Alley

Mar Diemèl, actually Marinus Cornelus Wilhelmus Diemel, attended evening courses in drawing, oil painting and modelling between 1919 and 1921, organised by Cris Agterberg, who came to Utrecht. While still at school, he was employed in a print shop to study lettering, graphic design and advertising techniques. He soon enrolled in an evening course in art history and theory taught by Willem Vogelsang. In 1928, the artist moved to the suburban village of Groenekan, where he spent the rest of his life. The illustration work done in the 1920s secured him a permanent contract with the publishing house Sint Gregoriushuis from 1930. In 20 years, he made hundreds of drawings for it on biblical, children's and sports themes. At his first exhibition at Utrecht's Quintijn gallery in 1935, Diemèl presented paintings that referred to masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age. Baroque reminiscences marked the style of the works of the 1930s on a par with the aesthetics of magic realism. In 1935, Diemèl co-founded the Jan van Scorel Group, and in 1940, he became a teacher at the Artibus school. A year later, the Sint Gregorushuis Publishing House was closed down, and any artistic activity was subject to control by the Nazi Chamber of Culture. Diemèl took the change in the spelling of his surname, accented in French from 1942, as an anti-German manifesto. Many expressionistic vedutas were produced during this period, including Wijk C and Zaułek [The Alley] from the Szczecin collection. They immortalise a part of Utrecht that owes its name to the French occupation during the Napoleonic era (1811-1814), when the difficult-to-pronounce Dutch names of the districts were replaced by successive letters of the alphabet. Much of this housing has not survived to the present day. The former slums, often of medieval origin, have been replaced by an orderly modernist structure.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak