SOLITARY CREATIONS 51 ARTISTS OUT OF DE STADSHOF COLLECTION
SOLITARY CREATIONS 51 ARTISTS OUT OF DE STADSHOF COLLECTION FRANS SMOLDERS / LIESBETH REITH / JOS TEN BERGE
COLLECTIE DE STADSHOF / LECTURIS
CONTENTS PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS /
14 - 15
JOS TEN BERGE
INTRODUCTION /
16 - 17
LAURENT DANCHIN
DE STADSHOF COLLECTION, AN ART COLLECTION’S HISTORY /
18 - 31
LIESBETH REITH
ARTISTS A – Z /
32 - 291
FRANS SMOLDERS
NAIVE AND OUTSIDER ART IN THE NETHERLANDS – A CHRONICLE OF FACTS AND VIEWS /
292 - 320
JOS TEN BERGE
ACQUISITION REVIEW / 321 - 323 REVIEW COLLECTION DE STADSHOF / 324 - 327 COLOPHON / 328
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VOORNAAM NAAM
PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is dedicated to Liesbeth Reith, who, some thirty years ago, initiated the formation of an art collection that has come to be known as De Stadshof Collection. It is this project - in a sense her life’s work - that this book aims to document and install with new momentum, as it has always been her goal to establish an independent museum for international naive and outsider art in the Netherlands. The art collection has been shown in three venues over the years: first from 1990 to 1992 at the Informatiecentrum voor Naïeve Kunst in Rotterdam, then from 1994 to 2001 at De Stadshof: Museum voor Naïeve en Outsider Kunst in the town of Zwolle, which was the first museum in Europe to include both categories in its name. After the museum was forced to close, the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent presented itself and in 2002 the board of the Collection De Stadshof Foundation loaned the entire collection to this unique museum, which still shows parts of it in a permanent exhibit. It was 2009 when an unexpected bequest from Mr Gerbrand J. Koelemeij and Mrs Meindertje Nieskje Postma enabled us to fulfil some long-held dreams. Top priority was to gain international recognition for the collection by improving its visibility and opening up its treasures. To this end, we first set up a new website showing a representative overview of the collection itself as well as its history of exhibitions and publications. We also started planning exhibitions, the first of which will be an extensive exhibition of Collection De Stadshof in Paris at the Halle Saint Pierre in the autumn of 2014. A third important goal was to publish a book about the collection. This book, entitled Solitary Creations, presents fifty artists that we consider to be ‘De Stadshof’s best’ and who together not only convey the message that art can be found anywhere, even in the most unlikely places, but also that it is worth looking for it. Since 1985, the collection has grown to include some 7000 objects by almost 350 artists. Most of the works were donated by the artists themselves, by their families or heirs and by collectors. Others are on loan, usually long-term, or have been purchased with money provided by patrons and various funds. In her contribution to this book, Liesbeth Reith tells the story of the collection’s formation from a personal point of view. The main part of Solitary Creations is dedicated to presenting masterpieces by the fifty-one artists that were selected for this purpose by an editorial board consisting of the three authors-cum-board members. We aimed for an overview that demonstrates the range and quality, wealth and variety of the
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collection as it stands today. Several well-known names from the outsider art canon, such as Madge Gill, Sava Sekulic´, Albert Louden, Jon Serl and the artists from Gugging, have been omitted as De Stadshof does not have a representative body of work by these artists. Nevertheless, one does not have to follow the canon or the footsteps of others to come up with recognizable quality. In a sense, this book also shows what flair, intuition and daring can produce. Many artists are presented here for the first time. All works are accompanied by visual analyses and relevant biographical notes from Frans Smolders, to aid in a better understanding of the artists’ motivations, themes and handwriting. Here we must also thank Marcel Köppen for his outstanding photography and Frederik de Wal for designing the book into an art work itself. This publication was made possible with financial support from the Piet Boxem Fonds and the Madelief Fonds, managed by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, and VSBfonds. As an added extra, the book closes with a chronicle that goes beyond De Stadshof, documenting the history of naive and outsider art in the Netherlands with special attention to the many definitions, viewpoints and stands that were taken with respect to these arts originating outside the mainstream. As such, this panoramic collection of often conflicting opinions from both within and outside the art world hopefully provides an illuminating read that may also be of service in determining one’s own position vis-à-vis an artform that – whether despite or thanks to its ‘outsider’ label - is steadily gaining recognition on all sides. We have worked together with dozens of people over the years: from board, management and staff to advisory bodies and exhibition and acquisition committees. With this book, we would like to thank them all for their efforts towards establishing and expanding a unique art collection that has come to be widely recognized as one of the major international collections of naive art, art brut and outsider art today. By disclosing the results of some thirty years of work, we want to honour them as well as the artists. Finally, it is also our intention to contribute to the field of knowledge and to generate wider recognition of the value of outsider art, especially in the Netherlands where it seems to have somewhat disappeared from view. Furthermore, we hope to generate new support for our view that De Stadshof Collection constitutes a valuable Dutch art collection that can compete with other collections of modern and contemporary art and is worthy of being treated as such. Jos ten Berge chairman Stichting Collectie De Stadshof
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CARLO ZINELLI (1916-1974) UNTITLED undated, gouache on paper, 50 x 35 cm.
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DE STADSHOF
INTRODUCTION For a long time there were only two collections of art brut in the orthodox sense of the term in Europe: the first by Jean Dubuffet, who invented the genre and commenced a collection in 1945, which was exhibited first in Paris, then in Lausanne from 1976, and much later the Aracine collection, which opened to the public in 1984 in the Parisian suburb of Neuillysur-Marne and has been on display at the LaM in Villeneuved’Ascq, near Lille, since 2010. All the other collections of “singular”, “outsider” or “marginal” art applied less restrictive criteria and adopted a more open, eclectic approach that excluded neither naïve art nor any form of self-taught modern or contemporary creators, even going as far as to include certain qualified professional artists whose eccentricity, visionary thinking or outrageousness rendered them unclassifiable. Along with La Fabuloserie, Alain and Caroline Bourbonnais’ French collection, opened in 1983 in their country house in Dicy, in Burgundy, and Gérard Sendrey’s Musée de la Création Franche in Bègles, near Bordeaux, which also opened in the late eighties, the De Stadshof collection is part of the heterodox category of contemporary marginal art collections that represent a form of openness, perhaps even dissidence in relation to Dubuffet’s somewhat suffocating viewpoint. De Stadshof collection was begun at the same time as the Aracine and opened ten years later in Zwolle, in the building that gave the collection its name. The location at the crossroads of several linguistic and cultural influences is part of the singularity of the Dutch collection, singularity that clearly distinguishes it from its Latin counterparts, not to mention the non-conformism with which its organizers used the international network of outsiders, of which the London-based magazine Raw Vision was the primary support before the rise of the internet. From the beginning, De Stadshof carved its own path, was less concerned with the past and more open to new encounters and opportunities. It never set out to rival with the historic collection whose intimidating authority was a possible reference point elsewhere. There are very few classic art brut creators displayed here - it was never the intention. On the other hand there are some unexpected discoveries found in local psychiatric archives, such as Aaltje Dammer, or the drawings and paintings by Dutch schizophrenics such as Truus Kardol or Ank van Pagée, or works from the Herenplaats atelier, by the excellent Jeroen Pomp, whose work is particularly promising. There are also naïve works, old or contemporary, from all over the world: Dutch - Alexandrine and Leo Neervoort, Spanish - Bonifaci Bros, a Brazilian, Luiz Figueiredo and a Senegalese from Anvers, Adam Diakhaté. Several artists stand out: the Russian Pavel Leonov, whose genius has been acknowledged today,
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some rare Zulu tapestries by Alline Ndebele, a naïve brut artist from South Africa, little-known in Europe and some small masterpieces by Bonaria Manca, the great Italian naïve brut artist, whose work was probably highlighted for the first time in this collection. Among the self-taught and the “singulars”, apart from Herman Bossert, a Dutchman who lived in France for a long time, whose gothic towns and floral compositions have been displayed only too rarely, a great many artists are well-known and are included in other collections. But it is a great pleasure to see their works again here, with other, sometimes forgotten, facets of their production. It is the case for rather sophisticated artists such as Michel Nedjar or Marie-Rose Lortet, Marc Lamy, Chris Hipkiss or Christine Sefolosha. And the same thing is true for others, namely Rosemary Koczÿ, Philippe Azéma, Ody Saban, Jackie Garnier or A.C.M., who have also been promoted by the Aracine, la Collection de l’Art Brut, la Halle Saint Pierre or the Bègles museum. As for Nek Chand, who should not be considered a remarkable example of art brut in the strict sense, rather an example of contemporary folk art, he has been the Raw Vision’s mascot since the beginning. The unrivalled publication can also be thanked for having moved Donald Pass’ visionary and very savant art out of the shadows and into the limelight. And for art brut connoisseurs, Carlo Zinelli, Martha Grunenwaldt or Anna Zemánková, recently presented at the Venice Biennial, will be familiar figures, likewise Paul Duhem, star of La Pommeraie atelier, in Belgium, and Jaber, the ‘King of Beaubourg’ in Paris. As well as these old favourites, there are new finds, Dutch or from neighbouring countries, who do not really have an equivalent elsewhere. I am not referring to Willem Van Genk, who has a well-established worldwide reputation, of whose work the De Stadshof collection comprises a surprising array, in particular some of the models of trolley-buses that once made up a reconstitution of the Arnhem bus station in his flat. Without doubt, Willem van Genk produces the most spectacular examples of Dutch art brut and he has a prime position in this collection. But Siebe Wiemer Glastra, for example, whom I discovered while exhibiting his visionary biblical tapestries at the INSITA triennial in Bratislava in 2010, is practically unknown outside of his native country. And his paintings, that he ceased making so as not to cause discomfort to his wife, have never been given the attention they deserve. The same could be said of the emotionally-charged miniature towns by Bertus Jonkers, which are a sort of naïve version of the Zairean Bodys Isek Kingelez’ urban utopia. It is also the case for Jan Kervezee’s psychedelic improvisations, a kind of avatar of mediumistic art produced in the country of the coffee shop.
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Several others who have developed a very personal approach also deserve a mention: Markus Meurer, for example, who makes wire animals and complex characters that are full of life. Or Paula Sluiter, whose birds are larger than the trees they live in, and who portrays a world of delicateness and reverie. And Roy Wenzel, an autistic draughtsman whose recurring symbols remain largely impenetrable. But to my mind, without doubt the most precious recent discovery is Johnson Weree, a homeless Liberian refugee who draws thousands of varieties of busts and vehicles with an inexhaustible sense of decoration and absolute singularity. In the moving film in which we see him chatting to Frans Smolders, at his table in the local library that is his haven during the day, we understand that to Johnson, drawing is survival. His entire existence depends on the tip of his pencil. It is his way of expressing himself, proof
that he is here, his only point of contact with the rest of society. With that, suddenly, we are at the very core of art brut, in the purest sense. Each collection has a particular flavour, is a new mixture. With authors of this quality, the De Stadshof collection adds a note of singularity in the worldwide chorus of self-taught artists long set aside by contemporary art, while giving us the rare privilege of contemplating some new masterpieces by inspired non-academics. Laurent Danchin art writer and critic, lives in Paris; scholar of Dubuffet, he is among the leading International specialists of Art Brut and Outsider Art.
JEROEN POMP (1985) KROKODILLENMEER (CROCODILE LAKE) undated, coloured pencil on paper, 70 x 100 cm.
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DE STADSHOF COLLECTION, AN ART COLLECTION’S HISTORY LIESBETH REITH ‘HOW COME WE DON’T HAVE A MUSEUM FOR NAIVE ART IN THE NETHERLANDS?’ MY FATHER WONDERED IN LATE 1983, ‘PLENTY OF OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE OPENED MUSEUMS LIKE THAT IN RECENT YEARS. COULDN’T WE FOUND ONE HERE?’ COMING FROM MY FATHER, WHO LIVED IN A HOUSE FULL OF PROFESSIONAL MODERN ART AND HAD NEVER SPOKEN OF THIS NEW INTEREST BEFORE, THE QUESTION SURPRISED ME. I had never given naive art much thought, but the idea stuck in my mind, and shortly afterwards I started reading up on a subject that was to play a dominant part in my life. I studied such works as Naïeve schilders zien ons land, a popular ‘Book of the Month’ in 1978, and, from the same year, Naïeve kunst: Aspecten van een randverschijnsel, a study by art historian Louis Gans and psychiatrist W.P.H. Russelman. I read Nederlandse naïeve kunst by Nico van der Endt and Joop Bromet from 1979, and Die Malerei der Naiven from 1981 by Oto Bihalji-Merin, the leading international authority on the subject at the time. Not all the reproductions in the books appealed to me, many of them even making something of an amateurish impression, but I was often struck by images and shapes that seemed to spring from unknown regions of the artistic imagination – unknown to me at the time, that is – in work by Alexandrine, Willem van Genk and Leo Neervoort, for example. Perusing a newly published collection of essays and articles titled Naif: Alltagsästhetik oder Ästhetisierter Alltag shortly afterwards, I realised naive art was not an easy phenomenon to pin down – and that the discussion was in full swing. Art historian Otfried Schütz started his contribution with the striking remark that the only thing the many publications on naive art had in common was their authors’ helplessness when it came to defining the subject and its boundaries. No one seemed to be able to say where exactly ‘high art’ stopped and ‘naive art’ began, nor lay down the criteria to distinguish between authentic naive art and pseudo naive art.1 I gradually started to share my father’s conviction that naive art deserved its own museum, and decided to invest time in the project – but neither style nor movement, this art was unlikely to find a place in art history otherwise, and seemed destined to stay on the margins. For it to become fully understood and preserved for future generations, it needed to be systematically collected and exhibited. I have worked together with dozens of others towards establishing and
ALEXANDRINE (1903-1980) PROMENADE AU CLAIR DE LUNE 1970, oil on canvas, 66 x 55 cm.
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expanding a unique art collection ever since, holding positions on every level, from management and advisory bodies to exhibition and acquisition committees. Thanks to the tireless efforts of all these people, De Stadshof collection has become one of the major international collections of naive art, art brut and outsider art today.
THE PIONEERING YEARS, 1985 TO 1990 In February 1985, the foundation Stichting Museum voor Naïeve Kunst was set up2 with the goal of establishing an independent museum, specialised in international naive art, in the Netherlands. While various art museums such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Frans Hals in Haarlem and the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam had purchased naive pieces for their collection, these tended to be misunderstood and consigned to the vaults indefinitely. Why had these pieces lost their popularity after the 1980s? Had they become dated and overshadowed by new trends such as the Wild Style or new media art? Or did, on closer consideration, the artistic quality of too many of the pieces fall short? We believed that concentrating art and activities in one location would enable us to achieve a considerably higher standard, not just of the collection, but also in terms of academic research, exhibitions and international reputation. As a result, artists, collectors and their heirs would be more inclined to entrust pieces to the museum, where they were assured of regular exhibitions and specialist academic consideration. On 24 March 1985, we opened the exhibition Naïeve Schilderkunst at the University Museum Utrecht, mainly showing pieces on loan by Dutch artists such as Willem van Dok, Pieter Hagoort, Sal Meijer, Leo Neervoort and Ruurd Wiersma. It was an experiment to gauge public opinion and find out whether there was enough interest among art lovers to justify a naive art museum. The reactions from the media, collectors and members of the public alike were so positive that we immediately set to work, even without a permanent venue. The collection of the museum we had in mind was to provide a cross section of international naive art, with an emphasis on Dutch naive art. We stated our criteria in our very first newsletter in October 1985, with artistic quality as top priority,
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followed by authenticity and the artist’s ability to depict their vision convincingly. Though many were self-taught, we made sure to include artists who had some formal training but had chosen to go their own way afterwards.3 We had yet to hear of the term ‘outsider’. In May of the same year we had visited, at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, an exhibition of its Naïeven collection, a part of the museum’s wider collection that owed its existence mainly to the interest of Willem Sandberg, the director between 1945 and 1962. The exhibition took the highly unusual approach of including – instead of the obligatory Yugoslavian naifs from the ‘Hlebine School’, founded by Croatian intellectuals in the 1920s to develop a national style with naive elements – art from Haiti that had its roots in folk art and animism. I thought this showed an admirable nonconformism. In the accompanying leaflet, curator Marja Bloem put forward the question whether Niki de St. Phalle should not in fact be counted as a naive artist, despite being part of the professional avant-garde.4 This subject – the artist’s position in the art world and the resulting label applied to his work – has been a recurring topic in art criticism to this day. Taking into account both the work of Niki de St. Phalle and her mentality, the answer to Bloem’s query should be yes.
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ANONYMOUS JANUARŸ. LOUWMAAND - FEBRUARŸ. SPROKKELMAAND - MAŸ. BLOEIMAAND OCTOBER. WIJNMAAND part of calendar with labours of the month, undated (18th C), watercolour on paper, 14 x 21 cm.
In 1986, the first donations of pieces towards a future museum were pledged: twelve naive eighteenth-century watercolours depicting the labours of each month. Naive art from the eighteenth century? Yes, because this is a universal art form, even if the term naive has not always been applied to it. It did, however, again raise questions about our collection parameters; questions that would also occupy a newly formed advisory body consisting of a member of the Stichting Museum voor Naïeve Kunst, collectors of naive art, a gallery owner specialised in naive art and other art lovers. Around that time, I visited an exhibition on Jean Dubuffet in Das Badische Museum in Karlsruhe. Some of his paintings looked distinctly naive to me. This exhibition was where I first came across the term ‘art brut’, which Dubuffet had coined for his collection of pieces by amateur artists, eccentrics and
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mental patients. I read Gerd Presler’s L’Art brut: Kunst zwischen Genialität und Wahnsinn and Michel Thévoz’ L’art brut, both published in 1981, as well as Roger Cardinal’s Outsider Art from 1972. Each member of our board explored the extensive field of nonprofessional art in their own way. Starting off with naive art, the trail seemed almost inevitably to lead to art brut and related fields. It was a group process of gaining insights which we duly reported on in our newsletter – anonymously, since the articles resulted from discussions involving us all. In the summer of 1987, for instance, we stated that ‘it would be possible to define art brut and naive art in such a way that both styles fall in the same category. Any separation between them is often artificial, especially in intermediate forms. A striking example of this is the Dutch naive artist – as he was considered at the time – Willem van Genk, whose work caused a s ensation in Lausanne last year [in 1986, at the Collection de l’art brut]. But famous naive artists from the past such as Séraphine and Nikifor can just as easily be classified as art brut.’5
WILLEM VAN GENK (1927-2005) GREAT RAILROADS OF THE WORLD undated (c. 1970), oil on hardboard, 68 x 133 cm.
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ROTTERDAM, 1990 TO 1992 After seven years of negotiations with the Rotterdam city council, it looked as though we would be able to establish our museum in Rotterdam. In anticipation of this event, we opened the Informatiecentrum voor Naïeve Kunst, run by art historian Peter Fransman, in the borough of Delfshaven in 1989. Our Rotterdam board members, benefactors and other supporters enabled us to mount a small series of exhibitions, at the Informatiecentrum and other venues, designed to generate national and international awareness of our goal – a specialised museum for naive art and art brut in the Netherlands. We contacted scores of collectors, artists and museums in the hope of supplementing what we had acquired so far with potential ‘donations or loans for the museum at its completion’. Unfortunately, the city of Rotterdam eventually decided against the subsidy, and the Informatiecentrum held its final exhibition, Naïeve kunst en Art Brut uit eigen collectie, in 1992. By that time, the collection had grown to around 200 works of art by such artists as Alexandrine, Dirk Bos, Annekaatje Brand, Luiz Figueiredo, Willem van Genk, Thea Gérard, Pieter Hagoort, Isabel de Jesus, Cor Kaay, Rosemarie Koczÿ, Leo Neervoort, Yeshayahu Scheinfeld and Gérard Sendrey, mostly donated by collectors, artists or their families, or purchased with money provided by various funds and patrons. We could
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BONARIA MANCA (1925) DE STADSHOF undated (c.1999), oil on canvas, 45 x 80 cm.
already pride ourselves on a small but international range of naive art and art brut. We also had twenty pieces on loan, and over 500 more had been promised once the museum found a venue. With no budget and dependent on the opportunities that presented themselves, we were hardly ever in a position to pick and choose the pieces for the collection in those years, and consequently ended up with several donations of what Schütz called ‘attractive pseudo-naive art’. They are part of our history.
THE SCOPE OF THE COLLECTION Defining our collection parameters proved difficult in those early years, especially where there was an overlap with modern art, folk art or children’s drawings. We revised our criteria as we went along. In 1990, we accepted a donation of nineteen drawings and watercolours by Annekaatje Brand. A farmer’s daughter of limited mental capacities, she made numerous small and large drawings between 1905 and 1918 that attracted the attention of psychiatrists as well as the director of the Rijksmuseum’s Print Room at the time, because their realism was remarkably developed for the work of a child. But were they children’s drawings, a category we considered outside our field, or were we dealing with something extraordinary, a great talent that had managed to blossom in spite of the girl’s limitations? We decided it was the latter. In 1992, the foundation was also given twenty drawings by German-born artist Rosemarie Koczÿ, whose striking work drew on her tragic experiences during the Holocaust. Her human figures seem to float in a simmering space filled with thin lines. Koczÿ was a fully qualified artist who considered
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JOHANN KOREC (1937-2008) ES WAR AM SAMSTAG 14. MÄRZ 1992 1992, ink and watercolour on paper, 31 x 22.5 cm.
herself a professional, but due to her unique and obsessive working method, endlessly repeating the same themes from her life story, her work did in fact meet the requirements for our collection. Around the same time, we discovered ‘wandelingen op papier’ (walks on paper) by the Dutch interior architect Hans Scholze, who represented the Netherlands at the Quatrième Biennale in Paris together with Peter Struycken, Ad Dekkers and Reinier Lucassen, and had been selected for the Atelier 6 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1969. While
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D. LANDSMAN (?-?) UNTITLED 1960, wax crayon on paper, 50 x 65 cm. (collection Plokker)
this may have placed him firmly in the established avantgarde, Scholze’s drawings gave a different picture, namely that of an artist completely immersed in the process of drawing. While we all agreed this was a unique and fascinating body of work, we postponed the decision in this case, to return to it in 2012 with the purchase of fifteen works. As was tentatively announced in 1987 and made explicit in 1992 with the last exhibition of the Stichting Nederlands Museum voor Naïeve Kunst in Delfshaven, we now considered art brut, as well as naive art, part of our field. But the reality of applying these labels and categories invariably turned out to be more difficult, and far more complex, than envisaged. Some oeuvres seemed to display characteristics of both categories, and sometimes part of an oeuvre seemed to belong to one and
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the rest to another, as in the case of Willem van Genk. There was only a difference of degree in our opinion, which clashed with that of, say, Michel Thévoz, the then director of the Collection de l’art brut, who insisted on a clear division. In one of our newsletter articles, we wrote that he considered naive art to be ‘only partially free from contemporary cultural influences, while Art Brut goes significantly further. While the naive artist is usually a well-adjusted member of society, the art brut artist is far more isolated: on top of the artistic isolation he has in common with the naive artist, there is often a form of social and psychological isolation. Arguably, it is exactly this tragic isolation that brings forth art in its purest form. While naive art depicts the physical world, art brut is no more (and no less) than an inner image, completely determined by the artist’s emotional life.’6 The question remains how to tell when an artist’s artistic, social and psychological isolation has reached the crucial point at which their output can be called art brut; are these three factors equally important? Who determines what art brut is, and according to what criteria? Is Thévoz’s ‘purest form’ also the most interesting artistically? There is
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The Nederlands Museum voor Naïeve Kunst foundation was renamed Stichting Collectie De Stadshof by an alteration to the articles of association, and loaned its entire collection to the newly established foundation De Stadshof, Museum voor Naïeve en Outsider Kunst, which also took on all museum duties. The director Ans van Berkum and I took the bull by the horns, asking artists, collectors and institutions point-blank for donations or loans, and flattering them with the prospect of a new museum dedicated to their art. It was an intoxicating time: the sky was the limit, and we booked overwhelming results. Offers and tips flooded in from all sides, and the more the collection grew in importance, the more donations, too, snowballed. The tips and offers were considered by the members of the advisory board9, all of whom had their own networks, did their own research and presented proposals for the acquisition of new ‘artists’. Based on photographs of the works and information about the artists’ life stories and methods, the board decided whether or not to pursue them. Raw Vision, a magazine founded by John Maizels in 1989 and still an authority on the field today, functioned as a forum for debate among a growing number of experts. De Stadshof Collection also received advice from Nico van der Endt, owner of Galerie Hamer in Amsterdam, who had many years of experience, involved us in heated discussions about our collection para meters and made many donations and loans to De Stadshof Collection. Gérard Sendrey should not go unmentioned either. His Site, later called the Musée de la Création Franche in Bègles, France, provided a platform for countless artists outside the official art circuit, and he introduced us to the work of Alain Lacoste, Claudine Goux, Ody Saban, Bruno Montpied, Simone Le Carré-Galimard, Martha Grunenwaldt, Jaber, Adam Nidzgorski and many others.
NEK CHAND (1924) UNTITLED undated (c. 1993), textile, mixed media, h. 120 cm.
no definite answer to these questions. These solitary creations cannot be pigeonholed as either naive art or art brut. And why should they be?
DE STADSHOF MUSEUM, ZWOLLE, 1993 TO 2001 In the same year as Rotterdam abandoned the project, the town council of Zwolle decided to subsidise the museum.7 It was opened in October 1994, in the converted law court on Blijmarkt square. The director was art historian Ans van Berkum. Named after the historic site near the old city wall that had been known as ‘de stadshof’ in the past, the museum was called De Stadshof, Museum voor Naïeve en Outsider Kunst, the first museum in Europe to include both categories in its name.8
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All in all, the collection that had consisted of roughly 250 objects by forty artists in early 1993 had grown to around 7000 objects by almost 350 artists by late 1999. The largest part consisted of donations, solicited and unsolicited, and loans – long-term, in some cases – by museums such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the German Clemens-Sels-Museum in Neuß, Haus Cajeth in Heidelberg and Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund. By unearthing new, unknown oeuvres and seizing opportunities, De Stadshof Collection soon distinguished itself from other collections, which – more often than not – preferred to rely on established names with prestigious price tags. This is how we acquired important works by Bonifaci Bros, Nek Chand, Maurice Fuldauer, Siebe Wiemer Glastra, Martha Grunenwaldt, Tobias Jessberger, Bertus Jonkers, Reuben Lake, Hans Langner, Bonaria Manca, Henk Veenvliet and Roy Wenzel.10 Artists, their families and collectors were grateful for the opportunity of housing their art objects in a specialised museum. Early 1996, we were offered the Plokker collection. The psychiatrist Johannes Herbert Plokker had collected remarkable pieces by his patients during the 50s and 60s in one of the first studios for creative therapy in the Netherlands: a total of
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800 drawings, including highly expressive portraits by Truus Kardol, 140 paintings and around a dozen wooden sculptures.11 Plokker expounded his views on this ‘creative expression’ in his 1962 thesis Geschonden Beeld, which attracted international interest (translated as Artistic Self-Expression in Mental Disease: The Shattered Image of Schizophrenics, The Hague 1964).12 The pieces donated by psychiatrist Bas Reedijk in 1998 were all by the same artist, his patient Aaltje Dammer. After a visit to De Stadshof Museum, Reedijk felt he had finally found a destination for the drawings he had kept for years. The sixtynine sheets of brown wrapping paper on which Dammer made her drawings became a striking phenomenon within the collection.13 Showing artists around the museum, we noticed they never doubted their own talent and had little interest in the works of others; each had their own artistic language and themes, and that was that. When it came to recognition, they were no different from anyone else. Willem van Genk enjoyed a short-lived fame following his first solo exhibition in 1964, but felt misunderstood once it had ebbed away again. Some of the artists expected to get a museum of their own, such as Henk Veenvliet, who crammed hundreds of picture frames into his tiny apartment in anticipation. Bonaria Manca enjoyed the publicity too, and foresaw a museum of her own on Sardinia, where she spent her childhood before moving to the Italian mainland with her family. Her paintings proved difficult to come by; perhaps she was holding them back for her private museum, or perhaps she felt the illustrations were so intrinsically linked with her life story they could not simply be plucked out of it. Voices told her whether not to sell, and we knew better than to argue with the decrees of a higher power.14
LUCKY BREAKS Besides the tips and opportunities, we sometimes simply relied on luck. After the Rotterdam Informatiecentrum closed in 1992, I received a letter at my home address from the architect Ab van Dien. The letter, which had accidentally ended up in the recycling bin and was covered in dust by the time I retrieved it, enquired whether we would be interested in a group of sculptures by the Indian artist Nek Chand that had belonged to a travelling exhibition. I took the train to Amsterdam the following day and arrived in the nick of in time – a real stroke of luck. Getting in touch with Nek Chand in person proved to be of even greater value. After I asked him on behalf of De Stadshof Collection to contribute two or three small sculptures to the Het Formaat exhibition in 1997, huge crates arrived at the Museum from India, filled with dozens of handmade sculptures and three textile dolls wrapped up in colourful perfumed rags. A wonderful gift from his famous Rock Garden near Chandigarh, India.
BERTUS JONKERS (1920-2001) UNTITLED undated, wall hanging, mixed media, 205 x 50 cm.
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DE STADSHOF
Then there is the 1985 story about Maurice Fuldauer. Among the hundreds of naive works of art in the Naïeven exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, including pieces by Bauchant, Bombois, Van Genk, Sal Meijer and Nikifor, Fuldauer’s c reations immediately caught my eye. He was the only painter in the exhibition to incorporate unorthodox materials such as cork, seashells, leaves, stones and other natural elements in his work. In 1993, when De Stadshof Museum in Zwolle was a certainty, I started looking for the Fuldauer family and eventually found a cousin of his, A. Glerum, who very generously donated eighteen objects of his uncle’s. Shortly afterwards, the artist’s son Henry Fuldauer wrote us a long letter from Brazil about the life and works of his father, accompanied by photographs as well as donations of his work.15 This pattern would repeat itself in the following years. In 1997, the Stedelijk offered four Fuldauers as a donation, ‘because De Stadshof Collection is where they belong’.16 I would not have dreamed of this twelve years earlier! I discovered Roy Wenzel’s drawings in a 1993 catalogue of the travelling exhibition Het Gezicht/The Face, organised by Very Special Arts Nederland. The complex line structure overlying and connecting the various shapes fascinated me. At his day centre, I was told that Wenzel produced his best work at home, where he lived with his brother and sister-inlaw. I was allowed to make a generous selection from thick rolls of paper containing hundreds of drawings, and the many times we visited Wenzel in the years to come, we hardly ever left empty-handed. His work has since gained international recognition and been incorporated in various important art collections. De Stadshof Collection owns over 200 of his drawings, including a number of unfinished pieces that lend insight into his unique perception and imagination. ‘Homo ludens’ Bertus Jonkers appeared on the scene when he had to leave his Utrecht home, which could justifiably be called a Gesamtkunstwerk, to go into care. At the time, the Centraal Museum Utrecht already owned his Stad van Overgave (City of Devotion), an extensive conglomerate of temples, houses, boats and other structures. ‘Building is universal’, Jonkers said in an interview with curator Marja Bosma, ‘it is the opposite of getting stuck in a rut. It means space and positive action – ultimately, it means discovering yourself.’17 Jonkers gave us most of the art in his house on loan – natural pattern paintings, drawings, dry-points, miniature buildings, fabric art, matter paintings, reliefs, handmade books with texts and illustrations – installing them in a small gallery of his own. In the following years, he would turn up every so often to add new objects to the collection and take others back home, to the despair of the curator who was charged with keeping track of the loans. We visited him regularly at the old people’s home, where he had turned his room into a studio. After his death in 2001, the pieces on loan to the museum and others from his estate were bequeathed to De Stadshof Collection, bringing the number of Jonkers objects in the collection to around 1700.
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MOHAMMED HARB (1888-1973) TRAGIC ROMANCE BETWEEN THE COURAGEOUS WARRIOR ANTAR AND HIS LOVE ABLA undated, gouache on cotton glued on paper, 65 x 70 cm.
Additional subsidies from funds and private donations enabled us to fill certain hiatuses in the collection. One patron paid for four drawings by Italian artist Carlo Zinelli and contributed towards the acquisition of work by Ethiopian artists Mickaël Bethe-Sélassié. A collector donated Brazilian artist Luiz Figueiredo’s exuberant sculptures. Leading Dutch cultural funds such as the Mondriaan Foundation, the Rembrandt Association, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Dutch Municipal Bank (BNG) and the VSB Fund have provided the means for extensive acquisitions of work by two of the most important Dutch outsiders: thirty-five paintings and twenty-two embroideries by Siebe Wiemer Glastra and fifteen pieces by Willem van Genk, including four trolley buses created from plate material and selected waste material.
MUSEUM DR. GUISLAIN, GHENT, 2002 TO THE PRESENT De Stadshof Museum in Zwolle was forced to close its doors in 2001, when the town council decided to end its subsidy in favour of fulfilling its old dream of a modern art museum. On
SOLITARY CREATIONS
MARKUS MEURER (1959) PAPA 2008, assemblage of fishbone, cartilage, biker-doll and found objects, 30 x 15 x 30 cm.
our search for a new venue, the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent lent a helping hand, and in February 2002, the board signed a loans- and cooperation agreement.18 The new department for outsider art at the Dr. Guislain Museum was brought to life by such exhibitions as Welkom De Stadshof in 2002 and Spel makers in 2005. We established a growing exchange of loans between museums on a national and international level. To avoid confusion and because all the activities related to the collection – acquisition, exhibitions and publicity – had been conducted under that name, we kept the name De Stadshof.
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Though our collecting policies were unchanged, the loss of a budget and venue had put an end to the privileged position we had occupied in previous years. It was 2009 by the time an unexpected bequest enabled us to fulfil some long-held dreams. A top priority in our new policy plan was improving international recognition with a new website, showing a representative overview of the collection. Another important spearhead was to be the publication of an accessible book on the collection, in which portraits of our fifty major artists would convey the wealth the collection had acquired over the years. We then felt the wish to bring the collection up to date. We followed up old leads and opportunities in order to build on existing oeuvres and unearth new ones. Adding recent artistic creations was also a great opportunity to reinforce appreciation for De Stadshof Collection. Even though the term outsider art had become globally accepted, our new collection develop-
DE STADSHOF
KARIN ZALIN (1951) UNTITLED undated (c. 2010), wall hanging, mixed media, 100 x 150 cm.
ment policy stated that ‘it is defined very narrowly by some – synonymous to the notion of art Jean Dubuffet developed around 1947 – and loosely by others, sometimes even including tattoos. De Stadshof adheres to neither of these extremes, refusing on principle to impose such rigid restrictions on its collection parameters; after all, as the frequent new discoveries and the continuing debate on the nature of outsider art have shown, this is a field with flexible boundaries.’19 De Stadshof Collection uses the term outsider art to cover naive art, art brut and related phenomena. In Europe, an increasing number of studios connected to healthcare services present the artistic endeavours of groups of patients as outsider art.
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This has led to a tsunami of work – usually stereotypical, onedimensional and heavily influenced – that very rarely meets the criteria to qualify it as art. Of course there are exceptions: artists like Aaltje Dammer, Paul Duhem, Lies Hutting, and Carlo Zinelli who are impervious to outside influences and whom the studios offer a chance to develop their talent.20
NEW ACQUISITIONS The main criteria De Stadshof applies to potential acquisitions have remained unchanged to this day: artistic quality, autonomy and independence from their cultural environment together with an authenticity and strong-mindedness born from an irrepressible urge to create, which turn an oeuvre into a self-contained world.21 What has changed since the Rotterdam and Zwolle days is the way we go about finding new work.
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While we had no, or hardly any, money of our own, we relied heavily on donations. We have since been able to be more selective, not just in deciding which offers to accept, but also in the active search for unknown or little-known work – a search that still leads to wonderful discoveries. It has allowed us to add some new jewels to our crown, around 250 pieces by twenty-five artists at the time of writing. A major driving force behind this was Frans Smolders, who brought to bear his knowledge of outsider art in general and our collection in particular, as well as plenty of curiosity and a critical eye. I would like to end with some examples of this successful and inspiring cooperation. The Syrian artist Mohammed Harb, who died in 1973, had already built up a reputation for his naive paintings on glass and canvas. An autodidact who had come to painting late in life, this Islamic naive artist drew on ancient folk tales for his
DONALD PASS (1930-2010) RESURRECTION STUDY 2009, conté crayon on paper, 95 x 130 cm.
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work, taking the courageous step from Syrian folk art and its conventional letters and calligraphy to a more individualistic artistic language. De Stadshof Collection purchased eight of his paintings. Travelling through Basel in early 2009, we noticed a crowd of intriguing, poetic wooden sculptures in an optician’s window that haunted us for a long time afterwards. Back in Basel some months later, we tracked down and visited the artist, Japanborn Saï Kijima, a dancer and performer who had lived in Europe for over thirty years. He makes sculptures and reliefs from waste material such as cardboard boxes, driftwood and his own discarded socks and shirts, and uses these sculptures, called ‘dolls’, in his performances. They all have names and personalities of their own. In his reliefs, often with protruding papier-maché heads, he has taken the idea further. We were soon convinced his work would fit into our collection, but at the mention of the word ‘purchase’, Kijima was less than enthusiastic; his dolls belonged together, like a family. After a number of visits, we gradually won his trust, until the idea that some of his pieces – fifty-three, to be precise – would find a new home in De Stadshof Collection even started to feel reassuring to him.
DE STADSHOF
On our way back to the Netherlands, we stopped in Münster for a visit to the Kunsthaus Kannen, where we noticed some small but eye-catching wire sculptures by someone called Markus Meurer. The director Lisa Inckmann provided us with a phone number, and the very same evening we were taken to see Meurer and his muse Jacqueline by his patrons, Mr and Mrs Nieting. Meurer turned out to be a highly talented and imaginative artist, whose voodoo-like power images stood out at De Stadshof exhibition Backyard Genius held at the Belgian Verbeke Foundation in 2010. Ulf Bolland from Basel was at the opening, the friend of Markus Meurer’s who had discovered him and who kept personal texts, films and photographs on Meurer in his archive. Meurer allowed us to buy over twenty assemblages, including some large ones. Visiting Henry Boxer’s Gallery in London in late 2009, we were struck by a gigantic conté drawing in the hall: Resurrection, a ‘vision’ of the English artist Donald Pass. It took our breath away. The work turned out to be part of a series of monumental drawings about the Resurrection, which Pass had started working on after an intense mystical experience in a churchyard in 1984. We signalled our interest, and after a period of corresponding, Boxer wrote to us in the summer of 2010. Pass, who had fallen seriously ill, wanted De Stadshof Collection to have one of his large drawings, and was prepared to donate a more recent piece – the slightly smaller Resurrection Study from 2010 – if we purchased Resurrection. During a board meeting, one of the members presented drawings by a homeless Liberian artist who spent every day drawing in a public library. The Herenplaats gallery, who had exhibited his drawn heads before, put us in touch with this Johnson Weree. He came to see us and soon covered our tabletops and floor in bust portraits of men and women with piercing eyes and colourful clothes. He works on his striking portraits and vehicles every day with unflagging enthusiasm. ‘I did not go to school, anyone can do it… Art doesn’t mean you need books or study books… Art means you need to see and do… When you see it’s Reality…’ he explains his work. A single drawing takes him between one and four weeks to complete. De Stadshof Collection bought over thirty of them. My final story is about the American Karin Zalin. An artist friend of ours brought her incredible embroidery to our attention in 2011, but all he could tell us about her was that she lived in Venice. He did know her ‘patron’, however, one of the few people who visited her regularly, and who invited us to come and see her colourful, inventive embroidered Venetian vedute for ourselves soon afterwards. A self-taught artist, Zalin is a very private person who does not like to be photographed. She has lived in a Venetian apartment, flooded every time the water is high, since 1988. She deliberately bases her embroideries on just a few preliminary lines, expanding them by way of association into textile epics. Convinced as we were by the quality of her work, we had to wait and see if she would let us have any – which she did, and De Stadshof Collection is about to surprise art lovers with three unique pieces of fabric art in 2014.
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SUMMARY Our recently acquired pieces display a tremendous diversity, which has always been a benchmark of the oeuvres in our collection: there are as many styles and artistic imaginations as there are individual artists. The wrangling over the proper term for artistic oeuvres that do not fit neatly into the critical matrix sometimes obscures unique creations. But whether they are ‘outsider art’, ‘naive art’, ‘primitive art’, ‘art brut’ or ‘visionary art’ is not really relevant – what matters is that these solitary creations stick in the mind of the viewer. All the pieces do have one thing in common, however: executed with decisiveness, conviction, and without hesitation, they are full of spontaneous and highly personal ideas and scenes combined in the most unlikely ways – and without an initial plan. To anyone with knowledge of outsider art, its remarkable formal qualities are recognisable at first sight. Some of the recent acquisitions mentioned above have already been exhibited. The creations of Markus Meurer and Hans Scholze caught the attention of young and old, experts and members of the public, at the Backyard Genius exhibition, while Jan Kervezee’s paintings and drawings were subjected to careful scrutiny at Borderlines in Garage Rotterdam in 2012. At the Venice Biennale 2013, Curator Massimiliano Gioni recognised the mediating role played by outsiders’ work. This remarkable acknowledgement of the artistic quality of outsider art unleashed many discussions among art critics. As he states in the German art magazine Art, Gioni is interested in artists who go against the cultural grain. His search for the origin of creativity has led him to the makers of outsider art because they help us understand how the perception of visual images works.22 Again in Art, Sandra Danicke asks what makes Heimliche Kunst art? The same things that make any other creation art, such as a convincing form for pertinent content. Pieces by outsider artists are hugely attractive to the public because of their intensity; life and work of the creators of these private universes are usually inextricably linked.23 This encourages us in our mission to increase public interest in outsider art in general and in De Stadshof collection in particular. The extensive exhibition of forty artists with more than 300 works at the Halle Saint Pierre Paris in autumn 2014 is an important step towards international recognition of this too little-known Dutch cultural gem. Further exhibitions abroad are planned, and sometime in the future, our dream of a new platform in the Netherlands may even become a reality.
SOLITARY CREATIONS
NOTES 1 Otfried Schütz, ‘Naive Kunst? Wider eine ästhetische Kategorie’, from Ina-Maria Greverus et al (ed.), Naif: Alltagsästhetik oder Ästhetisierter Alltag, Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 7 2 With support from Livia Verstegen of the Vereniging voor Onderwijs, Kunst en Wetenschap. The name of the foundation was changed to Stichting Nederlands Museum voor Naïeve Kunst in 1989. 3 ‘Enkele gedachten over naïeve kunst’, Nieuwsbrief Stichting Museum voor Naïeve Kunst 1 (October 1985), pp. 4-5 4 Marja Bloem, Naïeven in de collectie van het Stedelijk, Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum) 1985, p. 1 5 ‘Aan de grenzen van de naïveteit’, Nieuwsbrief Stichting Museum voor Naïeve Kunst, 6 (June 1987), p. 4. 6 ‘Aan de grenzen van de naïveteit’, Nieuwsbrief Stichting Museum voor Naïeve Kunst, 6 (June 1987), p. 4. 7 Our board member Eric Denig and the actor and naive art collector Luc Lutz both played a decisive role in bringing about this positive decision. 8 ‘Het Museum krijgt gestalte’, Nieuwsbrief Stichting Museum voor Naïeve en Outsider Kunst 22 (February1993), p. 1. We wanted to use the term art brut, but it had already been reserved as a trade name for Dubuffet’s collection. The term outsider art was taken from the book Outsider Art by Roger Cardinal from 1972, and was intended by Cardinal as the English equivalent of art brut. Over time, ‘outsider art’ became an internationally established phenomenon, consisting of more than just art brut, but also, to a limited degree, of work from studios for mentally handicapped or psychiatric patients. 9 With thanks to Yvonne Beelen, Nico van der Endt, Peter Fransman, Marianne Kooijman, Frans Smolders and Roeland Zijlstra. 10 See on the acquisition of outsider art in general and about ‘De Stadshof’ artists such as Dirk Bos, Riet van Halder, Ben de Recyclist and Reuben Lake: Jos ten Berge, ‘Op zoek naar de homo ludens’, in P. Allegaert et al (ed.), Verborgen werelden: Outsiderkunst in het Museum Dr. Guislain, Tielt 2007, pp. 26-41(transl. as ‘Stadshof Collection: The Search for Homo Ludens’, in Univers cachés/Hidden Worlds, pp. viii-xv), and Stichting Collectie Stadshof, Collectieplan 2010-2014, Utrecht 2010.
11 See Jos ten Berge, ‘Truus Kardol’, in exhib. cat. Meesters uit de marge, Zwolle (Stadshof Museum) 1999, pp. 22-27 (transl. as Masters of the Margin). 12 See Liesbeth Benjaminse-Reith, ‘De collectie Plokker’, in Ateliers van de Ziel, De collectie Plokker, Zwolle (Stadshof Museum) 1996, pp. 10-27. See also Liesbeth Reith, ‘Vormsels, beeldende expressie, kunst? De collectie Plokker’, in P. Allegaert et al (eds.), Verborgen werelden: Outsiderkunst in het Museum Dr. Guislain, Tielt 2007, pp. 52-52 (transl. as ‘Shapes, plastic expression, art? The Plokker collection’, in Univers cachés/Hidden Worlds, pp. xviii-xx). 13 See Jos ten Berge, ‘Aaltje Dammer’, in exhib. cat. Meesters uit de marge, Zwolle (Museum De Stadshof) 1999, pp. 10-15 (transl. as Masters of the Margin). 14 See also Claire Margat, ‘Bonaria Manca’, in exhib. cat. Meesters uit de marge, Zwolle (Museum De Stadshof) 1999, pp. 76-81 (transl. as Masters of the Margin). 15 Unfortunately, customs officials intervened when they saw the turtle shells that Fuldauer had incorporated in his work before their use was banned. Repeated requests for restitution have been fruitless. 16 See ‘Recente Aanwinsten’ in Nieuwsbrief Stadshof, Museum voor Naïeve Kunst en Outsider Art, 35 (February 1998), p. 3. 17 Marja Bosma, ‘”Een knalgele paardenbloem tussen de tegels”. Een gesprek met Bertus Jonkers’, in Bespiegelingen van Bertus Jonkers; leven and werken aan de Lagenoord, Utrecht 1993, p. 29. 18 Its success is due to an important part to Prof. Ferdinand van Dam, member of the board and adviser of De Stadshof Collection. 19 Stichting Collectie De Stadshof, Collectieplan 2010-2014, Utrecht 2010, p. 10. 20 Stichting Collectie De Stadshof, Collectieplan 2010-2014, Utrecht, p. 12. 21 Ib. 22 ‘Der Traum vom Wissen’, Art, Das Kunstmagazin, June 2013, pp. 80-82 23 ‘Heimliche Künstler’, Sandra Danicke, Art, Das Kunstmagazin, August 2013, pp. 18-31.
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DE STADSHOF
Solitary Creations presents the work of 51 artists from the Dutch De Stadshof Collection, talented individuals that do not profile themselves as artists, and unfurl their creativity outside the mainstream art circuit. The areas covered include both internationally renowned creations of ‘outsider art’ (an umbrella term for art brut, naive art, visionary art, imaginative art) and ‘discoveries’, hidden artistic gems that deserve an audience. This book presents an array of spontaneous and idiosyncratic artistic creations, a category of art that has always existed all over the world, independent of cultural and fashionable trends. Solitary Creations presents beautiful examples of this art, collected over a period of 30 years, almost always from the hand of irrepressible, often obsessive auto didacts. Special facets of these artworks are the unique handwriting of the maker, unusual materials, overcrowded images, that have been photographed in detail especially for this book. www.collectiedestadshof.nl
Front and back cover: Markus Meurer Schlittschuhläufer c. 1985-1995 assemblage 102 × 56 × 38 cm.