BRAM VAN VELDE
IN THE WINTER OF 1962 Bram van Velde met Willem de Kooning for the first time. Since it was as difficult for the New York host to converse in French as for his guest from Paris to converse in English, they settled on Dutch, a language both had trouble remembering, but took great pains to speak.
By emigrating, Bram van Velde and Willem de Kooning indicated the physical and esthetic limitations of their native country. Dutch critics have since wistfully distorted history by claiming them for Holland. In reality, the contributions van Velde and de Kooning have made to painting do not relate to Holland, but to the countries that adopted them, and the pictorial traditions they have challenged and enriched are those of France and America. From Paris and New York, where they achieved prominence, the artists gained international fame and reputation.
The first twenty years of Bram van Velde’s life and work in France remained largely unnoticed. Since 1945, he has emerged as a leader of the School of Paris and one of the most original contributors to contemporary art.
A painting by Bram van Velde is composed of loosely articulated triangles and trapezoids that are wedged into rectangular compositions. It resembles a tightly sealed cage from which forms struggle towards freedom, and like a labyrinth full of mischievous symmetry, is difficult to probe and hazardous to penetrate. An ovoid shape recurs, one that is evolved from the slanting eyes of women he portrayed and the fruits in his earlier still lifes. Although reduced to a formal element of composition, these ovoids remain suggestive of a human stare or come organically alive and exert hypnotic power. Another mark of identity, paralleling the use of the ovoid, though probably subconsciously attained, is the coalescence of the letters B and V in a great number of the artist’s abstract compositions. Van Velde’s initials are readily deciphered and they correlate with the archetypal forms he invents.
Color is the activating principle, provoking the overall design instead of following it. Aquatic blues and greens, blazing reds and yellows, vaporous purples and browns force breaches in their funneling and ballooning envelopes to inundate the canvas. Limp masses of color are dissected by brightly-hued filaments and held together by contours of contrasting values. White is effectively used to suggest pockets and incisions that alleviate pressures and allow forms to breathe. Van Velde creates surfaces that vary from translucent washes to layers of opaque and accentuated brush work. Dripping effects are preserved and given studied prominence. The artist’s emotions are brought onto canvas with the straightforwardness and immediacy, characteristic of the abstract-expressionist manner. The result is luminous, as fresh as a shower from a sunlit sky.
In search of a personal style, Bram van Velde has gone through the impressionism of Hendrik Breitner and the expressionism of Paula Modersohn-Becker. In Paris, in 1924, he sampled the decorative fauvism of Matisse and the compositional cubism of Braque, and to what he had retained of his two years in Worpswede, he added important elements of their style. Favoring the accepted themes of landscape, portraiture and still life, he was capable, with the talent at his disposal, of adjusting to the new environment in a natural way. But, before long, a consistent pattern developed in van Velde’s reconstitution of subject-matter, and formal idiosyncrasies appeared that were germinal to his later work. Still serving representational goals, the staggering of planes, the spiraling and saw-toothed lines, and the embryonic kernel shapes presaged outright abstractions. Van Velde attained the first phase of a personal style in his paintings of the late twenties and all through his career he drew from the principles of form and composition that were implied by his semi-abstractions of that period.
During the four years he spent on Majorca, from 1931 to 1935, van Velde attempted a synthesis of expressionist manner with post-cubist method. The ten surviving works are only partially successful, for they still honor a beaux-arts tradition, while falling short of the artists’ revolutionary goals. The real metamorphosis of discernible subject into private vision occured after 1936, following, and undoubtedly spurred by, Picasso’s investigation into the elementals of living matter. In a further shift to the abstract, van Velde abandoned his stylized rendering of conventional figures and still lifes. Instead he isolated fragmentary forms from their natural surrounding, endowed them with organic life and created a system of dynamic relationships admirably suited to carry the artist’s emotions and convey them in plastic terms. Van Velde’s gouaches of the late thirties embody presentiments of human suffering and physical annihilation. They are tense and aggressive and contain allusions to faces distorted by cries of anguish and protest. Though van Velde never championed the surrealists’ cause, or felt comfortable under their banner, he borrowed from the surrealist repertory of pictorial devices. He relied on automatism, created space and explored the origins of form in a way that relates him not only to Miró of the twenties, but also to Pollock of the forties.
Van Velde’s sense of identification with his subject was such that it is difficult, in retrospect, to distinguish between reflections of personal hardship and the artist’s empathy with a world in distress. The act of being engaged in esthetics for life’s sake, rather than being engaged in life for the sake of esthetics, was rare among artists and unpopular with the cognoscenti. While the neo-plasticists, the eminent taste-makers of the thirties were preoccupied with conceptual thinking, purity of form, integral organization and universal harmony, van Velde assaulted his viewers with contempt for intellectual approach and disregard for synthetic order. His paintings manifest intuitive, not conscious, organization and they hinge on private emotion, not plastic principle. Instead of generalizing the particular, a principle in which the neo-plasticists excelled, van Velde particularized the general. No wonder that his works provoked an audience that was conditioned to view painting as a macrocosm scaled down to size and thus comfortably emasculated. By magnifying, in all its intimacy and crudeness, the microcosm of his own affective processes, van Velde reversed the visually acceptable, and broke the rules of his environment.
After his return to Paris and until the end of World War II, Bram van Velde led a life of poverty and seclusion. Jealously guarding his integrity and refusing to compromise, he had no supporters to buy his work or come to his defense. A notable exception was Samuel Beckett, whose friendship with van Velde dates from those years. Through the personages of his creation the playwright identified with the artist, the “non-herd,” ardently pursuing his solitary goal in the margin of an indifferent and imperceptive society. Their world and all humanity has been capsuled in the myth of the fate-stricken individual waiting for somebody or something he no longer has faith in. One might apply to van Velde’s work the idea Beckett expressed in Waiting for Godot: “The more it changes, the more it is the same . . .” In a climate of cataclysm, the act of painting became either completely gratuitous, or it could be raised to mystical heights. Stifled by this dilemma and sickened by the war with its privations, van Velde stopped working in 1941.
The liberation of Paris and the exaltation that came in its wake were bound to effect changes in van Velde’s paintings. At the age of fifty and at the edge of his endurance, the artist was finally offered his first one-man exhibition. As his work attracted more attention, it also gained him recognition. In the years that followed, and as a likely result, a new clarity took hold of van Velde’s paintings, exemplified in a relaxation of form, a greater fluidity of line and an intensification of color. The aggressiveness of his earlier work had mellowed into proud intransigence and a universal sense of the tragic had evolved from individual agony and despair. It is true, the end of van Velde’s artistic confinement shook the premises on which his esthetic had been built—the plight of the individual in a hostile world. But the artist miraculously triumphed over his predicament, and not only sustained, but expanded the impact of his tragic vision. Bram van Velde’s production of the last twenty years has shown a remarkable level of performance. He paints little, though all his days are devoted to working. In the absence of further evolution of imagery or form, van Velde has consolidated his idiom and he exercises a spectacular control in walking the tight rope between self-renewal and self-imitation. “To be an artist,” says Beckett, “is to fail as no other dare fail.” Forever faced with failure, van Velde will not permit it to impair his craft. Beckett has called the history of painting a “history of its attempts to escape from this sense of failure by means of more authentic, more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee.” The willingness to risk failure, can be equated with total dedication, and, in van Velde’s case, with maximal result. It is difficult to read joy into van Velde’s paintings, and yet, in the breathing space between the knowledge of death and its acceptance, life asserts itself with all its sweet enticing powers. Expressing through the magic of color, “what is virginal, new, uninhibited, without routine and without limits,” van Velde succeeds in proving that life can restore art as art restores the artist: “I am in a thousand pieces: painting, in a sense, puts me together again.”
Jan Van Der Merck is Curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
