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The material painter Jaap Wagemaker attended the Decorative Arts department at the School of Applied Arts in his native Haarlem. This laid the foundation for his knowledge of the various materials he would later use in his work, making him the most important Dutch representative of the international 'material painters' in the 1950s and 1960s.
Before World War II, he painted in a Flemish expressionist style in the style of the Belgian Constant Permeke. Later, the Dutch expressionist Herman Kruyder influenced his work. After the war, Wagemaker moved to a studio on Zomerdijkstraat in Amsterdam, a building complex consisting of 16 studio apartments with living and working space for visual artists. During this period, like many other painters, he was influenced by Picasso and also became fascinated by the CoBrA group, but found no connection with any of the prevailing movements that suited his preferred mode of expression.
After 1945, a free art movement emerged in Paris, a lyrical abstraction that emphatically broke with pre-war realism. Wagemaker attended the Ecole de Paris there and was impressed by the work of Braque, Kandinsky, and Klee. In the 1950s, this free and often colorful abstraction gave rise to a sub-movement known as 'informal art'. Recognizable figurative elements and shapes from a painting disappeared, making way for material and matter as a means of expression for a small number of like-minded artists in Europe, such as Alberto Burri, Antonio Tapiès, and Jean Dubuffet. Wagemaker's first experiments with a freer and more robust use of materials date back to 1956, after which he quickly established his reputation as a 'material painter' He became particularly well-known in Germany, where he exhibited in important galleries. In the Netherlands, Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam acquired his first work in 1956, and in 1957, he exhibited for the first time at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
From 1955 onwards, recognition for his work in the Netherlands grew. He exhibited regularly at the Stedelijk Museum, having solo exhibitions there in 1957 and 1967, and at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in 1965. From 1960 onwards, Wagemaker's characteristic material art began to emerge: abstract assemblages, for which he used rope, jute, slabs of slate, shells, chunks of wood, metal—screws and bolts—and even bones, which were fully integrated into the compositions. He mixed the paint, usually in earth tones, with fine sand, giving the structure a fine-grained texture.
In 1961, Wagemaker exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also acquired a work by him. In the Netherlands, he received the prestigious Talens Prize in 1962, and major Dutch and international museums acquired his work.
