Theodore “Dick” De Groot
The Dutch/American painter and sculptor Theodore “Dick” De Groot had three solo exhibits at SFA Gallery while in his early to late nineties. SFA Gallery now represents his estate.
Born in 1920, in Scheveningen, a beach suburb of The Hague in the Netherlands, De Groot trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts during World War II and then took post-graduate classes in sculpture. Several of his teachers were Bauhaus-trained or influenced and their philosophy left an indelible mark on his work.
After the war, he worked for newspapers, doing political cartoons and a daily cartoon for children. Cold War fears of Russian aggression in Europe prompted De Groot to emigrate first to Canada and then to the United States, along with his wife and their five children.
He initially found work painting large outdoor advertisements, but soon began painting commissioned murals, many of which still exist in public spaces today, such as the Union County Courthouse in Union, NJ, and sculpture projects such as the massive gilded bas-relief adorning the façade of the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland.
In the 1960s De Groot made the first prototypes of Lath Art pictures and set up a factory near Frenchtown, NJ to produce them. He partnered with New York-based Austin Productions to market and distribute the Lath Art, while also making modernist sculpture prototypes for them to produce and sell.
The Lath Art pieces were very popular, and the venture became a huge success. When De Groot retired from business in the 80s, he returned to painting full-time. Working in a surrealist style influenced by the Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978), his paintings went through a long distillation process wherein De Groot gradually eliminated extraneous details, leaving only the most essential elements.
Common themes run through his entire body of work, such as the vital urban environment, black humor, and loneliness.
While many Dick’s paintings have the feel of real places, people and things, they are actually “taken apart and put back together” as De Groot says, meaning they are “invented things and only exist for the artist to play with.”
In an interview De Groot once described his process:
"I refuse to paint sure-sellers such as the cute, the corny, the romantic, the sentimental, the narrative. My favorite subject is the contemporary American urban scene, which I find exciting and uniquely suited to my taste. I like to use clues that give an illusion of space, or only a suggestion of it around the corner or beyond the hill."
"The opposites of mass and space, of volumes and voids intrigue me. They are the basis of my compositions. The urban landscape is rich in geometric planes that can be arranged in expressive combinations of color and light-dark values. I want to see each element in my work in harmony with the total. That includes clouds, traffic signs, telephone poles etc. I will change the subject to suit my purpose. Things are moved, added or left out in a process of translating reality into a painted and new reality."
