Jean Leppien | Art Store

VAN HAM Art Estate presents"Jean Leppien"

The German-French painter Jean Leppien (1910 - 1991) is one of the best-known representatives of geometric abstraction in post-war modernism. As an artist in exile, Leppien drew on his experiences both from his Bauhaus period in Dessau and from his encounters with art abstrait in Paris. The offer on Jean Leppien provides all art lovers and collectors with an exciting insight into the artist's oeuvre.

The artistic estate has been represented by Van Ham Art Estate since 2020. Further information on the VAN HAM Art Estate can be found on the official homepage.

The paintings of the 1940s and 1950s are particularly characterised by curved and straight lines. Abstract forms and coloured small areas structure the picture surface and create an expressive rhythm.

In the following phase, the painting style changes, the colour takes on a material character and irregularly delimited areas dominate. In the 1960s Jean Leppien began a series on the African Komo culture, inspired by his friendship with the painter Jean Deyrolle. An impasto painting technique and earthy dark colours are characteristic of the paintings of this work phase. Compact surfaces replace isolated lines and form material pictorial fields.

In the 1970s and 1980s, serial themes such as crosses, predellas and UFOs appear in his oeuvre.

Between 1967 and 1976 Leppien worked on the UFO series, which show luminous circular discs with concentric rings above horizontal colour stripes. The UFO works are named after the English expression "unidentified flying object" for extraterrestrial flying objects.

Parallel to the UFO series, the Kreuzform paintings were created from 1970 to 1976. Numerous works are created in which the cross appears over the entire surface or as a line, singly or arranged in groups. Grey tones and muted colours are used for the paintings.

At the end of the 1970s, the Predella paintings were created, which structure the pictorial space into an above and below. The predellas in the lower third, named after altar elements, are accentuated with colour and correspond with the crosses, squares and textiles in the upper third. Leppien allows the canvas to appear partially untreated as an independent surface structure.

The late work of the painter Jean Leppien in the 1980s is characterised by the extreme reduction of colour surfaces with isolated accents. The picture collages consist of painting rags, scraps of canvas, mail bags and strings, which are laid over the pictures as lines in an optically refined way. The focus is on the materiality of the painting, which is influenced not least by his wife Suzanne Leppien, who trained in the weaving class at the Bauhaus.

Find results about the artist on the art market in our artist database:

Auction results

For more information on the artist, please visit Jean Leppien's official homepage::

Jean Leppien