First department: painting and sculpture
Published in 1977 by the Fine Arts Service ‘s Gravenhage
First section ; painting and sculpture from De Bock to Berserik
By Ronald de Leeuw
On May 1, 1891, The Hague gained an artists’ society 1). Besides the renowned “Pulchri Studio,” for years the unspoiled bastion of the Hague School, 14 gentlemen in a smoky room above Café Riche on the Buitenhof now founded the “Haagsche Kunstkring. The statutes of the new association stated as its goal “the promotion of painting, sculpture, fine arts, music, art industry and of affiliation and cooperation between the practitioners of these various arts. With this the Haagsche Kunstkring had clearly formulated its goal more broadly than ‘Pulchri’, which was only a painters’ association. The mutual influence of artists of different disciplines was a typical idea of the end of the nineteenth century, as propagated especially by Wagner, with his Gesamtkunstwerk, and in our country by the movement of Eighty. The Kring has remained true to this idea of fraternization of the arts to this day, and it still strongly defines the special character of the association.
At its inception, the multifaceted activities of the Art Society were divided into five sections, each with its own board of directors, answerable to a General Board.
Section 1 was that of painting and sculpture, which also included drawing and graphics. This would usually set the tone in the history of the Circle, although it was not always the most interesting subjects. The second department included architecture and art industry (later renamed arts and crafts), department 3, “fine arts,” and department 4, “tonal art. The most important expansion underwent the third department, which over the years would include not only literature, word art and drama, but also the dance arts, puppetry and film.
One of the main ways in which the Kring hoped to bring about the desired fraternization was by ‘holding a Society for social intercourse among members’. The members here included both the artists (working members) and the category of ‘art-loving members’, without whom art simply cannot exist. The society was therefore initially a separate, fifth department. It was a time when artists saw each other intensively in a flourishing café and terrace life. It is therefore no coincidence that the Art Society was born in a café and that its first home was the second floor above that same café.
Foremost among the founders and first general president of the society was Théophile de Bock, a minor master of the Hague School who was and is known, among other things, for his Doorwerth landscapes and his collaboration on the Panorama Mesdag. Exactly what the motives of him and his first fellow board members (the painters D. J. R. Jordens, J. Akkeringa and A. Lange and the Hagenaars, J. Th. Tromp and A. H. G. Hazelhoff Roelfsema) were for founding a new artists’ association can no longer be fully ascertained. Perhaps it was an attempt to escape the monopoly position of Pulchri’s strongman Mesdag. At least it was often seen as such. It was known that he and De Bock had had disagreements while working on the “Panorama. Simon Moulijn wrote in his recollections of the early days of the Kunstkring (catalogue jubilee exhibition HKK 1941) that many artists, especially the younger ones, wanted out from under ‘the cachet of distinction’ of Pulchri. This by no means meant that they openly turned against the older society, or rebelled against the traditions of the Hague School. The founders themselves and most of the early members were zealous practitioners of Hague Impressionism, and most were members of both one and the other society. For many of them, art circle membership initially meant little more than another opportunity to have their work exhibited. From the very beginning, however, the members of the Kring insisted on their image as “the younger” of the two sister societies. As Knuttel put it, they wanted to be “independent, fresh and unofficial” before anything else. Not surprisingly, artists who had made their name as art circle members with losing the wild hair left the Kring – ungrateful as artists sometimes are – and joined Pulchri.
How little rivalry with the established order was initially sought, however, is evidenced by the Kring’s continuous homage to the masters of The Hague School. In the first years of its existence it organized exhibitions of the work of the Maris brothers, Jongkind, Weissenbruch and Mauve. The sketchbooks of the recently deceased Bosboom were displayed in the circle in 1891. Jozef lsraëls was among the loyal visitors. Even in the decorations of the Kring’s society, the connection with the distant and near past was emphasized. For example, P.P. Rink designed a mural entitled ‘The Apotheosis of Dutch Painting’, on which, among others, the brothers Van Eyck, Lucas van Leyden, Frans Hals and Rembrandt appear, and further, the grand masters of the Hague School appear: de Marissen, Jozef lsraëls, De Bock, yes, even Mesdag! Last in the line of prominent figures is Toorop, who began to play a major role in the Circle at that time.
In the first years, these celebrations mainly took place in the society, which was decorated in a “very cozy” manner with the help of paintings and objects from De Bock’s own possession. There were paintings by Akkeringa and Monticelli, and the reading table had the most important art magazines of the time. Comfort also came in the form of “Roman sail, real Turkish curtains, old Dutch ashtrays” and a large number of rocking chairs.
Other contributors to these decorations included Arnold Koning, Pieter Josselin de Jong, who painted a nude youth who feeds on the source of art, and Theo van Hoytema. The latter painted on either side of two doors two high panels with birds, representing day and night, connected by a heraldic ribbon in which the painter J. M. Lion argued that the artist must believe in his art. These decorations whose description we also owe to Simon Moulijn, by the way, did not adorn the Circle for long. They were strongly criticized for their lack of unity between them. De Bock noted: ‘one worked without cooperation: this one has some carrots there, the other some red cabbage and in the long run they are very annoying’. In a financially somewhat less rosy time, the paintings were subsequently monetized. They were the first example in a long line of (mostly temporary) decorations made by the members of the circle over the years to embellish celebrations or performances. The photo album of the Circle holds numerous memories of these more or less inspired improvisations, including some by Han van Meegeren from the 1920s.
On August 2, 1891, the Kunstkring opened its first members’ exhibition in the exhibition rooms located on the second floor: “From the stairs to the rooms an ornate decoration of plants pointed the way. And once entered the halls, the first things to attract attention were the sculptures, which, although small in number, testified to a highly artistic conception, and were surrounded by plants and conifers’.
The exhibition presented a fairly familiar picture of such well-known Hague names of the time as Akkeringa, Chr. Bisschop, De Bock, Poggenbeek, Suze Robertson, Floris Verster, Josselin de Jong, Willem de Zwart. 1500 visitors climbed the stairs, including the Grand Duke of Saxe Weimar, whose visit obviously did much to enhance the prestige of the Circle. Moulijn rightly remarked: ‘of a modern aspiration of the young it then appeared nothing’.
People were not entirely satisfied with the overall quality of what was offered afterwards either. A press article formulated it as follows: The prodigious efforts of some members at the opening exhibition had made many in the audience, who are not lacking in taste and sense of art, somewhat timid and skittish as partridges at the end of the hunting season’. De Bock said ‘one next exhibition must look better than this one. We have strength, and I believe we can easily dress our owl mirrors. The latter referred to De Bock’s suspicion that the author of a ‘nasty’ article about the exhibition in the Groene Amsterdammer was to be sought among the ‘always revolutionary members’. Probably with the intention of showing the Hague public a respectable face after all, the next exhibition was one of the president and vice president of the society himself. De Bock showed landscapes from the surroundings of Doorwerth, Pieter Josselin de Jong was there with ‘mighty moving landscapes from Drente and Limburg’, horse studies and illustrations. The Hague painting establishment was present in the form of portraits by Bosboom and Jacob Maris.
After this exhibition Arnold Koning, his brother Edzard, Charles Dankmeijer and Mrs. Bilders van Bosse were given the opportunity to exhibit their work. The second general exhibition of members followed from April 3 to 17, 1892. The first year of the association seemed to end quietly. Suddenly the art world, and not only The Hague, was surprised with a sensational exhibition, the first in a series that would give the Art Society a central place in Dutch art life in the nineties.
On May 17, 1892, the doors of the Kunstkring opened for an exhibition of 45 paintings, 44 drawings and one lithograph by Vincent van Gogh, the first to be held in our country of work by this then highly controversial artist. Although Van Gogh’s work was already somewhat known to insiders through closed art reviews and the art trade, the Kring had the premiere of the first real exhibition. One reviewer called the Kring’s initiative a “naughty existence” because “ridicule and laughter on the part of the public could be expected. Pulchri, to whom the exhibition had initially been offered, had refused. The Kunstkring took the risk, although the annual report admits: ‘Although the board of this division did not face the result without some anxiety, it appeared after only a few days that this venture would succeed’. The report proudly concludes: ‘With this exhibition the ice of the convention was broken for good’.
The organizer of the al was Jan Toorop, who had moved to The Hague after a year-long stay in Belgium, where he had become acquainted with Van Gogh’s work with the artists’ group “Les XX,” and was to give an important impetus to the art life of the court city in the years to come. However, he was certainly not the only one to warm to Van Gogh’s work in the Kring. The literary writer P. A. M. Boele van Hensbroek, who was at home in both Pulchri and the Kring, had admired Van Gogh’s “symphonies of color” while he was still in Paris. So did Arnold and Edzard Koning, the former of whom even lived in the same house with Van Gogh for some time. Théophile de Bock had already opened his studio to Vincent in his time in The Hague. In 1892 the chairman spoke of the “heartfelt sorrow” he felt in Van Gogh’s work, “fierce as earthquakes worked in him the phosphorus. It was not to be expected that on a first confrontation the Dutch viewer would immediately understand the work, yet the reviews were almost without exception good. Jan Veth praised the Kring for the excellent choice, which was above all ‘arranged with tact’; ‘… the light background, which one has nowadays in these rooms, is excellent to see such paintings against’ (Amsterdammer, June 5, 1892).
The exhibition was well attended, and on “dime day” (Sunday, when the price of admission was reduced) also “the people of the people” flocked to see Van Gogh’s art, and they apparently had little trouble with it. A second Van Gogh exhibition followed the same year in Amsterdam at the Panorama building, which sealed the painter’s fame. Yet in the following decades it was again mainly in The Hague that people paid most attention to him. The Kring remained loyal to Van Gogh by again showing his work (180 “drawings and scribbles”) from the collections of Ms. Van Gogh, Mrs. Theo van Gogh and Hidde Nijland in February-March 1895. From the possession of the latter, one of the earliest collectors of Van Gogh’s work in our country, another exhibition of drawings was put together for the Kring in 1918.
Just one month after the Van Gogh exhibition of 1892, the Kring was already coming up with another first. This time Toorop introduced to The Hague a number of leading artists from the Brussels group “Les Vingt,” of which he himself was also a member, and the Antwerp “Association de l’art. In 1889, some members of this Belgian avant-garde had already exhibited in Amsterdam, but the 1892 exhibition was of particular importance because here, for the first time, the Dutch public was unequivocally confronted with neo-impressionism. At the recently held exhibition “Light through Color,” the significance of this exhibition for Dutch Luminism was recounted in detail. On display were works by Signac, Lucien Pissaro, Henry van de Velde, Theo van Rijsselberghe and their master of all time, the recently deceased Georges Seurat. Strikingly, incidentally, Toorop himself, who had been extensively involved with pointillism in previous years, was conspicuous by his absence. He had by now moved into Symbolist territory with complete conviction, as evidenced by the cover he created for the catalog of this “Les Vingt” exhibition. Indeed, it is one of the earliest examples of symbolism in our patriotic graphic art, and thanks to this exhibition at the Kunstkring, the gate under which on this cover a handsome knight rides into the new art is adorned with a Hague stork.
Another work by Toorop that was on display at the Kring during this time and that attests to his ties to “Les Vingt” is the painting “Lenore. This was based on Bürger’s ballad of the same name, to which Henri Duparc composed a symphonic poem. Toorop probably attended a performance of this at ‘Les Vingt’ in Brussels, with Vincent d’lndy at the piano, among others. The latter was also a guest at the Circle at this time, as was Ernest Chausson. Toorop’s daughter Charlie would later have violin lessons with d’lndy. Moreover, from the concerts at ‘Les Vingt’, people in The Hague adopted the habit of giving concerts amid the paintings of art brothers, a symbolic gesture in a period when the arts were constantly reaching out to each other.
Symbolist was not only the cover of the ‘Les Vingt’ exhibition, but also at least the work of one of the exhibitors, Odilon Redon, but more about him later. First a new first should be mentioned: hung modestly in the Kring’s vestibule hall, simultaneously with the ‘Les Vingt’ exhibition, for the first time in our country a number of posters by Toulouse Lautrec were on display.
During the exhibition, Henry van de Velde gave a lecture on the subject of “Le paysan en peinture,” focusing particularly on Millet, so admired by Van Gogh. On this occasion Van de Velde met Richard Roland Holst and Johan Thorn Prikker, among others. Especially the contact with the latter would lead to a very fruitful collaboration.
1892 was clearly a successful year for the young society, which by unfolding all these activities had immediately taken the lead in the artistic avant-garde of the moment. However, one must always remember that it was and is one of the characteristic traits of an artists’ association such as the Haagse Kunstkring that, unlike a painterly “movement” held together by a single artistic credo, one finds different directions within one association. Generations and styles overlap, making it difficult to speak of a clear “face. Thus one can hear complaints of ‘malaise’ on one side while interesting developments can be found in another corner of the same association. Did this aspect play a much less important role with ‘Pulchri’ as the home of a clear school, the Hague, an overview of the activities of the Art circle shows a clear split especially after 1892. Hague impressionism and late nineteenth-century naturalism are found there at the same time as pointillism and symbolism. In addition, relatively much attention was paid to art from a much more distant past, such as in December 1891 when a collection of old prints (sent by H. Dirksen) was on display, from which Jozef lsraëls and Albert Verwey bought Rembrandt etchings, while Toorop and De Bock acquired engravings by Dürer.
The first members’ exhibition of the 1892-93 season (opening Sept. 24, 1892) clearly showed the breakthrough of symbolism, although it also featured works by Haverman, Dankmeijer, Suze Robertson, A. Hijner, Willem de Zwart and the sculptor A. W. M. Odé. Toorop exhibited some of his most famous symbolist works such as “The Garden of Ancient Woe,” “Les Ródeurs” (owned by Frederik van Eeden), “O grave where is thy victory” and the already mentioned “Lenore. Thorn Prikker, with his mystical/religious ‘Singing Seraphim,’ ‘Madonna’ and ‘Crucifixion,’ was a far cry from the average Hague portrait or landscape. Unfortunately, a dispute within the Kring caused him to stop exhibiting here for the rest of the 1990s. His work and that of Toorop soon inspired countless people inside and outside the Kring. To his friend Henri Borel, Thorn Prikker complained about how H.A. Daalhof in particular (a member of the Kunstkring until after the Second World War) had exhibited ‘the most dreadful imitations’ of Toorop and himself (a title such as ‘O soul that bursts into fires of pure life’ from an Kunstkring catalog does not lie either).
On the work of others, fortunately, the influence was more valuable. The friendship with Toorop inspired Floris Verster to produce some beautiful pastels. By the way, ties also existed between Verster’s brother, the heraldist Cees Verster, and the Art Circle. In the summer of 1892, the latter had held a heraldic-fragistic exhibition at the Circle. The one-man exhibition by Toorop, organized by him as curator of the Leiden Lakenhal, was taken over in a more extensive version by the Kring in the preceding year of 1894. During this well-attended exhibition, Toorop’s Belgian friend and foreman of the magazine “Van Nu en Straks,” Emile Verhaeren, held a conférence.
P. C. de Moor and Simon Moulijn, both natives of Rotterdam and both born there in 1866, each in their own way fell under the spell of Toorop’s symbolism. Moulijn paired a Hague naturalism with a symbolist/decorative sensibility in his work. In the fine series of lithographs “The Duno” that he showed at the Kring in 1895, he shows a tranquil, park-like nature that is also not far removed from some of Verstar’s work. With P.C. de Moor, it is more Toorop’s conception of the “femme fatale” that impresses, as we can glean from a title like “Hell’s Wife” and from the evil lady staring at us on a cover he made for an art circle catalog. In some fourteen drawings accompanying the fairy tale ‘The Triumph of the List’ which he exhibited in April 1893, one reviewer recognized symbolism, mysticism, prae-raphaelism and Japonism, which agrees nicely with what De Moor himself remarked about the Circle: ‘(It was) a time when you were flooded with new ideas’.
Etienne Bosch (1863-1933), Boschje to his friends, was, among other things, greatly fascinated by the work of Maeterlinck, which at this time received wide attention from the literary department. In 1896 he exhibited a “Pelléas and Mélisande” at the Circle. On a ‘Japonnerie’ exhibited in 1893, the August-September exhibition of Japanese prints from the collection of the Parisian art dealer Samuel Bing may also have had some influence. On this occasion, the Kring was the first to pay large-scale attention to Japanese woodcuts. The influence that Japanese motives and compositional methods would have on all branches of visual art in the Netherlands in the years to come need no further explanation. One thinks only of the Rozenburg pottery (Jurriaan Kok was general secretary of the society from August 1893 to August 1894, having previously been treasurer).
The woodcut exhibition was supplemented by “objects of oriental arts and crafts” from various Dutch collections. From this would also be drawn many times later for exhibitions of Chinese and Japanese art (including from coli. A. Kuyper and A. Steehman in 1902, Kleykamp in 1904, Henri Borel in 1913 and August Heyting in 1919 and 1920).
Returning to the members’ exhibition of autumn 1892, one more important exhibitor should be mentioned, Theo van Hoytema, who was actively involved in the circle’s activities for many years, and whose contribution to the decoration of the Kring’s premises has already been noted. In 1892 he exhibited, among other things, his pioneering booklet ‘Hoe de vogels aan een koning kwam’, in which the inclusion of the text within the window of the illustration could be called revolutionary for that time. De Kring could boast an elite of illustrators at this time. We already mentioned Toorop, Thorn Prikker, Moulijn, Edzard Koning, but also Marius Bauer, J. G. Veldheer and Wenckebach were members at this time. In February 1896, the year of Bing’s “Exposition International du Livre moderne,” the Circle devoted a very distant exhibition to old and new bookbindings, for which D. F. Scheurleer made the catalog.
The international contacts of the Circle (Les Vingt, Samuel Bing) have been mentioned several times in the course of this story. The statutes explicitly mention: ‘the establishment of relations both within and outside the Empire’. We have already mentioned the important role of Toorop. At the same time as the Van Gogh exhibition, ‘etchings by foreign masters’ were on display in the rooms of the Kring, followed a year later by prints by Rops, Ibels, Pissaro, Steinlen, Vallotton and Lunois. French illustrators such as Daumier, Steinlen and the now lesser known H. S. lbels were very popular in the Circle and were given their own exhibitions. The fall 1893 member exhibition also featured work by Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro.
On the initiative of Saar de Swart, the muse of Eighty, a major Odilon Redon exhibition was held at the Circle from May 20 to July 1, 1894. His work had already been shown at the “Les Vingt” exhibition, but the new exhibition was “the most complete yet organized of works by Redon,” and immediately followed the first Redon exhibition that had been held in Paris at Durand-Ruel. It included borrowings from the collections of two of Redon’s oldest Dutch friends, Ary Prins and A. Bonger. Edmond Picard, whose “Le Juré” Redon illustrated, delivered a lecture on the painter on June 30. To the information Redon provided Picard for this, we still owe much of our knowledge of the artist’s life today.
The exhibition was a great success, evidenced in part by the large number of repeat orders for lithographs that the Circle placed midway through the exhibition.
In December 1894, the Belgian symbolist Charles Doudelet exhibited with Franz Melchers at an exhibition that went by the name “Lucky Dreams. Through Melchers’ intercession, the young Albert Plasschaert applied for membership in the Circle in 1895, with one of the first works he submitted titled “Vicarious Veere …
Sometimes the Hague art dealers were called upon. In March 1895 they showed drawings, woodcuts and pastels by the Englishmen Shannon, Ricketts and Rothenstein in collaboration with Van Wisselingh. In 1896, the same firm collaborated on a graphite exhibition (these usually went by the Kring under the name “Black and White”) which again showed work by Redon, Pissarro and Shannon, and on the Dutch side exhibited Roland Holst, among others. The exhibition was taken over by the Rotterdamse Kunstkring, with whom they had collaborated the previous year in connection with a Mauve exhibition.
All these activities culminated in July and August of 1895 in a large “International Invitation Exhibition” held at the Art Society’s initiative in the building of the Academy of Visual Arts on the Prinsessegracht. The greatest possible variety of contemporary art from home and abroad had been brought together here. The Arnhem newspaper reported: Thus the Board of the Art Circle has now triumphed over everything narrow-minded, petty and one-sided in the field of art appreciation. The muddy suds are far behind her. This very special exhibition is like a breach made by a well-aimed bullet. Mr. W. F. G. W. Snijder van Wissenkerke, a non-artist who as of November 1894 had taken over the general chairmanship from De Bock and would hold that post uninterruptedly until 1919, praised the cooperation of idealists, symbolists, and neo-impressionists, but also mentioned lsraëls, Roelofs, Gabriel, Maris, and Cuypers among those who had contributed to the success. From abroad, the symbolist camp was especially strongly represented with Doudelet, Degouve de Nucques, Knophf, Frédéric, Rops and Ensor from Belgium, Redon from France and Segantini from Italy.
Twenty works by artists from the Haagse Kunstkring including Etienne Bosch, P. C. de Moor, Arnold Koning, F. A. E. L. Smissaert and Albert Plasschaert were shown that same summer at the major Kunstausstellung in Berlin.The Haagse Kunstkring also sent a contribution to the Centennial Exposition in Tenessee.
With all this, however, the impression should not be given that the Hague School and its numerous epigones were no longer discussed at the Kring. There was great interest in an exhibition of work by the three Maris brothers in December 1893; we have already mentioned those devoted to Mauve (1895) and Jongkind (1897). In 1899 Jozef lsraëls showed at the Kring the illustrations for his Spain trip.
The masters of the second or third garment were also given space in one-man or group exhibitions, in addition to the member exhibitions. In 1892 P. P. Rink, De Bock, Arnold Koning and Adolf Lange had their turn, in 1893 De Moor, Moulijn and Oosterzee. Before some thirty works by Philippe Zilcken were to be exhibited in the United States, they were on display at the Kring in December 1894. In addition, until the turn of the century, J. van Steenwijk, H. Hijner, H. v. d. Haar, D. J. R. Jordens, G. D. Gratama, G. J. Roermeester and D. Wiggers were featured.
Sculpture, to which so much attention had been paid when the Circle was founded, was represented at this time by A. W. M. Odé, Charles van Wijck, Thérèse van Hall and Minca Bosch, while in the 1897-98 season Constantin Meunier was a guest. In October 1899 the century concluded, as far as sculpture was concerned, with a major Rodin exhibition, this time held in cooperation with Arti et Amicitiae at Villa ‘Boschoord’ on the Bezuidenhout. From Paris Judith Cladel came over to speak about the master.
A facet of the circle’s life that has remained undiscussed until now was formed by the so-called art contemplations, for which the members usually met in the evening in the society. There, on the basis of pictures and talks, they discussed all kinds of subjects. People showed their colleagues the latest work, or showed something from their own collections, De Bock for example his pottery collection, Nijland his plate works, a third engravings after Italian masters. Sometimes foreign guest exhibitors were asked to explain their own work, such as H. S. Ibels, or art historians were invited, such as Hofstede de Groot, who spoke about Rembrandt. The Golden Book of the Kunstkring preserves many drawn or written memories of such meetings.
One of the ways in which the Kring made itself heard outside The Hague was by touring a portfolio of drawings and prints, which was available for inspection here and there in the country, and from which works could be bought. The level could vary greatly, but among the works sold in this way were such outstanding works as Toorop’s drawing ‘Cor Cordium’, which came into Verwey’s possession.
An important event within the Circle was the annual lottery, for which people could subscribe through an extensive network of correspondents throughout the country. The prizes consisted of works of art and premium plaques, and the proceeds were deposited in a fund from which contributions could be made to struggling artists. In addition, the lottery supported its own members in other ways, namely by purchasing the works of art that constituted the prize from its own Circle. In addition, each year they had a member of the first section create the premium plate, usually an etching or a lithograph, for which the artist was again paid. Sometimes members also offered to provide the premium plate free of charge. When one lists the makers of these prints one gets an excellent picture of the wide range of good graphic artists the Circle had at its disposal. Among them were P. Dupont, Edzard Koning,S. Moulijn, Leon Senf, J. J. Aarts, Willem Roelofs Jr, Storm van ‘s Gravesande, Hoytema, Huib Luns, Dirk Nijland, Jan Wittenberg. Particularly successful was the portrait of Queen Wilhelmina made by Thérèse Schwartze as a premium plate in 1915-16, of which 200 more copies found a place in all the country offices in the Dutch East Indies. Van Meegeren’s famous “Little Deer” was also a premium plate of the Circle. However, not everyone was equally enthusiastic about the institution of “bounty plates. When in 1913 Graadt van Roggen was asked to make one, he refused, because in his opinion this custom ‘brings much damage to good graphic art.’ Premium plates are popping up everywhere these days … yes even den heer P. Zilcken, who gives an etching as a gift on his bookwork, just like the margarine merchants’.
After the heaviest clouds of symbolism had floated over around 1900, impressionism and neo-impressionism experienced a second flowering in France. In our country the as always very agile Toorop now again immersed himself in Luminism, but with the Kring he had hardly any contact at this time (1900-1916). Here neo-impressionism was represented only by Hart Nibbrig. Work by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Helleu, Cézanne and Roussel was on display again, and in 1904 Weissenbruch was honored with an exhibition, but the choice of other guests showed a clearer preference for international art nouveau. At the Kring, as throughout The Hague, the veil of the fin-de siècle still lingered quietly.
In 1903 the work of the fashionable Georges de Feure (originally a Dutchman by the name of Van Sluyters) attracted a large audience, and garnered the appreciation of the press. Old ties with the Parisian art dealer Durand Ruel were renewed, resulting (in 1905) in a major exhibition of work by Puvis de Chavannes.
The success, however, was only moderate, something that had already been foretold by H. P. Bremmer, who gave a lecture during the exhibition. In his introduction to the catalog, he calls Puvis’s art the antithesis of the Dutch, which always seeks the characteristic, and not, like Puvis, the “typical.
However, the work made a great impression on an artist such as Willem van Konijnenburg, and a year later he visited Paris to study it in situ. P.C. de Moor was also Puvis’ pupil for some time. Earlier, in 1904, a number of Antwerp painters had exhibited at the Kring, including the young Walter Waes, who would later find many buyers among the Dutch public. In 1908 the Kring again showed “French masters” to which 600 visitors came to see, but a still very respectable selection from the work of Degouve de Nuncques that closed the line of international exhibitions in 1911 attracted only 380 visitors.
An increasingly important place in the circle life at the beginning of the century was occupied by the aforementioned Willem van Konijnenburg. Initially he belonged to d rambunctious youth whose undisciplined behavior caused the board so much concern, “to become in time, however, as Knuttel called him in his monograph on the artist, ‘the most priestly of artists’ and a guiding light for a whole generation of Hague artists.
Van Konijnenburg was born and educated in The Hague in 1868, but spent long periods in Limburg, his mother’s country of origin, with work from which region he made his debut with the Kunstkring in 1893. This was clearly in keeping with that of the Hague masters whose studios he visited, but in the late 1990s, as evidenced by what he designed for the Fop Smit firm, he struck out on new paths. For the weekly magazine ‘De Kroniek’ to which at that time many an art circle member collaborated (although often considered a typical Amsterdam affair) he delivered cartoons whose spirit did not go unnoticed even in the Kring. At a party in 1894 he gave a fine parody of Willhelm Tell, and after a quarrel in the society he wrote a truly Deysselian invective in the complaints book, only to revoke it in a no less honoring song of praise for the Circle. Once, when he was in danger of not being admitted to a party because of overdue contributions, he managed to get in anyway, disguised as a ‘lady’. That he would one day become an honorary member was difficult to foresee.
With the work “Deer” that is now in the Kröller-Müller Museum, and which he exhibited at the Kring in 1898, the artistic prelude definitively ends and Van Konijnenburg takes the path that would be dominated by the struggle between matter and spirit, nature and stylization, which formed the poles of his artist shelf.
In a series of writings from the first years of this century, culminating in the highly complex “The Aesthetic Idea,” he set forth his views on art in the service of the idea. Two steps towards this self-awareness as an artist experienced their baptism in the form of mimes at the Haagse Kunstkring: in 1907 ‘Beauty and Devil’, in 1909 ‘Truth and Chimäre’. The performance of the tableaux vivants which made up the latter work was a textbook example of that collaboration of the arts which the Art Society advocated. Henricus created the set, Willem Landré the music, played by Henriette Roll, while Albert Vogel Sr. recited the text “solemnly without affectation. The press was very enthusiastic about the visual aspect of the evening: ‘We do not remember ever having seen such a splendid grouping in such a small space as the Kunstkringtoeltje’. Among those present was the young Greshoff, who found it all beautiful and highly interesting. ‘I had not yet discovered the value of the immediate and simplest use of language,’ he wrote in 1963.
For over forty years Willem van Konijnenburg was a leading member of the Circle, where he regularly exhibited, served on exhibition committees and juries, and gave lectures, in 1912 for example on Futurism. Among the circle members he had numerous admirers, pupils and friends, such as Rie Cramer, Chris de Moor, Harry Verburg and G. A. H. van der Stok. An exhibition of his work in 1921 inaugurated the stately Tomb Halls. In 1928, the sixty-year-old “educator in life idealism and bringer of grace,” as the then president of the Circle, Albert Vogel, called him, was extensively honored and made an honorary member at the same time as Toorop. The painter remarked in his acceptance speech that in his view the Kring had only then, after abandoning De Bock’s impressionism, risen to a religious idealism: ‘Only now does the Kring come to its proper calling.’ Then and in 1938, at the seventieth anniversary, as well as at the exhibition on the occasion of the Kring’s 45th anniversary, his work was on display at the Kring. On the latter occasion, the Kring offered five drawings by his hand to the Gemeentemuseum.
A less dominant, but certainly not less colorful appearance in the Kring of those days was Henricus (pseudo niem for Hendricus Jansen, 1867-1921), who now enjoys a limited fame only for his murals in the Hague theater and the Rotterdam city hall. Starting out as a naturalist in the Hague style, in the nineties he was an esteemed illustrator, filling many pages of ‘Elsevier’s Maandschrift’. In 1892 he became a member of the Kunstkring, where he silently experienced the transition to symbolism. From 1893 dates a poster for a special raffle exhibition that the Kring then organized to pay for the decoration of its rooms on the Buitenhof. Before Henricus could make himself heard more, however, he was suspended by the board for misconduct.
In 1901, however, he returned to develop as a particularly active Circle member until World War I. In 1901 he exhibited here “the fruits of his labor in Tunis and its surroundings,” clearly following in the footsteps of Marius Bauer, who was then his traveling companion. In December 1903, together with P. C. de Moor, he exhibited drawings on Old Testament subjects. By far the most interesting, however, were the 27 lithographs after Pol de Mont’s “Here Halewine” on display in 1904, also showing the various stages in the printing of the color lithographs. The critic Loffelt was so enthusiastic about this work, in which Henricus had shown himself to have closely followed the latest developments in the field of book illustration, that he wondered, “Might we greet in him a Dutch Walter Crane?
Even more than through his exhibitions, however, Henricus made a name for himself through his numerous contributions to the Circle: he served on juries for exhibitions and balloting, designed costumes for festivities and parades, sets and a number of posters (the jubilee exhibition of 1902, the honorary exhibition for De Bock in 1905).
However, his versatile but also superficial artistry was seriously undermined by an irregular lifestyle, to put it mildly. A bohemian pur sang, he constantly shocked the good society board by sometimes getting into fist fights with the tenant of the downstairs room or by introducing ‘a lady of dubious behavior’ into the society. In the course of the years he also built up a monumental buffet debt, which often led to his suspension. His permanent presence in the clubhouse is confirmed by the countless scribbles in the Golden Book, which preserved many an anecdote from the life of the circle. In 1923 the Kring commemorated the late Henricus with an excellent exhibition.
New members who joined in the first years of this century included Victor Hageman, Leon Sent and G. D. Gratama. The latter reviewed many Circle exhibitions at the time, and it was he who defended the Circle in 1905 when it was attacked in an article by former member Frits Lapidoth for the shabby decoration of Théophile de Bock’s honorary exhibition.
In 1907 Rie Cramer became a member, and the first works she exhibited, such as “Chanson de Bilitis” and “Pelléas et Mélisande,” still breathe entirely of the Hague fin-de-siècle. She was therefore a pupil of Veldheer, Van Konijnenburg and Hoytema. Then appear the illustrations with which she acquired such a place of her own in our artistic life, and which have come back into fashion in recent years. Important was her part in the children’s picture book exhibition organized by the Haagse Kunstkring in 1912, for which she made the poster.
From 1909 we greeted Huib Luns, versatile artist and writer on art, and Willy Sluiter, who had then just moved to The Hague. From 1901, sculpture was represented mainly by Toon Dupuis, with his portraits of the Hague monde and his Scheveningen fishermen’s wives. His bust of Théophile de Bock still braves the Hague drizzle in the garden of the Kring, this work proving to be much more weather-resistant than the wooden “picnic pole” of his younger colleague Van Lunteren. Presidents Snijder van Wissen kerke and Albert Vogel were also immortalized by Dupuis. Many young sculptors from The Hague, including the currently active Marian Gobius, were among his pupils.
When one considers what was going on in the visual arts nationally and internationally in the years shortly before the First World War, one must conclude that much of the most modern, let alone the very most modern, completely bypassed The Hague. The absence of a Toorop, who had moved his field of work to Amsterdam and spent summers in Domburg breaking new ground with Mondrian, was keenly felt. Sporadically, promising names still pop up in the annals (e.g. that of Kees van Dongen in 1906), but basically it all remains with a talk, in 1912, by Van Konijnenburg about Futurism. When this last subject is touched upon again three years later, it has meanwhile metamorphosed into an “entertaining tableau vivant” on a St. Nicholas evening.
Financial difficulties forced the Circle to move to 12a Koninginnegracht in early 1914. However, the war made it utterly impossible to put money in order, which meant that there were no funds for a planned exhibition hall. Large membership exhibitions had now become impossible. On the initiative of Albert Roelofs, however, so-called group exhibitions were held from September 1914 until the end of the war, with two artists each showing their work in the building’s three upstairs rooms. Among the exhibitors we see Paul Arntzenius, Herman Bieling, Rie Cramer, Lucie van Dam van lsselt, W. Ding mans, Jaap Gidding, Theo Goedvriend, J. M. Graadt van Roggen, P. A. H. Hofman, the brothers Frans and Georges Hooger waard, Theo van Hoytema, D. J. R. Jordens, Edzard Koning, Willem van Leusden, A. M. Luyt, Albert and Willem Roelofs, Dirk Schäfer, Leon Sent and Philippe Zilcken. Toorop was also back in attendance in 1916.
Towards the end of the war the coal famine put a premature end to the traditional drawing evenings which the Circle had been organizing for its members for years. When at one point ladies’ members threatened to join these useful meetings, there were vehement protests from the gentlemen, upon which the ladies then began to wonder what was being discussed that ladies’ ears could not bear! In June 1920 a number of them united to form the ‘Ladies Club’ which had the aim of awakening ‘greater appreciation of female achievements in art’ and ‘the creation of a fine civilized artistic environment’. The Board immediately saw an opportunity to use these energetic ladies for the benefit of the general public and to make connections abroad in the interest of the Hague Art Society through the ladies’ relations.
The economic consequences of the war had their repercussions not only on the Circle itself but also on its members. There were hardly any sales. At so-called support exhibitions, only very low-priced works were offered in order to stimulate the urge to buy, while members who were better off gave their work away for free. To lift the mood in these sad times, party nights and a ‘Caricature and farce exhibition’ were organized, in the colorful catalog of which we encounter such luminaries as Jan Toorop and Suzette Robertsen.
January 4, 1916
After the war, the Kring revived. Albert Roelofs could observe “The Kring is in a kind of stupor”. The commissioning of the new building at 7 Lange Houtstraat, where the Kring was located from the end of 1917 to the beginning of 1921, must have contributed to this initially.
Much attention was paid to the modern movements within contemporary art these early years, even though their practitioners were not yet too often to be found within the first department itself.
The great flowering of the architecture department in these years would also not fail to have some resonance among the painters. Furthermore, in September 1919 a “propaganda committee” was established by the general board of the Kring, independent of the doings of the individual sections, whose task was to bring the sections together and to conduct a more recruiting policy towards the outside world. The minutes of the Kring teem with difficulties between the general board and the sections regarding this committee, which, according to the sections, did not care enough about artistic content. The reality was that people sometimes felt that their own interests were being harmed, because quite often forces from outside the Kring – against payment – were recruited. In practice, however, the propaganda committee, despite a number of failures, was a happy idea because it breathed new life into the Kring and gave it a slightly more progressive image to the outside world.
In September-October 1918, the group “De Branding” hosted what was called “Ultra Moderne Kunst,” which included a ditto matinée, in which Laurens van Kuik, Lou Saalborn, Leo Kok and Leonard Limousin participated. The latter gave a futuristic declamation as a foretaste of the DADA happening a few years later.
Two months after this, Bieling, in these days a progressive circle member (in the 1919-20 season, he took the initiative for an “Artists’ Council” for The Hague, intended to give the artist a greater say in the happenings in the city, a plan that came to nothing, however) showed paintings during a performance of expressionist dances by Grit Hegesa.
At the end of March 1920, Theo van Doesburg asked the Kring board if he could hold an exhibition of “foreign moderns,” after which he came to explain his request in person on March 30. This was the exhibition that ran under the title ‘La Section d’Or’ and, originally from Antwerp, took place at the Kring at the end of July 1920. Van Doesburg himself had designed the poster for it and gave an introduction about the form of cubism adhered to by the members of the group. It was on this occasion that work by Mondrian was also shown in the Kring. It remained with that one occasion as far as Mondrian was concerned, although many other Style Brothers such as Huszar, Wils and Oud were regularly present and busy in the Kring. Incidentally, if we are to believe the catalog of the 1968 Van Doesburg exhibition, Van Doesburg’s 1920 appearance was not his debut at the Kring, but he had already shown drawings and sketches in 1908 (the Kunstkring archives do not mention such an exhibition).
In 1921, after finding temporary shelter in the hall “De Mercuur” on Anna Paulownaplein, the Kring moved “on fair terms” into the attractive Grafelijke Zalen at the Binnenhof. This granted the society a not unpleasant cachet. However, the exhibition space there, although “stately and clean,” was so dark that one could only exhibit there with artificial light. When, in time, the situation of the Kunstkring became less prosperous again and the secretary of the painting department, Fokko Mees, spoke of ‘bitter times’, the blame was laid at the location: ‘this room (is) in fact death for the Kring’.
Attention to the latest in art initially continued even in the distinguished surroundings of the Binnenhof. In May 1922 Petrus Alma, whose work is once again in the center of attention, spoke about “Art in a revolutionary period,” referring mainly to recent developments in Russia. This theme was taken up again exactly one year later in the Circle by El Lissitzky, who, during his then visit to our country, maintained fruitful contacts with the artistic vanguard. The title of his lecture was “Young Russian Art.
Rudolf Vonka spoke on modern Czechs in 1924, and from Paris came Marie Dormoy to speak on French sculpture since Robin. In February 1921, French painter and critic André Lothe had preceded her with a lecture on French painting. However, an offer by Feininger to exhibit at the Circle was declined. They did, however, show graphics by the Flemish expressionist group “Lumière,” which became known in the Netherlands primarily through the initiatives of Fokko Mees. However, there was little interest in the lecture by Lumière’s artistic spokesman, Roger Avermaete, known for his many books on art. From the Circle itself, it was mainly Vilmos Huszar who spoke about modern art in several lectures (on February 22, 1924, expressly for “laymen”).
Especially Vilmos Huszar who spoke about modern art in several lectures (on February 22, 1924, expressly for “laymen”). Still worth mentioning is the exhibition of the ‘Branding’ of 1923, behind which Bieling was now the driving force. In fact, following his appearance at the DADA evening of the Kring, work by Kurt Schwitters was shown here. A request to be allowed to give a second evening was incidentally rejected by the Kring, nor was there any interest in a subscription to ‘MERZ’.
By stringing together a number of highlights, a nice progressive picture of the Circle at this time could easily be presented. Reality dictates that when reading through the reports and minutes of the Kring the missed opportunities are numerous, and what was progressive, at least as far as painting is concerned, mostly came from outside. Leading were still men like Van Konijnenburg and the late Toorop (Plasschaert gave another lecture on his work in November 1922). In the year of DADA, the Circle also counted a Han van Meegeren among its members. Who was or was not at a dead end was not easy to recognize from the perspective of those days. For aspiring critics like the Plasschaert just mentioned were committed to monumental art, and symbolist-idealist ideas that were dear to a Van Konijnenburg also occupied, in a somewhat different form, a Mondrian and a Van der Leek. It would be interesting to know who were already among the audience in this way when Dr. M. Schoenmaekers, whose ties to the Style movement are especially emphasized, gave his courses in visual mathematics at the Art Circle in 1918-19.
The last major exhibition that took place before the move to the Grafelijke Zalen was one of murals. Years of preparation had preceded this large-scale exhibition, and the Municipality of The Hague had provided a hefty subsidy for it. Derkinderen, Toorop, Berlage, Mendes da Costa and Van Konijnenburg, in short, all the forerunners of Community Art formed the jury, and Van Konijnenburg, Jac. Jongert and Richard Roland Holst gave lectures (the latter had already spoken about monumentality in the Kring in 1908). The motto was that “Art should no longer function as a useless opulence, but more as an organic part of real life. Entirely in keeping with the Kring’s ideals, a painter and an architect were always united in one project.
Among the participants was the now almost forgotten Jan Linse, about whose work De Gruyter had already described in the Vaderland as ‘cerebral symbolism’, despite the fact that Linse’s ‘Moses’ nevertheless approached ‘the non-representational art of Mondriaan’. Linse was particularly popular in the late 1920s at the Kring, where a one-man exhibition was devoted to his work twice (the second time, admittedly, on the occasion of his death). Both times Berlage spoke the opening words.
Another artist who was a long-time member of the Circle and should be mentioned in this context is Antoon Molkenboer, to whom the Circle would later commission the mosaic monument for Albert Vogel.
Molkenboer was a very versatile man, so he was a member of several departments at the same time. Unfortunately, he never fully lived up to the promising beginning of his 1897 booklet “Minceline.
The opening exhibition of the Tomb Halls, described as spaces “full of consecration,” was also dominated by monumental art, in this case Van Konijnenburg. Likewise the exhibitions of work by Thorn Prikker held in 1922 and 1923 and the memorial exhibition for Henricus.
The malaise of the late 1920s and early 1930s unfortunately affected not only the economy, but art as well. The greatest concern for artists seemed to be keeping the standard of living high rather than the level of art, although there were a few positive outliers (an Otto Dix exhibition in 1928). Sales were generally poor, and again support exhibitions, now called “summer sales exhibitions,” had to bring salvation. Jury-free entries were allowed, while no price could exceed f 100. Through thematic exhibitions such as ‘The Nude’, ‘Eros in Art’ and the like, an attempt was made to attract more public, but what were they hoping to sell to the unemployed who could enter for free on presentation of their unemployment card? For many members the time came when even paying a membership fee was no longer possible. In some cases the Kring had to decide to make members honorary members in order to keep their names on the membership list.
Of the artists who predominated in the circle at the end of the twenties, such as Georges Hoogerwaard, Fokko Mees or J. C. Cossaar (the latter was chairman of the first section from 1926 to 1929) it can be said that they were renowned, but certainly not advanced, and of any impetus of their work on that of others cannot be spoken.
A typical circle figure at this time was Han van Meegeren. Contrary to what is sometimes said, ‘Van Meegeren, big little man, who can paint ‘Darling’ so well’ (according to a nice circle song) was for a long time a very appreciated member, whose cooperation at parties, for which he made sets and where he also acted as conférencier, was much appreciated. With Henricus he is the most faithful scribbler in the Golden Book, in which we owe to his talent as a quickdrawer racy portraits of Louis and Lily Bouwmeester, J. H. Speenhoff, Paul Fort, J. K. Rensburg, and the dancer Jodjana. His premium plate ‘Het hertje’ became a household name even outside The Hague.
May 1933, however, Van Meegeren left the Kring disappointed, convinced that great injustice had been done to him. The previous year he had wanted to become a member of the Kring’s board in a rather unsympathetic manner, announcing that in that case he would be able to pull the Kring out of its financial difficulties, a form of blackmail that was not appreciated. Moreover, a group of twenty young painters threatened to leave the association if Van Meegeren was elected, because “Van Meegeren will not be objective enough to give equal justice to the different views.
In 1939 Van Meegeren, albeit under his pseudonym of Johannes Vermeer, received attention from the Circle once more. Louis Meys wanted a brochure to be published about the painting ‘The disciples at Emmaus’, which had been purchased by Boymans. The brochure never materialized, but the art historian Hammacher was invited to discuss the subject.
Indeed, the financial difficulties into which Van Meegeren had sought relief were not insignificant. Once again they necessitated a move, and back to 7 Lange Houtstraat. 42 members donated a total of 10,000 guilders in artwork to pay for the renovation. Chronic shortages of money further made it necessary to rent out the Kring’s halls to third parties a lot, leaving little time for exhibitions, which naturally aroused the resentment of the gentlemen painters. Also for the repayment of a bond loan in 1936 artists again raised thousands of guilders. Among them we encounter Nanninga’s name in the Circle for the first time.
The turbulent developments in Germany kept many artists busy, but the Kringbestuur took the principled decision that as a society they would not get involved in politics. So when the painter Harmen Meurs submitted a work in 1934 which contained a direct attack against the Hitler regime, it was refused. However, they hastened to say that the work would certainly be allowed on artistic grounds, and they allowed the painter to hold an evening of debate on the subject. When something similar happened to the painter C. Gerritsen, however, he attached a different consequence and cancelled his membership. Similarly, at an exhibition of caricatures held in 1935, entrants were requested “not to submit work of a sharp political character.
On the other hand, some people found the Kring too modern. A member resigned because the brochures were sent around in modern spelling (and without capital letters), while the painter F. Hoogerwaard felt cornered by the ultra-modern tendencies of the young and “the maniacal views of ‘Modern’ being of the board.
By the mid-thirties, Haagse Kunstkring gradually begins to regain something like a face. Despite complaints about the lack of a “linchpin,” a degree of homogeneity is re-established, as was the case in the heyday of the Hague School. Thus at this time we come across the names of Hein von Essen, Rein Jan Drayer, Hubert Bekman, Jan Franken and M. Schipper, who from 1931 to 1935 had together formed “De Groep,” a distant predecessor of the later “Verve. Franken had been a member since 1919, and from 1933 to 1937 he was president of the first section. Bekman had been a Circle member since 1928, Von Essen from 1932, the others became members around 1934-35. Drayer showed at the Kring his first images of the abandoned modern city. Jan van Heel, whose active role in Kring life deserves separate mention, began with his impressive row of clowns and scenes of variety life. Bekman stood out for his fine woodcuts, one of which the Art Circle used as a Christmas card.
Chris de Moor had been a member of the Circle since 1926 and remained so until the 1950s, so that one could follow him in all his transformations. Twice he took on the chairmanship of the painting department for a short time. Furthermore, in addition to exhibitions, he took part in the life of the society in other ways, including lecturing. As leader of the First Dutch Free Studio, he worked closely with its members Willem van den Berg, Harry Verburg and Kees Andrea.
In 1933 we discover the names of Pyke Koch and Wim Oepts, among others, among the new members, the latter of whom did indeed exhibit. However, we never hear from Koch again. Similarly, Paul Citroen’s registration as a member in 1934 appears to have been nothing but an empty alarm, but since 1940, when he exhibited a portrait of Ter Braak, among other things, his work has been shown at the Kring every year.
Willem van Leusden, who in general one would rather associate with Utrecht art life, but who had already exhibited many etchings in the Kring around World War I, returned in 1934 with, among other things, one of his fascinating self-portraits.
Despite all these promising names, the Circle was not yet completely healthy. For example, in 1936 they lost about 35 members in six months. There were also complaints that the young people in particular ignored the club. No wonder, when one reads that the then manager was regularly found drunk, the gin was diluted with water (it used to be with port) and the milk was kept cool in the ladies room.
By cooperating with various art magazines such as “De Delver,” “Prisma der Kunsten” and “De Keten” they tried to get some more publicity, which was not without results. Moreover, in 1938 all forces were joined together to celebrate the 45th anniversary with dignity with an exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum. Despite the thanks of some members because their work was not exhibited on that occasion, a clear turnaround could be observed from that moment on. Within six months, the Kring gained another 59 members in 1939. Among those who joined shortly before the war were Johan Mekking, Paul Kromjong, Chiem van Houwinge, Harry Verburg, Wim Sinemus, Kees Andrea, Willem Schrofer. The main features of the face of post-war Hague art life were already given. A number of them later exchanged their circle membership for that of Pulchri, but in The Hague that is the way to show one’s ‘arrivé’. Already in 1904 the minutes of the Circle sighed ‘If Pulchri has progressed, it owes this in no small measure to the Kunstkring’.
The outbreak of war abruptly interrupted the revived élan. Already in 1939 a planned exchange with Antwerp painters could not take place because of the German invasion of that country. In May 1940 an exhibition of work by W. J. Rozendaal and W. Schrofer that had just opened was interrupted because of the German invasion of our country. The occupation threw the whole of Dutch art life into disarray, and that of the Kunstkring made no exception. The Kring’s halls were even used by the Germans for billeting, making exhibitions and performances impossible. For the first time in 35 years no permission was granted for the annual raffle.
The board, led by Hein von Essen, tried for some time to sail between the cliffs, but had to stop at comments such as ‘the plans for the guild formation of the Department worried many members’. The New Year’s greeting for 1941 concluded with ‘more than ever we will realize what ‘Nederlandsch’ means’. To escape the constraints of German cultural policy, most members prefer to resign as working members and remain members for art only. Subsequently, under the able G. J. van Haersma Buma, who until then had mainly organized the Circle’s raffle, a business board is formed that takes care of the official survival of the Haagse Kunstkring.
In 1941, in cooperation with the Gemeentemuseum, the 50th anniversary was stylishly celebrated. Kasper Niehaus observes in his review of that exhibition, which was also shown in Amsterdam: ‘In our troubled times the Circle still forms something like an outward unity of the arts’. In November 1941 another Limburg Week was held in the premises of Bas van Pelt, one of the circle members who would not survive the war. Then it became quiet in the Circle.
After the liberation, the Kring emerges fresh from its apparent slumber. As soon as possible the first exhibition is opened, because as Willem Schröfer said for the Kring in 1947 “Culture is needed like that ordinary bread we eat every day. In these early days, the Kring interceded in providing paint and linen that was still scarce at first. The first exhibitions were held in the Kring’s own building at 7 Lange Houtstraat, and after a brief interlude in the Panorama Mesdag building, it found shelter in the Korte Vijverberg 7 building, where the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie .was located until 1957. Society is then held together with Pulchri. As several times before in the history of both societies, serious thought is given to a merger, but time and again it turns out that their own identity is felt too strongly to make amalgamation possible.
Because the spaces are not sufficient, exhibitions are again held according to the system of group exhibitions, in which the Circle soon appears to be split into two main directions: the so-called experimentalists (which is usually also “abstracts”) on one side and the “new figuratives” or “modern realists” on the other. Of the new talent abounding in the first section, Theo Bitter, Wil Leewens, Jaap Nanninga and Jan Schoonhoven belong to the former, Herman Berserik and Co Westerik to the latter. Among the most active members after the war are especially Willem Schröfer, married since 1948 to Hannie Bal and George Lampe, both of whom held the chairmanship of the first section for many years.
Especially fortunate could the Circle be with in its ranks three sculptors of the caliber of a Theo v.d. Nahmer, Aard v.d. IJssel and Rudi Rooijackers.
A large number of members joined the group “Verve,” which started in 1951. The name was an invention of Willem Schröfer, while the initiative had come from three other circle members: Theo Bitter, Nol Kroes and Frans de Wit. Their spokesman was Paul Rodenko, who liked to make forays into the realm of painting from the literary department The members of “Verve” were at times characterized as “new expressionists,” at other times hailed as a new Hague school. The painters themselves set their boundaries very wide, although initially there was certainly a certain stand against abstraction. But this criterion soon disappeared, when Hubert Bekman, Rinus v. d. Neut, Frans de Wit as well as the later joined Wil Bouthoorn, went in the non-figurative direction.
George Lampe at one point could no longer reconcile himself with the ideals of ‘Verve,’ because he did not want to see real and surreal, abstract and figurative in terms of opposites. In the ‘Fugare’ he founded, the artist had to renounce all dogmatism. ‘Anti-absolutist’ and ‘liberating’ were the watchwords.
These two epithets also fit perfectly with the objectives of the “Free Academy” founded in 1947, with which the Circle maintained close ties from the very beginning. Livinus van de Bundt and George Lampe were the first director and vice-director, and Circle members Victorine Hefting and Chris de Moor formed the first board, in which they were later succeeded by C. A. Abspoel, the first postwar president of the Circle, and the later honorary member Nico Wijnen. An overview of the first teachers, or rather ‘tutors’ at the Free Academy basically amounts to a sampling from the register of the Haagse Kunstkring: Kees Andrea, Jan Goeting, Theo van der Nahmer, Huib Hierck, Uvinus van de Bundt, Rudi Rooijackers, George Lampe, Ber Mengels, Hessel de Boer, Hans van der Lek, Ton Hoogendoorn, Gerard Lutz, Lisette van Meeteren, Jan Snoeck.
Even with the present ‘Free Academy new style’, which enriched its name with the addition of ‘social creative center for visual communication’, the connection remained undiminished. Similarly, the Circle felt closely involved with the ‘Art Study Center’, founded in 1948, of which Wim Sinemus was one of the driving forces. Unfortunately, this project was not long-lived.
All kinds of pre-war aspects of club life returned after 1945. The lottery was restarted by the indefatigable Van Haersma Buma, and the summer sales exhibitions also returned. Although few in number, some flourishing discussion evenings and lectures were also organized. In 1948, for example, an evening was held in cooperation with Pulchri on the theme of “abstract rhyme-less,” in which, among others, Rodenko and the poet-painter Willem Hussem participated. On December 19, 1952, Paul Citroen gave a lecture on “The emergence of new forms in painting,” in which he in no way opposed his Bauhaus past. For a much wider, general audience was the series of evenings.
‘In the artist’s workshop’ referred to. The first of these, on January 31, 1961, was devoted to the visual arts Some painters talked about their way of working. The necessity as well as the relativity of criticism were further discussed, as well as the problems associated with making an exhibition. The divergent views of various artists were clarified by means of portraits of those present made on the spot. The commentator was George Lampe.
The Kring’s foreign contacts after the war were mainly with Belgium, although in 1958 Yugoslavian artists were also guests. The exchange with Antwerp, which failed in 1939 due to the outbreak of war, took place again in 1946 with the group ‘Het Getij’. Thereafter, work by members of the ‘Jeune Peinture Beige’ was regularly shown.
In October 1956 the Belgian ambassador opened an exhibition of work by the Belgian lsidore Opsomer and the Dutchman Jan Sluyters. Like Berserik then, one might wonder what these artists essentially had to do with the Circle. Then honors such as those for 70-year-old Jan Franken in 1948 and Herman Bieling in 1958 were more appropriate.
Still the Kring liked to jubilee whenever the calendar called for it, and looked back on the rich past with satisfaction. In this respect, they were on good terms with Nostalgia early on. Thus an exhibition “The Haagse Kunstkring then and now” was held as part of the “Plush and Plastic” event, showing what the Kring had accomplished between De Bock and Berserik.
Berserik was the first to receive a one-man exhibition after the opening of the Kring’s provisional last home at 64 Denneweg, an honor that was due both to his dominant artistic position and to the amount of organizational work he did for the Kring in this style. Thanks to artists of his stature – one also thinks of Livinus van de Bundt, Co Westerik, Jenny Dalenoord, W. J. Rozendaal and Harry Disberg – the Kring was able to boast an uninterrupted tradition in the field of printmaking even after the war. Since the days of Hoytema and Moulijn, this branch of the visual arts had always been exceptionally well represented in the Kring. To underline this, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Kring, a beautiful series of prints was published, to which were contributed by Berserik, Westerik, Rozendaal, Ap Sok, Cees Vlag, Jan Kuiper, Aat Verhoog, Pauline Braat, Peter Struycken and Theo Mooyman, among others.
Twenty years have passed since the building on Denneweg was inaugurated in 1957, and a whole new generation of artists has emerged. While it was not easy to make a ‘representative’ choice from the first 75 years of the Kunstkring’s history, an evaluation of what important talent can now be found in the Kring is almost certainly doomed to fail. Essentially, it also does not fit into the ‘historical’ overview given here. One can still daily consider and weigh the work of these artists according to the standards one wants to set for it. The threshold of time need not be crossed for this purpose. The presence of the work of a number of ‘older’ members will thereby make it all the more clear that the age of an association such as the Haagse Kunstkring and its significance to us depend not so much on the date of foundation or the age of the oldest member, but on the spirit that emanates from its last exhibition.
1 For this article, the rich archives of the Haagse Kunstkring were drawn primarily from the Annual Reports, Yearbooks, Books of Minutes, catalogs and clippings located there. Gaps could often be filled thanks to catalogs and clippings from the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague.
Of the further literature consulted, particular mention should be made of:
B. Spaanstra-Polak, The fin-de-siècle in Dutch painting, The Hague 1955
Van Gogh studies by J. M. Joosten (especially articles 12 and 13), in the 1969 and 1970 Museum Journal
Dr. G. Knuttel, Willem van Konijnenburg, palette series, Amsterdam 1941 Catalogue exhibition ‘Verve’ at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, October 19-November 24, 1974.
The abbreviation GB refers to the so-called Golden Books, owned by the Haagse Kunstkring, in which numerous events are recorded by members.