone and depicts a sleeping angel. The monument stands in the Schoonselhof municipal cemetery in Antwerp. Jespers made a preliminary study of it in plaster and bronze.