Son of a house painter, he started his career learning how to make stained glass in a shop in Utrecht. An example of his later stained glass work is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Hoge Veluwe, Netherlands.
After having met Mondriaan and van Doesburg and having founded the Stijl movement with them, his style went completely abstract, like Mondriaan's. But soon he started to disagree with Mondriaan and went back to almost abstract paintings, based on real images. His painting Tryptich is an example, in which he transformed sketches of a mine in Spain into seemingly abstract shapes. When he worked on the the St Hubertus Mansion, he painted De Ruiter (the Rider).
In 1919-1920 he created the interior design for Jachtslot St Hubertus, also on the Hoge Veluwe estate. Jachtslot St Hubertus was designed by Berlage. In 1930, he was commissioned by Jo de Leeuw, owner of the prestigious Dutch department store Metz & Co. to design interiors, window packaging, branding and advertising. For these print materials van der Leck developed a rectilinear geometrically constructed alphabet. In 1941, he designed a typeface based on this alphabet for the avant garde magazine Flax.Architype van der Leck, a digital revival of that face by David Quary and Freda Sack of The Foundry, was released in 1994.
References
Haley, Allen. Type: Hot Designers Make Cool Fonts. Rockport Publishers Inc, Gloucester; 1998. ISBN 1-56496-317-9
Hoek, Els, Marleen Blokhuis, Ingrid Goovaerts, Natalie Kamphuys, et al. Theo Van Doesburg: Oeuvre Catalogus.Centraal Museum: 2000. ISBN 90-6868-255-5.
Toos van Kooten (ed.). Bart van der Leck. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, 1994 (in Dutch).
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