Victor Servranckx, one of the pioneers of abstract art, was born in Diegem on 26 June 1897, in the Molenstraat; the family later lived on the Haachtsesteenweg. As a child he was already making strange little figures of clay, wood and iron, and his teacher Materne often had to call him back ‘from dreamland’. He studied at the Brussels Academy under Constant Montald and worked as a colour designer at the Peters-Lacroix wallpaper factory in Haren.
In his work you can recognise the Brabant landscape, the railway lines and tunnels between Haren and Diegem and the first factories of the area. In 1926 he designed a Cubist building on the Haachtsesteenweg for the greengrocer Karel Panneels, then unique in Diegem. Panneels also bought two of his canvases and received three closely written pages of explanation with them, without being much the wiser. Servranckx died in Vilvoorde on 11 December 1965 and, as he wished, was buried in Diegem, where a street bears his name.
Other artists
Other artists also lived in Diegem: the painter Emile Salu (born 1896), the marine painter Rik Bourguignon, the composer Arthur Varendonck (1913-1975), the sculptor Pierre Duquesne, the novelist Paul Horsch and the graphic artist Arthur Peeters (born 1922).