Charley Toorop “in Full Swing”
The Artist and Her Work
During the Second World War in the Netherlands
MA Thesis, August 2015
Master’s Programme Arts and Culture: Dutch Art Graduate School of Humanities
Sara Boccardo
Supervisor: Dr. G.M. Langfeld
Contents
Introduction ... 5
Research Question ... 5
Methodology and Literature ... 8
Structure of the work ... 12
Charley Toorop within the Artistic Environment of the Netherlands Between the 1910s and the 1940s ... 15
The Bremmergroep ... 15
Toorop and Abstract Art ... 18
Toorop and the Many Faces of Neo-Realism ... 22
Art Dealers and Buyers ... 28
Politics, Religion and Mysticism: the Life of Charley Toorop during the Second World War ... 33
The German Occupation ... 33
Cultural Life in the Occupied Netherlands ... 34
Life as an Artist under Foreign Ruling ... 38
Charley Toorop: the Artist and Her Relationship with Politics ... 40
Charley Toorop: the Dissident Artist ... 42
Politics and Mysticism: Charley Toorop and Her Research for the Deeper Dimension of Things ... 46
Working “in Full Swing” during the German Occupation ... 49
The Work of Charley Toorop during the Second World War ... 53
The Years Leading to the War ... 55
The Beginning of the Occupation ... 57
Icons of War ... 60
The Still Lifes ... 63
The Self-Portraits ... 67 War is Over ... 69 Conclusion ... 73 Figures ... 77 Bibliography ... 99
Introduction
Charley Toorop once said "alles leeft immers in alles”, “after all, everything lives in everything”.1 It was 1940, war had just broken out and the city of Rotterdam had just been destroyed by German bombing: the Netherlands was to fall under occupation. What would become of the country? People would lose all they have, those they hold dear, their freedom. What would become of Charley Toorop and her colleagues? From November 1941 art, and any other sort of cultural expression, would become institutionalised and controlled by the vigilant eye of the Kultuurkamer, the occupying force's way of making sure that culture would not deviate from the prescribed lines. Charley Toorop never became a member of the Kultuurkamer, despite this making her life and career more diffi-cult. How did the years of the occupation contribute to her artistic production? If, after all, “(...) everything lives in everything”, Toorop would not stop working dur-ing the war years, and the experience of the conflict and occupation would be reflected in her work throughout the period.
Research Question
It is an exceptional and all too rare privilege to be able to research and write about a female artist: it is all too easy to forget how male-dominated art history is. It is even more interesting in this case to be able to discuss the work of Char-ley Toorop. However, more important than her gender, was her position as an artist living in Holland during a time of great hardship and sorrow for her country (as for many other others). Her story is one of a woman who wanted to stay clear of the institutions and rules imposed by the occupying forces, whilst still
1 Interview “Ik ben geen pessimiste” (De Telegraaf), July 31, 1940, quoted in
Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 148.
not leaving her beloved Holland and quietly working (though, it must be said, not necessarily in a ground-breaking way) against German oppression.
Copious material is available and easily accessible to art historians of any language on the leading artists of the Dutch Golden Age. However, while this was indeed an age of splendour in Dutch history, this is no reason to pay less attention to other moments of history and art history that, even if not as prominent, are certainly of great importance if one wishes to obtain a thorough understanding of Dutch culture and of art history. It is therefore a pity for an art-ist such as Charley Toorop to continue to be known almost exclusively by the Dutch-speaking part of the world. Her story is one that remains of relevance even today. Not only was she a successful female painter, a single mother and someone who was struck by illness, straight after the liberation from Nazi op-pression. During her career Charley Toorop was part of a circle of artists (and friends) who are all significant for their contribution to Dutch and European art, in one way or another.
The title of the interview that De Telegraaf, published in July 1940 reads “Ik ben geen pessimiste”, ”I am not a pessimist”. The interview goes on by re-porting the words of Toorop, and reads “The first day [after the bombing of Rot-terdam] I was very shocked. I got over it, now Iʼm working again, in full swing”.2 Looking at the work carried out by the painter in these years, a large part of it is represented by trees in blossom and various kinds of fruit and flower composi-tions. However, at the same time, she produced a few self-portraits, which are telling depictions of her attitude and inner self during this time. More importantly, Toorop started again to work “in full swing” on more challenging material after the bombing of Rotterdam: her famous depictions of the horror of the invasion are subtle though powerful in their expression of her political position.
During the thirties, after working and further developing her skills as an artist, Charley Toorop had developed a distinct personal painting style. By the beginning of the forties, the German occupation necessitated a change in the
2
Ibidem. Original text: “De eerste dagen was ik zeer geschokt. Ik kwam er overheen, nu werk ik weer, volop”.
painterʼs artistic production. While before the war Toorop focused on finding commissions for painted portraits, during the years of the occupation the por-traits she produced were often drawings that she would only make in order to repay the person who was hosting her for their kindness.3 However, during the occupation Toorop still produced occasional striking and iconic portraits, which would be seen as emblems of that period. Nonetheless, her painterly production of this time largely consists of still lifes, in particular flowers, fruit and trees. In-deed, the genre of natural still life would remain the most painted one by Toorop after the end of the war.
All these aspects of Toorop's life will be discussed further in order to help understand in what ways the work she produced during the war could be considered as powerful and distinctive as her previous work. What did the breakout of the war and the German invasion mean for her as an artist? What sort of influence did the war years have on her work? As she refused to become part of the Kultuurkamer, what did this entail for her work and for her career. How did this change her choice of subject matter for painting? What was her at-titude toward the political situation and in what ways did her work comment on it? How was Toorop still able to work and live off her work despite her not ad-hering to the imposition of the Kultuurkamer?
As well as attempting to draw attention to the importance of this painter in general, ultimately, this research wants to try and particularly support the validi-ty of the work produced by Toorop in the period between 1940 and 1945. In fact, while Tooropʼs work of that period has been often exhibited as an iconic representation of wartime, it has been said that the artistic production of this time did not represent a great moment in the career if any artist.4 Therefore this dissertation will consider Tooropʼs artistic production of the time in relation to the obstacles that the war posed to her career. Can those years be considered
3
Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 156.
4
Claartje Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer: geschiedenis en herinnering (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2014), 30.
as a period in which Toorop still managed to work, as she herself put it, “in full swing”?
Methodology and Literature
In order to find an answer to the above research questions, this study will be based on the secondary literature available on the artist and on the history of the Netherlands during the Second World War. In addition, primary sources will be examined such as: excerpts from her letters (reported and translated from the secondary sources) as well as commentary on her oeuvre (mainly the works produced during the thirties and the forties), which can be taken as evidence of her beliefs and standpoint as a painter. Her works will be explained and ana-lysed as mirrors of their own time, that is, as pictures of the historical moment lived by the Netherlands in the years of the Second World War and of the life therefore lived by Toorop. The formal aspects of Tooropʼs paintings and their history will also be taken into account in order to have a complete and clear im-age of the work produced by the artist in that period.
As far as the sources are concerned, one article written by Virginia Pitts Rembert (2005) and the small volume written by Jaap Bremer (1995) represent the only two sources written in English on the painter.5 While Pittsʼs article is a short biography of Toorop, Bremerʼs book originates from the Kröller-Müller Mu-seum and focuses on the works by the painter that are present in their collec-tion. These publications will only be taken into account to a limited extent, as they both rely for source material on the more detailed monographs published in Dutch. The first one of these to mention is certainly the one written by her close friend Abraham Hammacher in 1952, while Toorop was still alive.6 Before then,
5
Virginia Pitts Rembert, “Charley Toorop”, Woman's Art Journal 26, no. 2 (2005): 26-32. Jaap Bremer, Charley Toorop : works in the Kröller-Müller Mu-seum collection, trans. Ruth Koenig (Otterlo : Kröller-Müller MuMu-seum, 1995).
6
Abraham M. Hammacher, Charley Toorop: een beschouwing van haar leven en werk, een lijst van werken, 46 afbeeldingen van schilderijen, (Rotterdam :
Hammacher had already written the foreword to the catalogue for the solo exhi-bition organised in her honour, which travelled around the Netherlands in 1951.7 In addition, the interviews published by her contemporaries Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder (one in 1930 and another one in 1933) have been useful in order to place Charley Toorop within the artistic context of the time.8 In order to find more specific information about Hendricus Petrus Bremmer, “art pedagogue” and one of the most important figures in Tooropʼs career, the monographic publications by Hildelies Balk (from 2004 and 2006, the latter writ-ten with Lynne Richards) have been consulted.9
Looking at more recent sources, the books written on the painter by Nico J. Brederoo and by Marja Bosma, respectively published in 1982 and 2008, rep-resent the major sources of biographical information.10 Brederooʼs work, is con-figured as a biography of Toorop, written with the help of her family, and in-cludes a catalogue of her oeuvre, complete with reproductions, compiled in col-laboration with the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. In that same year the Centraal Museum also organised an exhibition dedicated to the painter, for which Bosma wrote the catalogue.11 Later on, in 2008, the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum
W.L. & J. Brusse, 1952). Before then Hammacher had also published an arti-cle on his friend: “Charley Toorop”, in Forum, Maandschrift voor letteren en kunst, no. 1 (1932).
7 Abraham M. Hammacher et al, Charley Toorop (Den Haag:
Gemeentemuse-um; Amsterdam: Stedelijk MuseGemeentemuse-um; Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1951).
8 Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, “Een gesprek met Charley
Toorop”, in De werkende vrouw, no. 3 (March 1930): 66-70. Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, “De Nieuwe Zakelijkheid in de Schilderkunst. Een dialectische beschouwing”, In Forum 2, no. 4 (1933): 292-303.
9
Hildelies Balk, De Kunstpaus. H.P. Bremmer 1871-1956, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2004. Hildelies Balk and Lynne Richards, “A Finger in Every Pie: H. P. Bremmer and His Influence on the Dutch Art World in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”, in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the His-tory of Art 32, no. 2/3 (2006): 182-217.
10
Nico J. Brederoo, Charley Toorop, Leven en werken (Utrecht: Meu-lenhoff/Landshoff, Centraal Museum, 1982).
11
Marja Bosma, Charley Toorop 1891-1955, (Utrecht : Centraal Museum ; Stuttgart : Württembergischer Kunstverein, 1982).
in Rotterdam also organised an exhibition on Toorop with the title Vooral geen principes!, and on that occasion, once again, Bosma wrote the catalogue.12
As far as the years of the occupation are concerned, there was a need to obtain more specific literature. First of all, an important publication is Ham-macherʼs Het leven bloeit op de ruïnes, published secretly in 1944, while the war was still very much taking place. The essay relates to the work carried out during the years of the occupation by Charley Toorop and by her friend and col-league Henk Chabot.13 Because Hammacher is the author, this essay is particu-larly interesting since in it one can find both a factual as well as personal piece of writing on the painter. The letters quoted in Brederooʼs 1982 book and the in-terview with Toorop published by De Telegraaf in 1940 are also very important in gaining insight into the life of the painter in those years.14
In order to gain knowledge about the influence of the political situation on the arts in the Netherlands during the occupation the book written by Hans Mulder Kunst in crisis en bezetting (1978) and the recent publication by Claartje Wesselink Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer give a comprehensive impression of the Dutch cultural and political environment of wartime.15 Furthermore, the online source of the Verzetsmuseum (the Dutch Resistance Museum in Am-sterdam) and the publication Vliegveld Bergen NH 1938-1945 (2001) have been consulted in order to gain knowledge on more factual and specific historical in-
12 Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen,
2008).
13 Abraham M. Hammacher, Het leven bloeit op de ruïnes, (Den Haag: Final
Stage Press, 1944). More information on the two painters can be found in Jaap Bremer, A.M. Hammacher and Kees Vollemans, Henk Chabot en Char-ley Toorop red. Jisca Bijlsma, trans. Ruth Koenig, (Rotterdam: Chabot Muse-um, 1999). For specific information on Chabit see: Cees Doelman, Hendrik Chabot, (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1967).
14 Excerpts from the letters written by Toorop are constantly quoted by
Breder-oo. Parts of the interview published on De Telegraaf on July 30, 1940 are quoted in Marja Bosma, Vooral Geen Principies!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 148-149.
15
Hans Mulder, Kunst in crisis en bezetting : een onderzoek naar de houding van Nederlandse kunstenaars in de periode 1930-1945, (Utrecht : Het Spectrum, 1978). Claartje Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer: geschiedenis en herinnering, 2014.
formation on the years of the occupation. The book De Nederlandse Pers en Duitsland 1930-1939 by Fran van Vree (1989) has been useful in understanding more about the reception of Germany in the thirties in the Netherlands through the information spread by the Dutch press.16 Finally, information on the situation of the arts in Germany during the Nazi period has been gained from Stefanie Barronʼs catalogue to the 1991 exhibition Degenerate Art. The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.17
Moreover, other publications of a more general approach on Dutch art have been consulted. In particular, Blotkampʼs catalogue for the 1999 exhibition on Dutch realistic art between 1925 and 1945, Cor Blokʼs volume on Dutch art produced on the 20th century and Geurt Imanse's catalogue for the 1981 exhibi-tion at the Utrecht Centraal Museum Van Gogh tot Cobra: Nederlandse schil-derkunst 1880-1950.18 These volumes were a useful source of information in looking at the wider picture of artistic production in the Netherlands during the period. Finally, Irene Guentherʼs chapter on New Objectivity during the Weimar Republic, from Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995), helped in
16 “Verzets Museum/ the Netherlands”, Verzetsmuseum, last access date July
16, 2015,
http://www.verzetsmuseum.org/museum/en/tweede-wereldoorlog/kingdomofthenetherlands/thenetherlands/. Schuurman, Johan Hendrik. Vliegveld Bergen NH 1938-1945. Bergen NH: De Coogh, 2001. Frank Van Vree, De Nederlandse Pers en Duitsland 1930-1939, Groningen: Histori-sche Uitgeverij, 1989.
17 Stefanie Barron, „1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany“, in
De-generate Art. The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, edited by Stefan-ie Barron, 9-23, exh. cat Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February-May 1991.
18
Carel Blotkamp, et al., Magie en zakelijkheid : realistische schilderkunst in Nederland 1925-1945, ed. Ype Koopmans, (Zwolle: Waanders; Arnhem: Museum voor Moderne Kunst, 1999). Cor Blok et al., Nederlandse kunst vanaf 1900, ed. Henk Bas, et al., (Utrecht : Stichting Educatieve Omroep Teleac, 1994). Geurt Imanse et al., Van Gogh tot Cobra : Nederlandse schilderkunst 1880-1950, ex. cat. Utrecht: Centraal Museum (1981), Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/Landshoff, 1981.
getting better knowledge on the origin of New Objectivity and Magical Realism, the artistic trends to which Toorop is usually connected.19
Structure of the work
The first chapter of the thesis will give an overview of the artistic environment of the Netherlands during the decades of the thirties and forties during the 20th century. The group portraits Bremmergroep (1936-1938, fig. 1) and Maaltijd der Vrienden (1932-1933) will be taken as a starting point with which to draw a pic-ture of the artistic circles that developed in the Netherlands in those years. The thesis will also discuss the network of artists, art professionals and patrons that Toorop surrounded herself with during these years. Beside the many neo-realist painters she was in contact with, her contact with abstract painters, such as Piet Mondriaan, will also be discussed in order to bring together the connections and differences between Dutch abstract and realistic art produced within Toorop's circle of friends and acquaintances. Ultimately, this chapter intends to show Tooropʼs work in the general perspective of the artistic environment in which her style developed and matured.
The second chapter of the thesis will give an idea of the historical situa-tion in which Toorop was living during the years of the Second World War. Start-ing from the occupation of the Netherlands, the focus will move to the cultural life in the country, to the environment of the Kultuurkamer and to the definition of “sane” and “degenerate” art. Tooropʼs political attitude will also be considered in order to better understand the kind of life she chose to live during the German occupation. It will be shown how the painter was still able to work and live off her profession despite her not becoming a member of the Kultuurkamer. This chapter will aim to lay the foundation for later discussion, in order to gain insight
19
Irene Guenther, “Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 33.
into the life of the painter, her achievements and difficulties during the wartime, her political opinion and her mysticism. Ultimately, this section aims to draw an image of the character and of the sensibility of the painter and to show Toorop as an artist who was capable of conveying great intensity of expressiveness in her subjects.
The third chapter will take into account what has been discussed in the previous two chapters, namely: the painterʼs style, the artistic environment in which she was living, the life and difficulties she experienced during the years of the war and her firm reaction to it, her response to the threat through art and by working “in full swing”. This chapter will focus primarily on her painting, and on the work produced immediately before and during the war years. These works will be analysed and linked to the historical events of those years with the inten-tion of showing in detail what the breakout of the war and the occupainten-tion meant for Tooropʼs work.
It has often happened that in art-historical overviews the artistic experi-ence of the Second World War in the Netherlands has been dismissed alto-gether. In pointing this out, in her book Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer, Claartje Wesselink, commented that the war years did not represent the heyday of the career of any Dutch artist.20 While the cultural world did indeed experi-ence a period of stagnation because of the oppressive environment to which it was subjected, this thesis will show that this view cannot be considered entirely true. More specifically, this thesis poses the following question: to what extent is this accusation applicable in the case of Charley Toorop, whose war-time artis-tic production proved to be no less representative of her as an artist than her previous works (if not even more so)?
20
See Claartje Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer: geschiedenis en herinnering (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2014), 30. “Geen van deze kunstenaars (...) beleefde tijdens de bezettingsjaren een bloeitijd (...).”, wrote Wesselink.
Charley Toorop within the Artistic Environment of the Netherlands Be-tween the 1910s and the 1940s
This chapter will serve as a general background to the life of Charley Toorop, with specific insights into her circle of acquaintances in the environment of the arts. Her connections with artists, collectors, art dealers, museum directors, cu-rators and art critics will be brought out in order to provide a general idea of the kind of environment in which Charley Toorop was active as an artist during the interbellum period and the years of the Second World War.
The Bremmergroep
Hendricus Petrus Bremmer can be seen as a fatherly figure for Toorop. She had great respect for him and given his role as art critic and teacher, as art collector and dealer, connoisseur and publisher, she relied on him for support in busi-ness matters.21 Since 1896 until the 1930s, Bremmer worked as an art appreci-ation teacher, holding classes for groups of well-off ladies in the main cities of the Netherlands, alongside writing about art.22 During these classes his aim was to talk about contemporary art appreciation, and to let his pupils get acquainted with the work of contemporary artists, which he showed, bought and got others to buy. He and Toorop had met in 1916, and she had soon become part of his circle of modern painters. In time, Bremmer would become the first major
collec-
21
Hildelies Balk wrote De Kunstpaus. H.P. Bremmer 1871-1956 (Vrije Universi-teit Amsterdam, 2004). Another source on the influence of Bremmer is: Hilde-lies Balk and Lynne Richards, “A Finger in Every Pie: H. P. Bremmer and His Influence on the Dutch Art World in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 32, no. 2/3 (2006).
22
The monthly journal Moderne Kunstwerken started being published in 1903, until 1910. Beeldende Kunst was a monthly journal published from 1913 until 1938. Hildelies Balk, De Kunstpaus. H.P. Bremmer 1871-1956 (Vrije Universi-teit Amsterdam, 2004), 106, 58-61. His first book Een Inleiding tot het zien van Beeldende Kunst was published in Amsterdam in 1906.
tor and dealer of Tooropʼs work.23 The two shared the same vision on art: in a work of art, inspiration and spirituality should concur in the representation of a perspective of the visible world.24 Since 1919, H.P. Bremmer had discussed her work during his lectures on art appreciation. In this way many of his pupils had acquired her work and, following his advice, Helene Kröller-Müller, the founder of the Kröller-Müller collection, also bought her works.25
Toorop owed a lot to Bremmer, as far as her career and her success as an artist were concerned, and thus she decided to honour him by creating a group portrait. In Bremmergroep (1936-1938, fig.1), Toorop decided to depict the pedagogue and his wife, portrayed at the bottom of the composition, sur-rounded by some of his favourite painters from his circle.26 Toorop included her own portrait, at the top left of the canvas, and her fatherʼs sculpted portrait along with its sculptor John Rädecker. On the background, Toorop included a painting by Vincent van Gogh, whom Bremmer had always considered the greatest modern artist, a painting by Carel Willink and one by Floris Verster.27 In the cen-tre of the composition, as the focal point between Bremmer and his wife, Toorop positioned Bart van der Leck.28 Although all different in style, what the “art ped-agogue” admired in the work of this selection of contemporary artists was the
23 Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen,
2008), 49-51.
24 Idem, 51.
25 The Kröller-Müller collection at first, since 1913, was showcased to the public
in The Hague and then, since 1938 in the Kröller-Müller Museum, in Otterlo, who had been donated together with the collection to the Netherlands by He-lene Kröller-Müller in 1935. See Eva Rovers, “Monument to an industrialist's wife. Helene Kröller-Müller's motives for collecting”, in Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 21, no. 2 (2009), 241-252.
26
Hildelies Balk, De Kunstpaus. H.P. Bremmer 1871-1956 (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2004), 202.
27 The role of Bremmer in twentieth-century Dutch art is discussed in Hildelies
Balk and Lynne Richards, “A Finger in Every Pie: H. P. Bremmer and His In-fluence on the Dutch Art World in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 32, no. 2/3 (2006).
28
The other artists in each row, from top to bottom, from left to tright are: next to the sculpture of Jan Toorop, Jan Sluijters, Josep Mendes da Costa, Lambertus Zijl, Rudolf Bremmer; below them are Jan Altorf, John Rädecker, Dirk Nijland and Henri van Daalhoff. Next to Bremmer is Truus van Hettinga Tromp.
spiritually charged, realist essence of their work.29 Bremmer looked for a sort of tension in artworks, for the presence of a mystical, eternal quality in them. The subjects painted by the artists of his circle referred to the traditional painting genres and were always relying on the representation of a perspective of visible reality.30 Even in the case of Bart van der Leck it is still of realism that should be talked about: despite his involvement in the abstract group De Stijl, the painter was always essentially a realist, except for a brief interlude between 1916 and 1918 in which his work turned to radical abstraction.
All the portrayed artists were part of the artistic network created by Bremmer, and therefore they all relied on his judgement a lot, as he was very active in selling their work to his students around the Netherlands.31 These art-ists were also dependent on him from a purely economical perspective. His pro-tégés, like Toorop, van der Leck and Rädecker, were also known and active outside his personal circle. Nonetheless, Bremmer was the one person who was accountable for the largest part of their sales, and therefore for their suc-cess.32
Bremmerʼs contacts however, were not limited to his circle of students: in fact, his influence mattered for the art trade, too. In April 1917, Toorop, who was very aware of his connections and had recently divorced from her husband Fernhout, finding herself having to take care of her three small children, asked Bremmer to organise some sort of exhibition for her at a gallery in The Hague, or even a contract with a gallery, if possible, so that she would be guaranteed to receive a regular income to support her family.33 Bremmer was able to help her
29 Hildelies Balk and Lynne Richards, “A Finger in Every Pie: H. P. Bremmer
and His Influence on the Dutch Art World in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 32, no. 2/3 (2006), 202. 30 Idem, 203. 31 Idem, 182. 32 Idem, 202. 33
This and the following information is in Hildelies Balk and Lynne Richards, “A Finger in Every Pie: H. P. Bremmer and His Influence on the Dutch Art World in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 32, no. 2/3 (2006), 210.
and by December 1917 he had obtained a deal for her for an exhibition in The Hague, at Walrechtʼs, and had also put her in contact with the Gerbrands lery in Utrecht. Later on, Toorop also started to produce work for two more gal-leries in The Hague thanks to Bremmerʼs influence: the galgal-leries d'Audretsch and, though only from the thirties, Nieuwenhuizen Segaar.34 Bremmer constant-ly supported her and put her name forward to art dealers and galleries. At the same time Toorop also worked constantly to promote her work on her own, by writing to gallery directors and influential people in the art world, by looking for commissions and selling her works directly. In this way, the artist managed to carry on with her work and to support her family by obtaining a decent income.
Toorop and Abstract Art
Two other artists, whom Toorop greatly admired, were involved in the artistic environment of Bremmer: Piet Mondriaan and Bart van der Leck. While the for-mer was only part of his circle for a short time, it is safe to say that van der Leck was tightly connected to H.P. Bremmer for a long time, which also explains the reason why Toorop positioned his portrait right in the middle of the Bremmer-groep. Bremmer and Toorop shared the same take on art, which to them was strictly connected to the visible world, and therefore should be expressed through a realistic style.35 At the same time, however, it appears obvious that Bremmer was still appreciative of some of the abstractions achieved by Mondri-aan and the schematised realities of Van der Leck, until the moment when their abstraction became too radical. Bremmerʼs perspective on art was based on the so-called “Practische Aesthetica”, Practical Aesthetics, a mix of notions derived from mysticism and the science of psychology, which was a manner of looking
34 Ibidem. 35
Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 51.
at art that could also be applied to the appreciation of the modern art trends that were tending to abstraction.36
In a 1930 article about Charley Toorop, published in the magazine De Werkende Vrouw and written by the artist and critic Jacob Bendien and the critic Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, the interviewers remarked that Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondrian were very similar as artists.37 In response, Toorop said that one could even define them as completely opposite to each other: of course, they both worked in an abstract style, but she was not a fan of that sort of lim-ited, superficial definition applied to their work.38 To Toorop art and life were in-separable, she referred to the two painters further by describing their character, thereby drawing a distinction between them: “Van der Leck lives as a peasant and lives a domestic life. Either one is abstract in their soul, or they are not. Van der Leck is an actual realist. Mondriaan has always been away from the world, he is a romantic ascetic, a refined monk. Van der Leck is good (fijn) too, but he is certainly not sophisticated (verfijnd)”.39
Toorop had always greatly admired Mondriaanʼs work, both in his early and in his more mature phases, and in fact she also bought his work for her own collection (it can be seen hanging on her wall in her house in Bergen, in 1933, fig. 2). Toorop admired Mondriaanʼs striving for harmony as well as the
36 Bremmer probably adopted the terminology „Practical Aestethics“ after
read-ing the book Naturprodukt und Kunstwerk (1902) by Ludwig Volkmann. Hildelies Balk, De Kunstpaus. H.P. Bremmer 1871-1956 (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2004), 55,56.
37
Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, “Een gesprek met Charley Toorop”, De werkende vrouw, n. 3 (March 1930), 66-70. The two would also collaborate to write Richtingen in de Hedendaagsche Schilderkunst (Rotter-dam: W.L. & J. Brusse, 1935).
38 Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, “Een gesprek met Charley
Toorop”, De werkende vrouw, n. 3 (March 1930), 66-70.
39 As quoted in Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van
Beuningen, 2008), 103. Original text: „(...)Van der Leck leeft als een boer, heeft een gezinsleven. Iemand is abstract van geest of niet. Van der Leck is een echte realist. Mondriaan is altijd weggeweest van de wereld, is een ro-mantische asceet, een verfijnde monnik. Van der Leck is wel fijn, maar heele-maal niet verfijnd.”
purity and refinement of his work.40 As Brederoo suggests, while Toorop was not an abstract artist, it was through her painting that she was still capable of expressing her abstract view on the real world, which she considered to be a mere illusion of the human consciousness (a subjective projection of the indi-vidual on the universal reality, as her favourite Russian writer and philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev believed).41
From 1912 to 1945 the artworks bought by Bremmer, his support and the work he did as a mediator between the artist and the art market were the princi-pal source of income for Bart van der Leck.42 Van der Leck had developed a personal style that was based on a schematic representation of reality: Brem-mer was extremely supportive of the direction that Van der Leckʼs style had tak-en, and had been successfully offering his work to sell to the students of his art appreciation lectures (fig. 3). However, in 1918, Van der Leckʼs work was taking too abstract a turn for Bremmerʼs taste (fig. 4). Bremmer believed that Mondri-aanʼs influence on the painter was leading him in the wrong direction.43 Since without Bremmerʼs support there would be no sale of works, and Van der Leck needed financial security in order to be able to provide for his family, eventually he followed Bremmerʼs direction and returned to a less abstract style.44
Mondriaan had been collaborating with Bremmer since 1913, too. The art pedagogue had been very supportive of Mondriaan for a few years, as he par-ticularly admired the painterʼs cubist work.45 However, once Mondriaanʼs lan-guage started to turn toward a more radically abstract style, Bremmer stopped helping the artist, as he could not see his work in the spiritually rich way in
40 Nico J. Brederoo, Charley Toorop, Leven en werken (Utrecht:
Meulen-hoff/Landshoff, Centraal Museum, 1982), 161, 197.
41
Idem, 201, 202. In the next chapter more information will be given on Toor-opʼs interest for the writings of Nicolai Berdjaev.
42
Hildelies Balk and Lynne Richards, “A Finger in Every Pie: H. P. Bremmer and His Influence on the Dutch Art World in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 32, no. 2/3 (2006), 212.
43 Idem, 212. 44
Idem, 213.
which he previously had. The developments based around the journal De Stijl, and therefore outside of Bremmerʼs influence, did not meet with his approval.46 At the same time, however, he did not completely exclude Mondriaan from his circle, and in fact his work was the most radically abstract style that he took into consideration when advising Helene Kröller-Müller on what to buy.47 However, it was only Mondriaanʼs early works, those painted before the beginning of the twenties, that Kröller-Müller bought for her collection. After that point, Bremmer would not approve of the deepening abstraction of Mondriaanʼs work, and this was probably an important reason for H. Kröller-Müller stopping her collection of his paintings.48
Piet Mondriaan and Bart van der Leck were among the founders of the artistic group De Stijl, a group whose aim was to achieve a universal language of expression. 49 However, already in 1918, possibly also pushed by the pres-sure deriving from Bremmer, Van der Leck did not entirely agree with the Mani-fest I of the group. Eventually, Van der Leck did not sign the ManiMani-fest I and did not follow the extremely abstract and dogmatic turn that the other artists of the group took. Peter Alma, another painter who was involved with De Stijl, also leant toward a style that, though abstract in a way, was more of a figurative ge-ometrised representation.50 As with Van der Leckʼs painting, Almaʼs aim was to bring about the consciousness of the social and economic reality of the working class of the time.51 For this reason, Van der Leck became involved with De So-cialistische Kunstkring (SKK, The Socialist Art Circle), exhibiting with them, and,
46 Idem, 214. 47
Idem, 215.
48
Idem, 214. It was between the end of 1919 and 1920 that Mondriaan started painting grid compositions and using only primary colours.
49
De Stijl, which literally means „the style“, was founded in Leiden in 1917 by a group of Dutch artists that included Piet Mondriaan, Theo van Doesburg in and Bart van der Leck.
50
John Steen, “Realisme”, in Van Gogh tot Cobra : Nederlandse schilderkunst 1880-1950, edited by Geurt Imanse, ex. cat. Utrecht: Centraal Museum (1981), Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/Landshoff, 1981, 85.
as of 1927, Alma also became a member of the group, with the aim of making art relevant to the masses.52
In 1930 the SKK organised the exhibition Socialistische Kunst Heden (Socialist Art Now) at the Stedelijk Museum. Charley Toorop also took part in it as her relationship with art was expressing a similar socially involved nature during this period (figs. 5, 6). Over the years Toorop had developed her style considerably and by that point in time she was experimenting with a realist-expressionistic style of painting.53 Her painting Volkslogement (1928, fig. 5), which she exhibited at the SKK 1930 exhibition, can be taken as an example of the work that she produced during this time. Through the portrayals of the work-ing-class, she was engaged in depicting the social and political reality, and she was able to do so by representing them in a realist guise and rendering them in their individuality.
Toorop and the Many Faces of Neo-Realism
From the mid-twenties, Charley Toorop, together with Jacob Bendien, John Rädecker and Peter Alma started to think of founding an artistic circle in which the “beste jonge kunstenaars”, the best young artists, would gather and would allow space for any relevant artistic expression of their time.54 The group organ-ised their first exhibition in February 1928 at the Stedelijk Museum and was named Architectuur, Schilderkunst, Beeldhouwwerk (more often called ASB, Architecture, Painting, Sculpture), bringing together the work of architects, painters and sculptors, of figurative and abstract artists.55 As well as Toorop, other members of the group were artists such as Carel Willink, Peter Alma,
52 Idem, 87. 53
Idem, 92,93.
54
As written in the circular letter typed by Toorop on December 8, 1926. As quoted in Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 94.
John Rädecker, Jacob Bendien and representatives of the group De Stijl such as Mondriaan, Van der Leck and Gerrit Rietveld (fig. 7).56 At that stage of her career, Toorop had the chance to see the works produced by the German art-ists of the New Objectivity movement (Neue Sachlichkeit), which were exhibited in Amsterdam for the first time in 1929 at the Stedelijk Museum. In 1933, an ar-ticle written by Bendien and Harrenstein-Schräder was written in order to dis-cuss the meaning of “New Objectivity” (Nieuwe Zakelijkheid) in the Netherlands, and Toorop, who had already been interviewed by the pair, was also involved.57
It is not a simple task to explain the neo-realist trend that developed in Europe in the twenties and the thirties, as, by talking of realism, it is indeed mul-tiple realisms that are being referred to. At the beginning of his essay “Realisme en surrealisme in de Nederlandse schilderkunst”, the art historian Andreas Vowinckel explains that when one talks about (twentieth-century) realism in the Netherlands, one refers to the style that had a revival during the twenties and thirties that can be seen as part of the wider return to realism in Europe in that period.58 Indeed, the term “neo-realism” refers to a wide variety of realist styles, some involved with abstract influences, others focusing on a deep psychological analysis of the subjects, others merging a detailed realistic representation with alien settings, thereby creating pseudo-surrealist images. All these different trends developed in Germany during the twenties as part of the artistic trend called Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, a form of which was called Mag-ischer Realismus, Magical Realism.59 In the Netherlands the neo-realist trend
56
Idem, 93.
57 Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen,
2008), 101. Original article: Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, “De Nieuwe Zakelijkheid in de Schilderkunst. Een dialectische beschouwing”, in Paul Citroen, Jacob Bendien 1890-1933. Een herinneringsboek, Rotterdam: 1940, 72, originally published in Forum vol.2, n. 4 (1933), 292-303.
58 Andreas Vowinckel, “Relisme en surrealisme in de Nederlandse
schilder-kunst”, in Van Gogh tot Cobra : Nederlandse schilderkunst 1880-1950, edited by Geurt Imanse, ex. cat. Utrecht: Centraal Museum (1981), Amsterdam: Meu-lenhoff/Landshoff, 1981, 179.
59
Neue Sachlichkeit and Magischer Realismus are terms that were coined re-spectively by the German museum director Gustav Hartlaub and the German
translated into Nieuwe Zakelijkheid and Magisch Realisme, and can be seen in the work of Charley Toorop, Pyke Koch, Carel Willink, Dick Ket, Raoul Hynckes.
In his essay “Vrijheid en bezetting- Nederlandse Kunst voor en tijdens de oorlogsperiode”, Vowinckel describes the different ways in which all the already mentioned artists worked during wartime and the period of the German occupa-tion of the Netherlands (1940-1945).60 Dick Ket, who was considered as a rep-resentative of Magical Realism, died in September 1940, and therefore only lived a few months in the occupied Netherlands. He painted detailed and poign-ant still lifes and self-portraits, as can be seen by observing, to mention but one example, his Stilleven met eieren (1935, fig. 8). According to Vowinckel, it is in Ketʼs interest for realist detail in the rendition of the various elements of his composition that one could find the depiction of the state of despair and de-fencelessness that Dutch people must have experienced in the thirties, which were years of social, economic and political uncertainty. Indeed, the attention put in the rendition of the different textures could be seen as a sort of inner meditation for the artist, focusing on the small things that belonged to his every-day life, in order to avoid direct confrontation with what was happening in the outer world. The same precise rendering of textures can be seen in the work of Raoul Hynckes, a painter who became a member of the Kultuurkamer (Cham-ber of Culture), the institution founded in 1941 by the Nazis that controlled the cultural production in the Netherlands during the occupation. His dark-coloured and gloomy still lifes seem to refer more to the traditional images of the frailty of life and human mortality that were very much present in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, although the element of death and the existentialist element can
art historian Franz Roh in order to give name and definition to the return to re-alism after Expressionism. See: Irene Guenther, “Magic Rere-alism, New Objec-tivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 33.
60
Andreas Vowinckel, “Vrijheid en bezetting- Nederlandse Kunst voor en tijdens de oorlogsperiode”, in Van Gogh tot Cobra : Nederlandse schilderkunst 1880-1950, edited by Geurt Imanse, ex. cat. Utrecht: Centraal Museum (1981), Am-sterdam: Meulenhoff/Landshoff, 1981, 208.
be read more explicitly in Hynckesʼs work. Another artist who was involved with the occupiers during the period 1940-1945 was Pyke Koch, who had also had been romantically involved with Charley Toorop and who very much admired her as an artist. Koch was not very productive during the years of the occupa-tion, but already from his 1937 work Self-portrait with black band (fig. 9a), one can see that he made no attempt to hide his approval of fascism, portraying himself, in what appears a clear reference to the portrayals of Benito Mussolini, as mimicking the solemn severe expression of the famous portrayals of the Ital-ian dictator (figs. 9b, 9c). Another painter who was part of the circle of Toorop and who had also been a member of the A.S.B. was Carel Willink, whose man-ner of working was inspired by the pittura metafisica of the Italian painter Gior-gio de Chirico. From the thirties onwards, Willink combined landscapes and fig-ures and often pseudo-classical elements, such as statues and architectural el-ements, the combination of which gives viewers a feeling of both estrangement and threat.61 An example of the kind of disquieting sensation that his works cre-ated can be experience by observing his 1939 work Simeon de Pilaarheilige (Simeon Stylites, fig. 10).
While Toorop and these contemporaries all belong to the neo-realistic trend, her paintings appear to stand out from the work of her colleagues. While in most of the work by Hynckes, Willink and Koch one finds the depiction a sort of estranged yet familiar world, a world that reminds the beholder of the real world, but in which something is clearly not quite right, the majority of Tooropʼs paintings (excluding the few still lifes with pseudo-classical elements (figs. 16, 17, 18) seem to be rooted more deeply into reality. Her portraits, self-portraits and group portraits, the still lifes and the landscapes are portrayals of all the people, things and places that were part of Tooropʼs life, which she would rep-resent through the sharp, clear lens of her own individual style. Although her work has been considered by many as an expression of New Objectivity, it
61 Geurt Imanse, “Carel Willink”, in Van Gogh tot Cobra : Nederlandse
schilder-kunst 1880-1950, edited by Geurt Imanse, ex. cat. Utrecht: Centraal Museum (1981), Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/Landshoff, 1981, 302.
should be said that the artist herself could not recognise it as adhering to that artistic label.62 In fact, it was on the occasion of the 1930 interview with Harren-stein-Schräder and Bendien that, commenting on the 1929 Amsterdam Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, the artist stated that she was not fond of German mod-ern art: she did not think of it as art and she found it uncultured and purely jour-nalistic.63
There is another realist artist, and a close friend of Toorop, who should be mentioned at this point. Hendrik Chabot was active in those years, too, and his painting style distinguishes him from the previously mentioned artists. Through his thick and rough brushwork, Hendrik Chabot was capable of depict-ing in emotional images the reality of the horrors of the war. Most of Chabotʼs early work was destroyed. A couple of days before the bombing of Rotterdam (which happened on May, 14 1940) a German bomb was dropped on the build-ing where he had his studio, where he was keepbuild-ing many of his artworks.64 In De brand van Rotterdam (The Fire of Rotterdam, 1940, fig. 11) Chabot depicted what he directly witnessed a few days later, when the whole city was reduced to ruins by German bombing. Chabot's work from the years of the war is moving in its portrayal of the events connected to the persecution of the Jews, of people
62 To give a few examples, Toorop is referred to as part of the Nieuwe
Zakelijk-heid in the following publications: Carel Blotkamp, et al., Magie en zakelijkZakelijk-heid : realistische schilderkunst in Nederland 1925-1945, ed. Ype Koopmans, (Zwolle: Waanders; Arnhem: Museum voor Moderne Kunst, 1999). Cor Blok et al., Nederlandse kunst vanaf 1900, ed. Henk Bas, et al., (Utrecht : Stichting Educatieve Omroep Teleac, 1994). Geurt Imanse et al., Van Gogh tot Cobra : Nederlandse schilderkunst 1880-1950, ex. cat. Utrecht: Centraal Museum (1981), Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/Landshoff, 1981.
63
Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, “Een gesprek met Charley Toorop”, De werkende vrouw, n. 3 (March 1930), 66-70. Original text: “Eerlijk gezegd heb ik hartgrondig het land aan de moderne Duitsche kunst (...) Ik vind dat geen kunst. ʻt is journalistiek. Als je een ding van Braque ziet, daar zit kultuur in. Ja, interessant is ʻt, maar interessant is een akelig woord; dat is nou juist een word, dat op die kunst past, vooral op Dix. Die menschen groeien niet. Ze gaan dadelijk alles systematiseeren. Hun intellect zit hen in de weg. ʻn beschaafd mensch doet dat niet.”.
involved with the resistance and of “subversive” people in prison.65 In these paintings, his style can be defined as pertaining to the neo-realist trend, howev-er it is the expressionistic elements that dominate the composition. In particular, the choice of earthy colours, the rough brushwork and the expressive defor-mation of the facial features of his subjects come together in creating intense, moving images of life during wartime. In Chabot's painting De Brand van Rot-terdam, the city is seen from a distance, and a red cloud of thick red and orange smoke is hovering above: the colours and rough brushwork express the strong emotions that many people felt in those difficult days. In 1944, the art critic Abraham Marie Hammacher secretly published Het leven bloeit op de ruïnes, which he devoted to the work that Chabot and Charley Toorop had done during the occupation.66 The two were set as example of bravery, as they had not be-come members of the Kultuurkamer and had resisted the occupier through their painting.
For Toorop, painting was a difficult and laborious task, but at the same time, since art and life were not distinguishable in her view, this kind of hard work allowed to achieve a state of personal fulfilment.67 To the artist, painting was not about reproducing the world realistically, but it was more about repre-senting her own perception of reality. She did this through images that were saturated with intensity. As her friend and poet Adriaan Roland Holst defined it, Tooropʼs style was “meedogenloos”, relentless.68 In a 1933 article written by the art critics Bendien and Harrenstein-Schräder, she was defined as “Veristisch”
65
Andreas Vowinckel, “Vrijheid en bezetting- Nederlandse Kunst voor en tijdens de oorlogsperiode”, in Van Gogh tot Cobra : Nederlandse schilderkunst 1880-1950, edited by Geurt Imanse, ex. cat. Utrecht: Centraal Museum (1981), Am-sterdam: Meulenhoff/Landshoff, 1981, 217.
66 Abraham Marie Hammacher, Het leven bloeit op de ruïnes (Den Haag: Final
Stage Press, 1944). Furthermore on the relationship between Chabot and Toorop see: Bremer, Jaap, A.M. Hammacher and Kees Vollemans. Henk Chabot en Charley Toorop. Edited by Jisca Bijlsma. Translated by Ruth Koenig. Rotterdam: Chabot Museum, 1999.
67 Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen,
2008), 119.
and “Expressionist”, though in a different way when compared to the caricature-like works of the German Veristen.69 Toorop strived to portray the world in her own personal language without following any other idea but her own. As she wrote to Paul Citroen in the letter of April 7, 1930: “Most of all no principles! To work and to purify our own opinions”.70 By saying this, Toorop probably wanted to express how she firmly believed in having her own personal artistic language, which she had achieved by working and gaining her own consciousness as an artist.71 Moreover, this statement does not only apply to her aesthetic, but also to her way of living, as will be explained in the next chapter.
Art Dealers and Buyers
Part of the work of the artists, other than actually producing art, is also to get their work into the system of the art market. As it has been said, for Charley Toorop the role of H.P. Bremmer had been crucial for the artist in order to be able to live off her work. At the same time, Toorop was also active herself in making contacts and enlarging her own network within the art market. In 1928, she made the acquaintance of the Radermacher Schorers. René Schorer was active in the cultural environment of Utrecht, and he had met Toorop because they were both members of the Filmliga.72 Soon after their meeting, Toorop
69 Idem, 101. Jacob Bendien and Ann Harrenstein-Schräder, “De Nieuwe
Zake-lijkheid in de Schilderkunst. Een dialectische beschouwing”, in Paul Citroen, Jacob Bendien 1890-1933. Een herinneringsboek, Rotterdam: 1940, 72, origi-nally published in Forum vol.2, n. 4 (1933), 292-303.
70
Letter of Charley Toorop to Paul Citroen of April 7, 1930, as quoted in Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 119,120. The original text reads: „ Surtout pas de principes „Travaillons - Epu-rons notre propre conception“. Paul Citroen was writing a book on contempo-rary Dutch painters at the time, and he had contacted Toorop to include her.
71
Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 119,120.
72 This and all the following information on the contacts that Toorop had in the
art market are from Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 109.
painted a portrait of his wife, Lotte (fig. 12) and with time the friendship strengthened and Toorop and Schorers started a correspondence. As well as a friendship, there was also a business relationship, as Schorers was a member of the Utrechtsche Museumvereeniging voor Hedendaagsche Kunst (the Utrecht Association of Museums for Contemporary Art). From 1933, when a dif-ficult time for the art market began, Toorop relied more and more on the help of the Schorers. They bought some of her work and commissioned another portrait of Lotte in 1939 (fig. 13). They also kept on financially supporting Toorop and her son, the painter Eddy Fernhout, through the whole of the thirties and during the years of the war.
From 1929 Toorop had started to gain more and more connections within the art world. Other than the Amsterdam art dealer Carel Van Lier, she started to make contact with art dealers such as Gerrit Johannes Nieuwenhuizen Se-gaar and Jacques Goudstikker, and with Dirk Hannema and Jan Gerrit van Gelder, who were the director and the curator at the then Boijmans (now Boijmans van Beuningen) Museum in Rotterdam. By the wartime period Toorop had become a mature, established artist and was therefore being asked more frequently by art dealers and museums to sell her work. This brought her into contact with more and more art professionals, and with some of them she also developed friendships, though without ever forgetting about business.
At the beginning of her connection with Nieuwenhuizen Segaar, who at first would only deal with graphic arts, Toorop was encouraged to work at some lithographs, for which the art dealer provided the materials.73 However, despite Tooropʼs efforts, the results did not satisfy her, and therefore she went back to painting. It was 1933 when Nieuwenhuizen Segaar opened an art gallery in The Hague, where, from the very beginning, he exhibited and sold works by Toorop. The artist was also in contact with Jacques Goudstikker, who, though he spe-cialised in Old Master paintings, was also interested in contemporary realist art. At his gallery in 1933 he exhibited about forty of her works. The relationship with the art dealer also entailed commissioned work, as in the case of Kaasmarkt
van Alkmaar (fig. 14), the composition of which had been suggested and de-scribed in detail by Goudstikker himself.
It could be said that Toorop painted her Maaltijd der vrienden (1932-1933, The Meal of the Friends, fig. 15), in reference to the Dutch tradition of the group portrait, and as a nod to Goudstikker, who was one of the most important art dealers for Old Master Painting.74 In the composition, the heads crowd on the canvas as if they had been cut out and stuck on. For this painting, Toorop had the sitters pose for her separately. The portrayed people, some of them prominent contemporary artists, all belong to her circle of closest friends: Toor-opʼs children appear at the bottom of the composition (her son John Fernhout with his spouse Rachel Pellekaan on the bottom left, her daughter Annie Fern-hout and her brother Eddy FernFern-hout with his spouse Eva Besnyö on the bottom right), to the left are portrayed the artist John Rädecker, his wife Annie Rädeck-er and their son Kocki. In the middle of the composition is the architect and de-signer Gerrit Rietveld, at the top right we find the poet Jany Roland Holst, and underneath him is the portrait of the artist herself; next to Roland Holst and Toorop are the painterʼs pupil Wim Oepts and the painter Pyke Koch. While all the heads point toward the centre of the composition, Kochʼs head breaks the rhythm by pointing toward the side, and incidentally toward the self-portrait of Toorop. The painting was bought in 1935 by the Boijmans Museum. The direc-tor of the Museum, Hannema, who was very interested in Tooropʼs work and had also acquired a painting of her for his own collection, was so drawn to Tooropʼs work that, not having enough available public funding, relied on private funding for the purchase. The connection with Hannema was maintained until the beginning of the German occupation, when he started collaborating with the regime. At that point Toorop did not wish to be connected to him anymore. Dur-ing that time, however, she was able to keep in contact with the Boijmans Mu-seum through her friend Van Gelder, who worked there as curator of the muse-um, and who, since 1940, had become director of the Netherlands Institute for
Art History (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Dokumentatie, RKD), in The Hague.
Since 1930, Toorop became friends with Abraham M. Hammacher, who had started writing since 1927 for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant as an art critic.75 Since their meeting, they had been talking about producing a publication on her work, and in 1932 Hammacher wrote an article on her for Forum, Maandschrift voor letteren en kunst.76 Despite the request of the editors of the journal to write on Carel Willink and Pyke Koch, Hammacher devoted the article to Toorop, whose work he described as “without any additional frills, sober, but still tragically intense and still sorrowful in its statement,” as opposed to other painters who were able to “wield astutely with the illusion of novelty and the illu-sion of change.”77 It would be safe to suggest that the painters that Hammacher was referring to were Willink and Koch. While Hammacherʼs judgment sounds quite harsh, it cannot be denied that Tooropʼs work was substantially different from that of her colleagues, as it could be said that its strength lay in the crisp and raw reality portrayed in it, rather that in its estranged appearance.
In the Netherlands, Toorop had established a solid network that allowed her to have a respectable artistic career, to exhibit and to sell her works. How-ever, she was not well-known in foreign artistic circles, with the exception of Belgium.78In 1938 she represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale (where she would exhibit once again in the Dutch pavilion in 1954). While this
75 Idem, 117. 76
Ibidem.
77
Abraham Hammacher, „Charley Toorop“, in Forum, Maandschrift voor lette-ren en kunst, n. 1 (1932). Text in original language: first quote: „(...) zonder franje, zonder ophef, noch tragisch van nadruk noch elegisch van voordracht (...)” ; second quote: „de schijn van het nieuwe en de schijn van het verande-ring vernuftig hanteeren (...)”.
78
Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 116. Brederoo reported all the exhibitions in which Toorop took part: Nico J. Brederoo, Charley Toorop, Leven en werken (Utrecht:
did not lead to her gaining international fame, it confirmed her achievements as an established Dutch artist.79
After having drawn the background to Charley Tooropʼs career as an artist working in the Netherlands during the interbellum period, the following chapters are going to go deeper into the specific events that had an influence on Charley Tooropʼs life during the Second World War. These chapters will try to see the reasons why this time of her life can still be considered as a prosperous and fruitful one in her artistic career, despite the practical difficulties that she en-countered on her way.
79
Marja Bosma, Vooral geen principes!, (Rotterdam: Boijmans van Beuningen, 2008), 116.
Politics, Religion and Mysticism:
The Life of Charley Toorop during the Second World War
The German Occupation
While in Germany and Italy democracy was under threat from Nazi and fascist totalitarian power, at the end of the thirties the situation seemed quite peaceful in the Netherlands, where people of different political affiliations coexisted with-out major issues. Newspapers were reporting on the growing power that Adolf Hitler was gaining in Germany, on his race theories and laws and on the threat of an imminent war.80 As they had managed to do during the First World War, the Netherlands hoped they could remain neutral in the event of conflict. How-ever, with the bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940, and the beginning of the German occupation of the country it became clear that this time would be differ-ent. The occupation by the German forces arrived as a shock for the Dutch people. There were three options available to them: resist, flee or collaborate. Nonetheless, whichever option a person chose, there was not always a clear line between what was the right or wrong decision one should make in the best interest of the country. With the occupation, the German National Socialists slowly took over every organ of the Dutch government and, little by little, began to control every Dutch institution. In a short time every aspect of Dutch life had been “occupied”, and therefore also culture.81
The advent of Nazism in Europe had a direct impact on every aspect of the life of its people. In the realm of fine arts, from the beginning of the 20th cen-
80 For more insight on these aspects and in general on reception of information
about the German political situation through the Dutch press, see: Frank van Vree, De Nederlandse Pers en Duitsland 1930-1939 (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1989). See especially chapter 8 (De pers en de opkomst van het nationaal-socialisme, 264-295) and chapter 9 (Het Derde Rijk, 296-342).
81 “Verzets Museum/ the Netherlands”, Verzetsmuseum, last access date July
16, 2015, http://www.verzetsmuseum.org/museum/en/tweede-wereldoorlog/kingdomofthenetherlands/thenetherlands/.
tury, the avant-garde movements had been showing alternative ways to per-ceive the reality and different ways to express artistic individuality: an exact re-production of the visible world had therefore ceased to be the main priority for artists. However, even prior to the thirties, a traditionalist trend had begun to take over the many artistic movements of the avant-garde in the Netherlands. This return to realism coincided with the rise of National-Socialism in Europe, which brought the imposition of new rules, including for the arts.82
Cultural Life in the Occupied Netherlands
After 1940, a radical transformation of the key institutions within Dutch culture occurred. In November 1941, the Kultuurkamer (Chamber of Culture) was founded under the leadership of the NSB (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland), the party of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands.83 The old OKW, (Departement van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen), the Department for Education, Arts and Sciences had been substituted by the DVK (Departement van Volksvoorlichting en Kunsten), the Department for Public En-lightenment and the Arts, with Tobie Goedewaagen as its head. The institution had the role of controlling the cultural media of the country, with the aim of maintaining cultural production consistent with National Socialist values. Artists, actors, musicians, writers, publishers, filmmakers, and indeed anybody who was active in the cultural industry, had to become members of the Kultuurkamer in order to be able to work in public. Artworks of abstract, cubist, expressionist, surrealist and dadaist art had been labelled as entartete Kunst, “degenerate art”
82 Claartje Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer: geschiedenis en
her-innering (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2014), 26.
83
As a source on the environment of the Kultuurkamer a valuable source of in-formation was the book by Claartje Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuur-kamer: geschiedenis en herinnering (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2014).
