Exhibition texts 'Charley Toorop. Love for Van Gogh
Love for Van Gogh
Charley Toorop 1891–1955 is one year old when the first exhibitions of the work of Vincent van Gogh 1853–1890 take place in the Netherlands. Her father, the artist Jan Toorop, is one of the initiators. In 1953, when the director of the KröllerMüller, Bram Hammacher, asks her what the artist meant to her, she replies: ‘Vincent van Gogh was there for me even before I started painting, actually when I became aware’. His art made a deep impression on her throughout her life because of ‘his deep, harsh love’ for reality, people and nature.
Toorop was meant to become a musician but in 1917 decides to devote her life to painting. She finds inspiration in innovative art movements, including expressionism and cubism. She also experiences influences of a spiritual nature, such as theosophy. She admires a variety of artists and certainly not only Van Gogh. Nevertheless, at defining moments it is his example that provides her support. Especially in the early 1920s, the most formative period in her artistic career.
With the horrors of the First World War still fresh in her mind, and surrounded by friends who all strive for cultural and political renewal, Toorop sets out to find her own committed artistic practice. Her fascination with the human psyche and her quest for spirituality take centre stage. Following Van Gogh’s example, she holds on to visible reality. Realism is her starting point. From there, she takes her first steps towards a ‘spirited representation’ as she calls it.
Her powerful and unique style makes Toorop the leading light of modern figurative art. According to H.P. Bremmer, art advisor to Helene Kröller-Müller, she had succeeded Van Gogh as the standard-bearer of the new art at the beginning of the twentieth century. He turns those words of praise into deeds. Today the Kröller-Müller Museum has the largest museum collection of her work. Together with special loans from other museums and private collections, the turning point in her development is shown through various themes that reveal Toorop’s love for Van Gogh.
Encounters with Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh was there for me even before I started painting, actually when I became aware. It was the first dispute with my father who saw things so differently; for me it was the breakthrough to a new world. It has always remained an event to see his work.
The major Amsterdam exhibition of his work after the Liberation was even more of a Liberation for me than the actual one. That his work could hang there so beautifully, and that we could see it like that again: the masterful drawings of the French landscape, the painted landscapes, the figures and the still lifes.
I first saw the Impressionists at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1951. Enjoyed it, beautiful, Renoir, Courbet and so on, but upstairs on the first floor there was suddenly Van Gogh’s selfportrait with the pale face and those piercing eyes against that moving green background. In the evening at home, I could still see that painting before me until late at night. It was the most beautiful painting I saw on that day.
Recently in Rotterdam at the Boymans museum with the French artists from the Petit Palais. Wonderful, enjoyed Courbet, Toulouse and others, but then suddenly that wall again with those paintings by Vincent from his Brabant period. And then I was seized again by that intense sensation of Van Gogh’s deep and harsh love for reality.
Charley Toorop, February 1953
Group Portrait of H.P. Bremmer and His Wife with Contemporary
Artists, 1935-1938
In 1935 Toorop conceives the idea for this group portrait: a tribute to Bremmer for his role in the Dutch art world. Bremmer and his wife are surrounded by artists that he promotes. Toorop has included herself, her father as a sculpture and also Van Gogh via a painting from Bremmer’s private collection .
Bremmer is the first collector and mediator of Toorop’s work. He praises her genius and her conception of art, which he compares to that of Van Gogh. Both, he believes, are filled with a sacred respect for everyday reality. She is ‘someone who dares to look at life in a way that only a few can’.
From left to right: Charley Toorop, bust of Jan Toorop, Jan Sluyters, painting of Vincent van Gogh, Joseph Mendes da Costa, painting of Carel Willink, painting of Floris Verster, Rudolf Bremmer, Johan Altorf, John Rädecker, Dirk Nijland, Herman Daalhoff, Henk Bremmer, Tjitske van Hettinga Tromp, Bart van der Leck and Aleida Bremmer.
Borinage, ‘the black country’
From mid-September 1922 Toorop spends three weeks in the Borinage. This Belgian mining region has attracted many artists since the nineteenth century, including her own father. More importantly, it is the place where Van Gogh worked as a lay preacher in 1880 and where he decided to become an artist. With Van Gogh in mind, she travels there to portray, in her own way, the harsh conditions of life in this impoverished region, scarred by black slag heaps.
Toorop makes several paintings and drawings, mainly of the region’s inhabitants. In the Borinage she finds the focus she has been in search of for five years: ‘Thank God it is now gradually beginning to emerge what I can what I want to express without any separate beauty, I mean beauty in itself, the beauty only of the inner, which expresses itself in every small part and the simplest of life. Or the awful, the darkness that is expressed in every line of a face’.
These works are Toorop’s first successful attempts to ‘give life its full shape – to see God in all matter, depicted in whatever way’, her often quoted motto.
The Hostess and Her Daughter, 1922 | Two miners’ wives in the Borinage Lia and her mother , 1922
These double portraits of mothers and daughters depict extreme destinies. The one on the left shows the landlady of the house where Toorop stayed, who exploited her own daughter as a sex worker: ‘I could hardly look into that face, something so terrible and at the same time infinitely bleak, you cannot imagine. I turn the canvas around at night when I go to sleep’. The portrait on the right shows Lia and her mother, devout Catholics whom she dines with in the evening: ‘There you see that piety is everywhere, as long as the heart is good’. The works are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s poignant drawings of his beloved Sien, a former prostitute.
Borinage, 1934
In 1934 Toorop’s close friend, the director and staunch communist Joris Ivens, made a social documentary together with Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck about the Borinage. This region, where socialism originated in Belgium due to the many strikes by militant miners, remained an attractive destination for politically and socially engaged artists until the Second World War. The selected fragments show the mine with its winding towers, the underground work and the slag heaps, as well as the lives of families. The harsh social disparities between capital and labour, church and people, are filmed in a raw anti-aesthetic style, similar to the work of Toorop.
The character of Provence
In the spring of 1923 Toorop travels to St-Paul-de-Vence, an artists’ village near Nice. She paints the landscape, but also a donkey driver who comes to pose with donkey and all in the house she rented. She does not visit the already famous Van Gogh destinations of Arles and St-Rémy-de-Provence. Nevertheless, according to contemporary art critics, this is where Toorop created the work most closely related to Van Gogh.
When she exhibits her French landscapes in various exhibitions in late 1923, art critics invariably refer to Van Gogh. For example, Belgian critic André De Ridder writes in the magazine Sélection: ‘The memory of Vincent van Gogh is in Mrs Toorop’s heart. She has seen Provence through his eyes’.
Whether this has a positive or negative effect on her work varies from critic to critic. A journalist from the Utrechtsche Courant finds that ‘the character of the country [is expressed] as powerfully as we have rarely seen, even in Van Gogh’s work’. Meanwhile, art critic and Van Gogh enthusiast Just Havelaar is more critical: ‘It lacks the deeper [spiritual] elements, which are so intensely fascinating in Charley Toorop’s good portraits’.
Harbour of Villefranche, 1934
Toorop hardly travels at all in the 1930s. Nevertheless, she visits southern France once more, as evidenced by this 1934 painting of Villefranche-sur-Mer. She again uses a colourful palette that also characterises her earlier work from Provence, but the stylistic similarities with Van Gogh have disappeared. Hidden in the painting is a message akin to Van Gogh’s use of personal symbolism. The names of the boats, Cupido, Henri and Les Miserables, refer to her brief, passionate relationship with the poet Hendrik Marsman in the summer of 1924. Ten years later, she writes on the awnings: Tout va bien all is well , Capito understood .
Self-portrait as a person
Toorop’s self-portraits are the most iconic works in her oeuvre. She paints herself as the main subject at least 17 times. The earliest known self-portrait dates from 1914 and the last two from the year before her death in 1955.
Her self-portraits are a pointed self-analysis, brutal and honest, in which she explores the power of her personality and spirit, as if to test Van Gogh’s 1889 statement ‘that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to paint oneself either’. A reproduction of Van Gogh’s best-known self-portrait, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat Van Gogh Museum , hangs for inspiration behind her easel in her studio in Bergen and is also hinted at here on the wall.
It is significant that Toorop begins every portrait by painting the eyes: the mirror of the soul. It is possible to discern her state of mind through the eyes. In Self-Portrait with Black Hat and Veil, which she paints in the middle of the war, her distress over the situation is depicted literally as introspection and mourning. This can be felt more deeply in Self-Portrait with Winter Branches. Her furrowed face, accentuated by the bare branches in the background, intensify the grief expressed in her gaze.
Portrait of the mind
In March 1924 Toorop works for three weeks in isolation at the Willem Arntsz Foundation on the Agnietenstraat in Utrecht. Henk Fernhout, to whom she was married between 1912 and 1917, was admitted to this psychiatric institution several times from 1915 onwards. Fernhout drank and was paranoid and aggressive. With the work she creates here, ‘thinking back to my visits to Fernhout and what I had seen there’, she seeks closure for her unhappy marriage.
Toorop completes three paintings of women receiving treatment at the clinic. The portraits paint a poignant and dignified picture of their mental state and of humanity in general. She confronts herself and the observer with the unfathomable side of life and the human psyche. After a few weeks she has to give up because it becomes ‘too overwhelming’ for her.
Her experiences and interest in psychiatry allow her to empathise with Van Gogh’s mental and artistic struggles. According to Hammacher, who writes her biography while she is alive, ‘Vincent, who had to break with much that belonged to artistic and ethical convention and was a fierce proponent [...], must have been a supportive example’. Van Gogh’s influence is enduring, but after 1924 Toorop moves away from direct imitation.
Spirited still life
During Toorop’s deteriorating marriage, painting becomes an absolute necessity. Even though Fernhout cuts her work to pieces in a drunken stupor, she continues to pick up the brush for the ‘preservation of my own nerves’. The bottle and knives in Still Life with Geraniums, Bottle, Plate with Knives and Bun may refer to this unhappy time. After their final separation in 1917, she devotes her life to art.
The search for a style of her own is evident in her still lifes. After 1925 she creates more constructed compositions, as she did in her figure studies. By simplifying the representation, the banal objects take on a more explicitly meaningful relationship with each other. In Still Life with Oil-Can and Clogs, the empty dish, the few lumps of coal and the clogs, reinforced by the contrast with the white background, refer to the lean years just after the war.
Her still lifes, like those of Van Gogh, are personal and full of symbolism. It is perhaps in this genre that she is most successful in her aim of expressing ‘the completeness of life’ from recognisable reality and her ‘symbolically felt’ coherence within that reality.
Social dedication
From October 1920 to April 1921 Toorop lives in Paris. She initially stays in rooms on Avenue Reille in the south of the city, near Cimetière Montrouge. Piet Mondriaan, who had been living in Paris since 1909, finds her an apartment with a studio on Rue Rollin near Place de la Contrescarpe. She moves there in January.
The tragedy of life in this metropolis, ‘the people who sleep under the Seine Bridge at night, [...] the young women with hollow eyes in the bistro’, both moves and inspires her. Toorop, who feels an affinity with the ideas of the humanitarian movement, believes that art can contribute to a better society. According to her, artistic originality should go hand in hand with a sense of social responsibility. She recognises this in the ‘deep, harsh love of reality’ of Van Gogh, who is regarded by humanists as a great psychologist whose work contributes to a more humane society.
However, just choosing socially engaged themes is not enough. She wants to make happy, radiant things at all costs, ‘internally radiant and clean and quiet’.
The monumentality of this drawing of a family living on the streets reinforces the criticism expressed in this work. Writer Emmy van Lokhorst interviews Toorop in Paris for an article in Wereldkroniek. She considers Toorop revolutionary in her social struggle due to a religious awareness: ‘The revolutionary too often squanders its power in indignation alone. In this work, the apostolic is conveyed first and foremost’. A year later in the Borinage, Toorop makes a similar drawing of miners. Through a more powerful formal language, stronger light-dark contrasts and a tighter composition of the individuals, she increasingly manages to infuse power into her work from the representation itself.
Vagabonds Paris, 1921
Peasant painter
An unusual aspect of Toorop’s admiration for Van Gogh is that she appreciates his French work less than his drawings and paintings of peasants in Brabant. In 1924, like Van Gogh, she chooses to immerse herself in peasant life. She trades the fashionable Domburg, where she has spent every summer since childhood, for the nearby farming village of Westkapelle. There, according to her, people still live close to nature.
Toorop depicts the peasants of Zeeland many times. In her earliest peasant paintings, such as Seated Peasant in Interior and The Family in the first room , she literally emulates Van Gogh in composition and dark and light effects. After 1924 she pursues a new direction. His example helps her depict reality honestly and unadorned, to subsequently achieve a unification between spirit and matter, between idealism and reality. With the underlying inspiration and ‘primal life’ expressed in her work, she aims to contribute to a better world.
Because of the sharpness in her peasant portraits, she has sometimes been accused of a lack of humanity. Toorop regards this as sentimentality, ‘an obfuscation of the fierce and immediate beauty of life’. In this respect, she is just as honest and uncompromising as Van Gogh.
Lane in Westkapelle, 1930
In 1929 the art dealer G.J. Nieuwenhuizen Segaar asks Charley Toorop to make a number of lithographs for sale. She draws several farmhouse interiors and this Lane in Westkapelle on the lithographic stones he provides. Nieuwenhuizen Segaar is critical in his response. For instance, he finds the shadow behind the boy in Four Walcheren Figures in an Interior too harsh. Although not entirely satisfied herself, the headstrong Toorop decides to print the lithographs at her own expense: ‘To be honest, I find them – although not very good – still better than many you do print. But artistic opinions differ’.
The rhythm of the seasons
After 1933, struggling with financial worries, Toorop abandons the unmarketable peasant genre. Still lifes, group portraits, commissioned or otherwise, and depicting the seasons dominate her oeuvre. Until her death, she would paint blossom in spring, flowers in summer, fruit trees in autumn and tranquil landscapes in winter. An additional advantage is that she does not have to travel far from home. The garden of her villa De Vlerken in Bergen and the nearby orchards in the Beemster provide a rich source for new subjects.
Toorop produces her first blossom painting in spring 1935. She paints outdoors. This requires a rapid method of working, which results in a quick, expressive brushstroke. In painting the seasons, unlike her figure studies, she experiences freedom and a more spontaneous and poetic connection with nature.
Although Toorop had developed her own style as early as 1924, these works reveal Van Gogh’s lasting influence. Like him, she zooms in on a single branch of an apple or pear tree, a lilac, a rose bush or a sunflower.
Christ, Snow and Winter Branches, 1952-1954
The trees and a windowsill frame a figure of Christ in front of a window overlooking snow-covered meadows. Toorop has deliberately placed the figure in the centre of the composition. There is no Christian message hidden in this work. She hardly ever works with traditional symbolism and it is therefore one of the exceptions in her oeuvre. This winter still life has a more meditative character in which she seems to reflect on the inevitability of death that she feels approaching. She passes away a year after completing this painting.
Self-portrait as an artist
By presenting herself as an artist in these self-portraits, Toorop places herself in an age-old tradition. In addition to the typical attributes of an artist, such as brushes or a palette, the reference to her artistic practice is sometimes more subtle when she depicts herself only in her painter’s smock. She believes that a painted or drawn portrait should have a better likeness than a photograph: ‘in a well-painted portrait, you recognise someone in all their expressions’. In her search for the essence in herself, she has become one with her artistic practice.
Self-Portrait in painter’s smock from 1953–1954 is her penultimate self-portrait, which she makes a year before her death. In the last 10 years of her life, even after two strokes in 1946 and 1947 respectively, she continues to work with a steely determination. According to the writer Arthur Müller-Lehning 1899–200 0 , with whom she had a relationship between 1928 and 1931, she also followed Van Gogh in this respect. In her passion, he recognised the ‘Vincent, whom she so admired, the extreme example of someone who could only live by painting [...]. For Charley Toorop, too, painting was the source of life: her life was dominated by it’.
Realisatie | Realization
Kröller-Müller Museum
Tentoonstellingsontwerp |
Exhibition design
Studio met met
Dana Dijkgraaf Design
Belettering | Lettering
Idem Dito
Vertaling | Translation
Mike Ritchie
Fotografie | Photography
Rik Klein Gotink Fotografie
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Stichting)
Maria Austria Instituut (MAI), Amsterdam
Bruikleengevers | Lenders
Centraal Museum, Utrecht
Collectie | Collection Diana & Piet van Toor
Dordrechts Museum
Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem
Kunstmuseum Den Haag Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Museum De Wieger, Deurne Museum Helmond
Museum MORE, Gorssel
Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed | Cultural Heritage Agency, Amersfoort
Singer Laren
Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Verschillende particuliere collecties | Various private collections
De tentoonstelling is mogelijk gemaakt dankzij | The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of
