With the Birds, 1928

Prior to the WWI, Prosper De Troyer was heavily influenced by Rik Wouters and Brabant Fauvism. During the war he became associated with the Antwerp Modernism that revolved around the writer Paul van Ostaijen and which was causing quite a furore. Like his friends Paul Joostens, Jos Léonard and Jozef Peeters, Futurism led him to abstract art. But he also abandoned this fairly quickly too, turning to a naive-looking narrative expressionism which was stylistically closer to the German and Dutch ‘New Objectivity’ of the time than to the work of Constant Permeke or Gustave De Smet. The 1928 work With the Birds is a good example of this. In highly simplified and monumental forms, De Troyer tells a simple story of the ties between man and nature, a theme that recurred regularly in his work at that time.