Jo Delahaut ( Vottem-lez-Liège 1911 - Schaerbeek 1992)

The Painter Jo Delahaut is one of the emblematic figures in geometric abstraction in Belgium. A plastic artist who studied at the University of Liège, he is a Professor in Art History at the same university. Jo Delahaut started to produce expressionist paintings in 1940. Particularly influenced by the works of the painter Auguste Herbin (1882-1960), he became the only painter in1946-1947 to approach abstraction with a hitherto unknown radicalism.

He became a member of the "Réalités Nouvelles" in Paris in 1946, member of "La Jeune Peinture Belge" in Brussels in 1947, together with Mig Quinet (1908), Louis van Lindt (1909-1950), Gaston Bertrand (1910-1994), Marc Mendelson (1915), Anne Bonnet (1908-1960) and founder member of the Belgian group "Art abstrait" (Abstract Art) in 1952. He was co-author of the "Manifeste Spatialiste" in 1954 together with Pol Bury (1922) among others.

His geometric abstraction was a way of awakening the mechanisms of intellectual activity, a meta-language addressed to the spirit. Feeding the ancestral dialectic relationship between form and colour, he used plane geometry in his work because he says, it is, "The most representative of man (…), intuitively comprehensible even for those who are not au fait with the theory".

The work Suggestion n°1 , from the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, translates the different stages of the expression of the dynamics of pure form into an utterly purified chromatic universe.
Jo Delahaut was also an eminent professor at Institut National de Sciences de l'Art et de la Scène (The National Institute of Sciences and the Stage) and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et des Arts Visuels (National College of Architecture and Visual Arts) called "La Cambre" in Brussels.