Bram van Velde

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Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde (October 19, 1895, in Zoeterwoude, near Leyden, Netherlands - December 28, 1981 in Grimaud, near Arles, France) was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style somewhere between expressionism and surrealism (his paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and Adolph Gottlieb). He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du Bouchet.

[edit] Life

Bram van Velde was born into an intensely poor family, and this would mark him profoundly for life. His mother, Catharina von der Voorst (1867-1949) was the illegitimate daughter of a Count. His father, Willem van Velde (1868-1914), owned a small company in water transportation on the Rhine. Bram was the second of four children (his sister Cornelia was born in 1892, Geer et Jacoba were born in 1898 and 1903). After going bankrupt, the father abandoned the family; the mother and children moved repeated over the next years, from Leyden to Lisse, and finally to The Hague.

In 1907, the young Bram entered into service as an apprentice in the painting and interior decorating company of Schaijk & Kramers in The Hague. He was encouraged in his art by the co-owner Eduard H. Kramers and his son Wijnand, who were appreciators and collectors of art, and these two would become Bram van Velde's artistic patrons until around 1934. Because of his status as bread-winner for his family, Bram van Velde was exempted from service in the First World War, and he was able to continue his work as painter and decorator, and to enroll in the Mauritshuis of The Hague, where he was able to copy masterworks in the collection.

In 1922, the Kramers encouraged van Velde to travel and gave him a monthly stipend. He went first to Munich in May, then to north of Bremen (in Worpswede) in June, where, since the 1890s, there existed a colony of expressionist artists. This brief exposure to contemporary art (3 months) revolutionized van Velde's work. He left Worpswede shortly after, and moved to Paris (in the "Belleville" quartier, XIXe arrondissement). His career progressed slowly, and in February 1927 he exposed his works in Bremen. This was followed by the Jury-Freie Kunstschau of Berlin in April. Finally, he (with his brother Geer) was admitted into the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where he would show his works several times (1928 to 1932, in 1940 and 1941). In this period he went to Chartres in the company of Otto Freundlich, and also discovered the works of Henri Matisse (probably at the home of Paul Guillaume). Matisse would have a great impact on van Velde's work (as too, in coming years, van Velde's discovery of Pablo Picasso).

On October 6, 1928, van Velde married the German painter Lilly (Sophie Caroline) Klöker (1896-1936), that he had been seeing since perhaps his stay at Worpswede. With the Great Depression, their material conditions deteriorated and they moved to Spain, and in September 1932 they were living in Majorca. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, Lilly van Velde died in a hosptial and Bram van Velde feld back to Marseille with several of his canvases. He came back to Paris and moved in with his brother Geer. He met Marthe Arnaud, a former Lutheran missionary in the Zambezi, and they became a couple. Through Marthe, van Velde was introduced to Samuel Beckett, and the two would develop a friendship. Stopped on the street in 1938 because he was speaking German with Marthe, van Velde was briefly imprisoned (his papers were not in order), and brief incarcerations would occur several times in the coming years.

In 1939, van Velde came upon his own painting style while working in a large-format with gouache. He stopped painting in 1941, but began again in the fall of 1945. His first solo exhibition opened March 21, 1946 in Paris in the "Galerie Mai" with 25 canvases, nearly all of his existing works, but the show was a failure. Beckett wrote his first essay on his work in les Cahiers d’art de Zervos. In 1947, van Velde signed a contract with the Galerie Maeght in Paris, and in 1948 he showed his work in the Kootz gallery in New York, but this was also a commercial failure, despite a good review by Willem de Kooning. After one more commercial disaster at Maeght, van Velde stopped painting for a year. In 1952, Maeght canceled their contract with him, while retaining his works.

In 1958, Franz Meyer organized the first museum exposition of Bram van Velde, a retrospective at the Kunsthalle of Berne. The couple Bram-Marthe left Paristhe same year, but Marthe died the following year (August 11), having been hit by a car during a brief trip to Paris. On Christmas 1959, Bram van Velde met Madeleine in Geneva, and the two became a couple.

Starting in 1961, van Velde began to achieve a certain critical success. Jean-Michel Meurice made a documentary film about the artist. Van Velde shuttled between Paris and Geneva, and in 1967 he moved to the latter. In 1964, he was named "chevalier" of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the Netherlands awarded him the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1969. In 1973, he painted at La Chapelle-sur-Carouge several large gouaches which are seen as the last "savage" appearance of color in his work. Aimé Maeght took him back in his gallery, almost 20 years after having dropped him. In 1975, he was received by Liberal Arts universities in Lausanne, Geneva and Neuchâtel, and in 1980 he was made "chevalier" of the "Order of the Falcon" in Iceland. For his 80th birthday, a collective homage was published by the presses at Fata Morgana (Montpellier).

Bram van Velde died December 28, 1981 in Grimaud (near Arles), and he is buried there. His mentor and friend Jacques Putman, who supported him and his career after Bram's departure from Maeght, is buried beside him (Putman died February 27, 1994 in Paris).

[edit] References

• Mason, Rainer Michael. Bram van Velde 1895-1981; Rétrospective du Centenaire, catalogue d’exposition, avec quinze contributions d'auteurs divers. Musée Rath (Musée d'art et d'histoire). Geneva: 1996, pp. 305-307.
• Putman, Jacques. Bram Van Velde. Texts by Jacques Putman, Georges Duthuit and Samuel Beckett. Collection: Le Musée de Poche. Paris: Editions Georges Fall, 1958.