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We proudly present you the catalogue & exhibition ‘Kieskleurig’. The selection has also appeared in a printed luxury catalogue, which you can view here in PDF form and of course also order via this page. The works are on display in our three galleries in Ede, where you are very welcome. We will welcome you with a cup of coffee and around four o’clock with a glass of Salentein. If you would like to view a specific work of art in privacy, make an appointment and we will hang it for you in a separate room.
Open: Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm
open Sundays November 26 and December 10
and by appointment: 0318-652888 or info@simonisbuunk.nl
The artwork by Auke de Vries for which this statue was the model, stands in the water of the middle part of the Zuiderpolder in Haarlem. The statue ‘leans’ in the opposite direction of the residential block (by the architect Koen van Velsen) and is placed diagonally in the water. The primary school is across the street from the apartment building.
Unveiling of the artwork ‘De Vishaak’ in the presence of Auke de Vries and students from Zuiderpolder primary school © Rob Hendriks / UP De Boer
After completing his training at the academy in The Hague, Hendrik Valk started looking for his own style as a novice artist in the 1910s and 20s. Although he never joined a group or movement, his style is often associated with artists such as Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszár. Valk made sure he was aware of modern art views, but always continued to follow his own course. He thought it was important to represent the ‘essence’ of a work of art in a clear way. He starts painting and drawing rural life, such as farms and landscapes in the Stroe area, but increasingly distances himself from realism. His colors are already even and his images have sharp lines. In his search for the core of his subject, Valk sticks to his own experience of the artist as a ‘seer’ and avoids everything that can distract, such as the use of details. He increasingly abstracts his compositions into block shapes, whereby the parts remain recognizable: a figure remains a figure and he also continues to apply depth on the flat canvas, unlike Bart van der Leck and other artists of De Stijl. As a teacher of head and figure drawing and founder of the graphics department at the academy in Arnhem, Valk encouraged his students to develop their own style.
In 1973, Corneille, together with his friend and editor Giorgio Cegna, produced a series about the adventures of Pinocchio. He spent a whole summer trying to translate the text of the well-known and beloved fairy tale into images. Corneille ‘mixed color and sweat together’ in the studios of the publishing house in Pollenza to finally show the series at the fifteenth Triennale in Milan’s city park. Together with Giorgio, Corneille decided to create a ‘colossal’ book that everyone could leaf through and that, because it was exhibited outdoors, had to withstand the Italian sun. Ultimately it was destroyed by students and Corneille thought that a set of twelve screen prints should be made. These were produced in black and white and then enhanced with gouache, making each screen print unique.
Nowadays horses are mainly kept for hobby and sport, but in the past they were indispensable on the land for tillage and harvesting. The painter-musician Johan van Hell did something different in the 20th century than his romantic colleagues in the 19th century. Like a template, the horses are cut out, duplicated and placed in a triangle, removing any illusion of space. The horizon is reduced to a narrow ribbon. Van Hell was a socialist. He wanted to simplify his subjects so that every worker and illiterate could understand them.
Simon Vinkenoog (1928-2009) poet, writer and activist played a central role in the Amsterdam music and art scene of the 1960s. He was a great advocate of experimenting with mind-altering substances such as marijuana and LSD to achieve a higher state of consciousness . In his house on the Bloemgracht and later the Noordermarkt there must have been a coming and going of artists and musicians. In 1948, Vinkenoog left for Paris at the age of twenty to escape what he perceived as the suffocating Dutch atmosphere. There he met Karel Appel, Zadkine, Corneille and Hugo Claus and the photographer Ed van der Elsken. Vinkenoog lived in Paris for eight years, where he worked at UNESCO for seven years (from 1949 to 1956) and made his debut as a poet during that period. In 1961 he devoted himself entirely to writing. His promotion of the benefits of banned mind-altering substances causes confrontations. In February 1964 he was arrested and given a conditional sentence of 6 weeks for possessing 0.16 grams of marijuana. A second conviction took place in December 1964 and in March and April 1965 he was held in the House of Detention on Wolveplein in Utrecht for six weeks. During his stay there, he wrote the diary Tegen De Wet: six weeks in detention, including about his use of LSD in prison. His contacts with Karel Appel resulted in the publication Karel Appel. The story of Karel Appel: a test of perception in 1963 and in 1970 the catalog Appel’s Oogappels.
Simon Vinkenoog, Karel Appel and Machteld at Château de Molesmes, Frankrijk © Nico Koster / MAI
As a painter in the 1930s, Wim Bosma was strongly attracted to the ‘wonders’ of modern technology. He liked to paint and watercolor things such as railway viaducts, trains, boats and flying machines in a new businesslike, realistic style. After 1945, in addition to technical subjects, other motifs also entered his work. Here Bosma painted the Ibis: the first KLM aircraft of the Douglas DC-3 type, which was delivered to KLM on September 21, 1936. The Ibis was used until 1940 on the first official scheduled service to Le Bourget near Paris and on the Amsterdam-Batavia route. In July 1940, the aircraft, which was then deployed on the Amsterdam-Shoreham scheduled service, was unable to return to the Netherlands due to the German invasion. Together with other KLM aircraft that had emigrated to England, the Ibis was deployed on the civil passenger service Bristol-Lisbon. The Ibis, the only one on this scheduled service, was attacked three times by German fighter pilots within seven months. During the first two attacks, all occupants were unharmed, despite heavy damage to the aircraft. But during the final attack, on June 1, 1943, the plane disappeared as BOAC Flight 777, with thirteen passengers and four crew members on board, in the Bay of Biscay.
Frans Lebret and Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch are contemporaries. They were both born in the 1920s, the heyday of romanticism. Painters explored nature, capturing it in sketches and later developing it in the studio into finely painted, idealized representations. Lebret went out at an early age to study the landscape, and especially the cattle, around Dordrecht. His specialty would always remain the depiction of animals, especially sheep, ‘who so attracted him to the mobility of their fur’. His style is therefore rooted in the Dordrecht Pictura tradition, in which the Van Strij brothers played a leading role around 1800. weather. Gradually, working in the open air, his compositions become more sober, his color palette more subdued and we see the typical, bright ‘Weissenbruch light’ appear more and more. For Weissenbruch, light and air were the most decisive in a painting and were his early guideline for depicting atmosphere and space in a landscape. He would deal with this theme throughout his entire painting life. Major differences can be seen in the landscapes of these two contemporaries. In Lebret’s case the attention is drawn to a shepherd and his cattle in the foreground. In the middle plan a grove and country house, along which the view continues to slide to the panorama in the background with a mill on the horizon. In Weissenbruch’s painting, the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn along the canal to the mill in the central background and the horizon is much higher than in Lebret’s landscape. In doing so, Weissenbruch gives his own impressionistic interpretation of the mood he experienced at that moment in the middle of nature, while Lebret (still) opts for the traditional portrayal of an idealized landscape according to a preconceived plan. After 1850, people broke away from academic traditions and looked at the landscape with ‘new’ eyes. Following the Barbizon school, Lebret changed the romantic image of the landscape into a more realistic representation in the mid-19th century. But that’s it. While Lebret prepared the way for younger painters who wanted to work in the wild around 1880, following the example of the Hague School, he himself hardly or never followed that path. His contemporary Weissenbruch did. He gave impressions of mood and atmosphere, seasons and moments of the day in nature in increasingly rapid, spontaneous brushstrokes.
We sold both of these paintings in 1999 to a good customer who had owned them for a long time. Now they are back with us. It was a pleasant reunion, because how we came into possession of these two counterparts is an interesting story. In 1987, Frank Buunk discovered early winter at an auction. He immediately saw that it was a Schelfhout, although the work had been attributed to another artist. So we started working on finding points of contact with Schelfhout for the final attribution. After purchasing and looking at Schelfhout the next day. The ‘new couple’ was photographed extensively. The next day the customer called. He could not buy the winter due to space constraints, but very graciously offered us his summer for sale. The case was settled within a minute. In the meantime, we, with the paintings at hand, have told the story to many people. And the still unframed panels were moved so often that some varnish damage occurred on the winter varnish. The varnish, with some good old retouches, would be because of the collection of the work. Frank remembered an early summer forest scene of Schelfhout, which we restored for a customer ten years earlier. In this painting the focus of the composition was on the left, while our winter had the focus on the right. And guess what? The sizes of both works were virtually the same, the horizon lines merged and both were painted on panel. Could they have been counterparts? We told the story to the owner of the summer. Intrigued, he came with his wife and his summer landscape of scratches had to be removed. So it happened. But what was our surprise when remains of Schelfhout’s signature emerged at the bottom right. The bottom of the signature was completely mutilated. However, the top half was still more or less intact, and if one knew it one could clearly read: A…lfh.ut F[ecit]. The two Schelfhouts found their way to a private collector where they hung inseparably next to each other in identical frames for years. Until they recently came back to us.
The works are on display in our three galleries in Ede, where you are very welcome. We will welcome you with a cup of coffee and around four o’clock with a glass of Salentein.
If you would like to view a specific work of art in privacy, make an appointment and and you will be able to view the piece of art in a separate room.
Open: Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm
open Sundays November 26 and December 10 and by appointment: 0318-652888 or info@simonisbuunk.nl
