Lou Loeber (Amsterdam 1894-1983 Laren) lived in her parental villa in Laren for almost her entire life from 2001 onwards. She was the eldest in a family of seven children. Her socially committed and art-loving parents allowed Lou to take painting lessons with Co Breman (1865-1938) and August Legras (1864-1915). She then attended the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam and became fascinated by the avant-garde of Le Courbusier, de Stijl and Bauhaus by Toon Verhoef (1893-1979). She also started working abstract figuratively even though the academy had not trained her in that.
The socialist Lou Loeber created art that had to be accessible to everyone, 'general human' as she called it. With an objective, cubist visual language and simple, geometrically determined color areas in bright colors, she wanted to respond to the viewer's mood without completely letting go of visible reality. She found completely abstract art elitist, and she chose a highly abstracted reality as her starting point. She found Mondrian's strict views, which used only primary colors and non-colours, too rigid. She preferred the looser approach of the Bauhaus. Lou Loeber's harmonious compositions are colorful and have a high aesthetic quality. She always made multiple 'prints' of her works to keep the price down.
In addition to being a painter, she was also active as a glass painter, draftsman, etcher, lino cutter, graphic artist and illustrator. Work by Lou Loeber is owned by, among others, the Singer Museum in Laren. Loeber's work is to a certain extent related to De Stijl. The Singer and the Centraal Museum, among others, have her work in their collections. In 1927 she traveled to the Bauhaus in Dessau and to Berlin. In the same year, the 'Socialist Artists Circle' (SKK) was founded, she became a member and remained so until 1929, she was also a member of the Association of Visual Artists Laren-Blaricum. In 1931 she married the socialist artist and astrologer Dirk Koning (1888-1978).
When the Second World War broke out, Lou refused to become a member of the Kultuurkamer and served in the resistance and hardly had time to paint anymore.
