Charley Toorop Love for Van Gogh
Foreword
Benno Tempel
Encounters with Van Gogh
Charley Toorop
‘It has always remained an event to see his work’
Charley Toorop’s fascination with Vincent van Gogh
Renske Cohen Tervaert
From Borinage to pilgrimage
Vincent van Gogh and Charley Toorop in the Pays Noir
Franka Blok
Art as medicine
Charley Toorop and the desire for a more humane society after the First World War
Marjet Brolsma
Charley Toorop at the Willem
Arntsz Foundation
Wessel Krul
Foreword
This exhibition and publication brings together two artists whose oeuvres are significantly represented in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum. Charley Toorop. Love for Van Gogh shows the influence of Vincent van Gogh’s artistic practice on that of Charley Toorop.
Charley Toorop’s life is intertwined with the history of the museum. Art advisor H.P. Bremmer and director Bram Hammacher were her most important supporters. Toorop had no direct contact with Helene Kröller-Müller; all purchases went through Bremmer. She was, however, good friends with her daughter Helene BrückmannKröller and regularly stayed with the Brückmann family in The Hague.
The appreciation and admiration for Charley Toorop’s work is evident from the 49 paintings and 22 works on paper that are currently part of the Kröller-Müller Museum’s collection. This means that the museum administers the largest collection of works by Charley Toorop. But Helene Kröller-Müller also managed to assemble the largest collection of works by Vincent van Gogh. Today, the museum boasts 88 paintings and 182 drawings by Van Gogh.
The theme of the exhibition was inspired by a contribution Charley Toorop made for a catalogue accompanying the exhibition celebrating Vincent van Gogh’s centenary. In 1953, in collaboration with the Gemeentemuseum (now Kunstmuseum) in The Hague and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kröller-Müller Museum organised a major commemorative exhibition. It is likely that Bram Hammacher, then director of the Kröller-Müller Museum, asked artist friends to contribute to the catalogue, in which they elaborated on what Van Gogh meant to them. One of these artists was Charley Toorop. Her Encounters with Van Gogh unequivocally expresses her fascination with the man and artist Van Gogh and the influence he had on her artistic practice. The text of Encounters with Van Gogh is included in its entirety after this Foreword.
Van Gogh’s influence on twentieth-century art can hardly be overestimated. Many artists have been inspired by his work, his letters and his life. This certainly also applies to Charley Toorop. For example, she visited places closely associated with Van Gogh, such as the mines in the Borinage. In her work we see her fascination with Van Gogh most clearly in the period 1921–1925, a turning point in her development. During these years, she arrived at her own unique and distinctive style. Van Gogh helped her find a way to visualise a spirited reality.
Although solo exhibitions on Charley Toorop have been held previously since her death in 1955, including at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1995, at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart in 1982, at the Gemeentemuseum Arnhem (now Museum Arnhem) in 1988, and in 2008 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, which travelled on to the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in Paris in 2010, our exhibition and catalogue focus specifically on the relationship between Toorop’s work and Van Gogh for the first time. This makes it an indispensable link for a better understanding of Toorop’s oeuvre.
Despite the fact that the relationship between Toorop and Van Gogh is not unknown, there has never previously been an exhibition in which this kinship is examined. The exhibition and publication therefore present a new image of Charley Toorop. Interestingly, this leads us to show works that have never before been seen in an exhibition.
We are proud to have been able to organise this exhibition and the accompanying publication. The idea and composition of the exhibition are the work of Renske Cohen Tervaert, curator of the Kröller-Müller Museum. I thank her for her tireless commitment to realise this exhibition and catalogue.
Our thanks go to the lenders. Without their support, we would not have been able to organise the exhibition. The publication, which for the first time focuses extensively on the relationship between Charley and Vincent, could never have been produced without the cooperation of authors Wessel Krul, Franka Blok and Marjet Brolsma. Wessel Krul has granted us an advance extract of his forthcoming biography on Charley Toorop (Charley Toorop. Een schildersleven (Charley Toorop. A painter’s life), which will be published by Boom Publishers in late 2025).
The publisher Waanders and designers Saiid & Smale have managed to create an indispensable title in the literature on Charley Toorop, I thank them for their collaboration in making this possible.
I would also like to thank translator Mike Ritchie, and Studio met met and Dana Dijkgraaf, the designers of the exhibition, for their careful attention to the presentation of Charley Toorop’s work at the museum.
Benno Tempel Director
Self-Portrait
2. Vincent van Gogh
Self-Portrait as a Painter, Paris, December 1887-February 1888
Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 50 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Cat. 1 Self-Portrait, 1922 Kunstmuseum Den Haag
Cat. 2 Self-Portrait with Palette, 1932-1933 Kunstmuseum Den Haag
Cat. 3 Self-Portrait, 1930-1931 Kunstmuseum Den Haag
Cat. 4 Self-Portrait in Front of a Palette, 1934
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Cat. 5 Self-Portrait, 1943-1944
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Cat. 6 Self-Portrait with Winter Branches, 1944-1945
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Cat. 7 Self-Portrait, 1953-1954
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
3. Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990)
Portrait of Charley Toorop next to a painted self-portrait, 1955 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
4. Vincent van Gogh
Self-Portrait, St.-Rémy-de-Provence, 1889
Oil on canvas, 65 × 54.2 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
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 self-portrait 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