Gustave De Smet

Gustave Franciscus De Smet, also known as Gustaaf De Smet and Gust De Smet was a Belgian painter and printmaker. Together with Constant Permeke and Frits Van den Berghe, he was one of the founders of Flemish Expressionism. The works of the Flemish expressionists bear a stylistic relationship to German expressionism through their use of distorted forms, coloration and dynamic compositions or show cubist elements in their sense of balance, synthesis and construction. Before the World War I, these artists had been part of the second group of the Latem School, a loose group of artists working at various times in the rural Lys river area around Sint-Martens-Latem, south of Ghent. They aimed to innovate Belgian art by turning away from bourgeois art and drawing inspiration from nature or the live of workers and farmers. Key members of the group fled Belgium at the start of World War I to countries where they were exposed to latest Modernist art trends. De Smet fled to the Netherlands, where his development of an expressionist idiom was influenced by the Bergen School, the first expressionist art movement in the Netherlands as well as the German expressionists.