Naakt, 1938

Considered to be the leading artist of Flemish Expressionism, Constant Permeke was a renowned painter and sculptor who drew his inspiration from the working classes and various landscapes. The majority of Permeke’s outputs were created between the two world wars and often focussed on the strife of the peasant population and working people; one of his most famous paintings, The Two Sailor Brothers, is a fitting example of the era in which his work was centred around fishermen and the sea. Periods of Permeke’s life were more comfortable than others, and he began to paint landscapes of the places he had lived, such as the mountainsides he frequented during his stay in Vevey, Switzerland. Eventually, Permeke tried his hand at sculpture, and the figures would often denote the human experience on an individual, existential basis – Niobe is perhaps his most notable sculpture. Unique among Flemish Expressionists, Permeke was the only artist of his kind to use charcoal as a medium for his monumental drawings; his paintings were also formed from a dark palette to highlight the bleak and dark times that his subjects were experiencing.