2023-04-29 01:00:01
‘Victory begins in Bergen near Alkmaar,’ wrote a critic in 1919 regarding the origins of the Bergen School. A beautifully constructed exhibition in Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar shows what inspiration (and imitation!) preceded it.
A basket of potatoes as gray and lumpy as stones and another half dozen delicious Van Goghs. A cartload of restored works by Le Fauconnier. And a giant-sized cross painted in cubist style by Jaap Weijand. From today lovers of top painting can indulge themselves in the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar.
The most significant works in the exhibition Van Gogh, Cézanne, Le Fauconnier & the Bergen School are not paintings, but the reproductions of three very old black and white photographs. They show rooms in the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam more than a hundred years ago. Wood paneling cuts through the image like a horizon, surmounted by a series of stiffly hung paintings. The graininess of the photos prevents precise identification, but according to the text plate, the artworks were made by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Henri Le Fauconnier.
Savior of art
Without those exhibitions, most of the work that now hangs in Alkmaar would probably never have been made. Perhaps a Bergen School would never have arisen. In a time long before the Internet, when illustrated art magazines were still in their infancy, the physical ‘encounter’ with works of art was the way artists influenced other artists.
Very little happened in the Netherlands around 1900. While the innovators tumbled over each other in Germany, France and Belgium, the brave realism of the Hague School still prevailed here. This only changed when the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam organized a Van Gogh retrospective exhibition in 1905. The driving force was Johanna Bonger, the sister-in-law of the artist who died in 1890, who had turned out to be a tireless promoter of his work.
A first retrospective in 1892 did not cause quite a stir – it was perhaps still too early, the minds were not yet ripe – but thirteen years later the entire painting community threw itself into Van Gogh’s work. He was posthumously proclaimed the savior of art, which had by then been pretty much collapsed. “Van Gogh is one of the apostles of the revolution,” said Leo Gestel without further ado.
The same Gestel imitated Van Gogh’s sheaves of corn, which first entered public circulation following 1905 in the form of photographic reproductions and later developed into icons. In the original, the sheaves play the leading role, as a radical addition to something commonplace. Gestel placed them more in the background, on a high horizon, between a pleasing pink-yellow field and a blue-purple sky.
Jaap Weijand also took a close look at Van Gogh’s work and gave it his own, less revolutionary twist. The tree he painted in 1916 is clearly related to Van Gogh’s horse chestnut of thirty years earlier. The keys are similarly short and powerful, but Weijand’s complementary colors are a bit more traditional and it doesn’t get as lively as the wind seems to play through Van Gogh’s foliage.
One-to-one copy
Like Van Gogh, Cézanne only came to the attention of the Netherlands following his death. This was thanks to Cornelis Hoogendijk, who discovered him in Paris and immediately bought 33 works. Through his sister, who was married to Gerrit Willem van Blaaderen, they reached the later members of the Bergense School.
Cézanne’s slightly Cubist still lifes with fruit were admiringly imitated by Dirk Filarski and Matthieu Wiegman. Arnout Colnot made his own version of Cézannes, often reprized Mont Sainte-Victoire with a steep North Holland dune top as a stand-in for the French mountain. The contrasting colors and heavy shapes look more rustic than the Mediterranean light example, but the composition is a one-to-one copy.
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Of the three greats presented in Alkmaar as initiators of the Bergen School, only Le Fauconnier has exerted a living influence. As one of the less pronounced Cubists, he has been out of the picture for a while in art history, but when he exhibited for the first time in the Netherlands, his use of recognizable figuration was highly appreciated. That’s how Else Berg has for her Mystical pond to be well looked following The treea forest giant splintered into planes.
Broker as patron
Le Fauconnier lived in the Netherlands during the First World War, had a studio at 288 Overtoom for many years and founded the artists’ association Het Signaal. Together with Piet van Wijngaerdt, he is regarded as the founder of the Bergen School, to which the second part of this exhibition is devoted.
Here the expressive power of, for example, Mommie Schwarz’s almost melting sunflower and the strip of lawn that Dirk Filarski makes glow between menacingly dark tree stumps is striking. This is work by artists who have found their own style, who are no longer imitators. But because of the foregoing you feel very well where this individuality comes from. Also significant in this room is the small sculpture in the corner representing the head of Piet Boendermaker. This local estate agent acted as a patron of the Bergen School and kept the artists’ group afloat by purchasing hundreds of paintings.
Apart from all the great loans – a major achievement for a medium-sized museum – that is the great strength of this exhibition. As before, for example in the Paul Rijkens Collection, Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar shows that innovation never just appears out of the blue. Movements and schools do not follow each other according to the laws of Biblical genealogy, but arise from the efforts of collectors, museum directors, exhibition makers and other passionate advocates. It is largely thanks to them that Van Gogh, Cézanne and Le Fauconnier were able to develop into examples that were followed, into an artistic three-stage rocket that eventually led to the renewal of the Bergen School.
Van Gogh, Cézanne, Le Fauconnier & the Bergen School: until September 3 in Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar
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