Jacob Bendienartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsman • printmaker • sculptorAmsterdam 1890-1933 Hilversum

Jacob Bendien is one of the first Dutch painters to paint abstractly. He also made figurative depictions; he refused to distinguish between these two schools of thought. Unlike, for example, the artists of De Stijl, Bendien used deliberately sensitive lines in his abstract work. Together with John Rädecker and several other artists, he proclaimed 'Absolute painting' in 1913. This stood for the creation of non-figurative, almost organic compositions with wavy surfaces in uniform colors, sharply separated from each other. These paintings represent 'inner things': they are inner life expressed in line and colour. Only a few sculptures are known of the artist. They are amorphous shapes that seem to be a 3-dimensional translation of his painted compositions.