Piet Ouborg
dal 11/12/2009 al 13/3/2010
Segnalato da
11/12/2009
Piet Ouborg
Cobra Museum, Amstelveen
With about 60 paintings, gouaches and drawings, the exhibition covers the entire development of Ouborg's work, from his earliest work in the Dutch East Indies and later, after 1938, when he settled in the Netherlands, to his late work from the mid-and late 1950s. The retrospective gives special focus to the mature work of the 1950s. Ouborg - always guided by his own personal compass - developed as an artist, from his first figurative, surrealistic works in the to his visionary abstract painting that led to his breakthrough.
The Cobra Museum presents highlights of the pioneering work of a forerunner and innovator in Dutch art. In the Netherlands, Piet Ouborg was well ahead of his time. Ouborg’s work gave visual art a radically new identity.
This extensive exhibition comprises a selection of Piet Ouborg’s masterpieces, including drawings, gouaches and paintings from all the periods of his career, with special emphasis on his later work. These works show how Ouborg - always guided by his own personal compass - developed as an artist, from his first figurative, surrealistic works in the 1930s to his visionary abstract painting from 1947 to 1950 that led to his breakthrough. With this work, Ouborg was a frontrunner in a perception of painting that the Cobra artists had yet to make their own.
The work of Piet Ouborg is currently generating considerable interest both nationally and internationally. In the context of our new century and after a long hiatus, we take in new look back at the legacy of one of the Netherlands’ most important modern artists. The most recent museum exhibition devoted to Ouborg’s work was more than seven years ago.
This exhibition presents an exclusive selection of about a hundred masterpieces, carefully selected from numerous collections, including the artist’s estate. It is also exceptional that this exhibition and the catalogue that accompanies it, makes a significant contribution to knowledge and understanding of this artist, including a previously unnoticed scientific source of inspiration.
Piet Ouborg (Dordrecht, 1893- the Hague, 1956)
In 1916, at the age of 23, Piet Ouborg moved to what was then the Dutch East Indies and taught drawing there. When he was 30, he spent a year back in the Netherlands and became familiar with the French modernists. He intensified his didactic drawing skills and returned to Java. His work was first exhibited in the Netherlands in 1932. In 1938, when Ouborg was 45, he and his family moved back to the Netherlands.
The 1930s
In the interbellum years, Dutch museums were still rarely exhibiting modern art. Ouborg was unaware of the few artists who were producing surrealistic art in the Netherlands between 1930 in 1932, when he painted several abstract dream images, followed by anthropomorphic and biomorphic beings in drawings that were rich in fantasy, as well as expressively painted explosions and hushed landscapes. This work would now be referred to as Surrealist. This series of dream images was primarily created on Java, far removed from the effervescent Paris art scene, where Surrealism was at its apex. Ouborg kept abreast of these developments by way of French magazines, through which he became acquainted with the work of Breton, Ernst, Miró, Tanguy, Picasso and De Chirico. Stylistically, there were parallels between Ouborg’s work and that of several surrealist artists. The oval shapes in Ouborg's dreamscapes have similar weight to Jean Arp’s ‘navels’. The spirit of Tanguy’s alienating landscapes, with their characteristic, surrealistic atmosphere of eroticism and decay, can be felt in Ouborg’s landscapes. His explosions might seem to refer to the threatening winds of war in some of Max Ernst’s paintings. Both the abstract and the figurative variations of Surrealism are present in Piet Ouborg’s work.
Ouborg was in these years at the very heart of the rich Indonesian culture, a culture that was only available to Parisian artists by way of ethnographic collections and objects. Ouborg’s awareness that masks and shadow puppets were tools for reaching the subconscious intensified. His investigation into the subconscious or the surreal was self-evident - he had visions and feverish dreams and was receptive to magic and spirituality. From the beginning, Ouborg collected masks and spontaneous children's drawings, all of which indicated that Ouborg’s personal surrealism developed in a perfectly natural way. By the time he brought it back to the Netherlands, he was well ahead of his time.
The 1940s and 50s
Piet Ouborg did not develop his interests as part of a group of like-minded artists, but by finding inspiration in the world in which he lived. He described that world as an endless flow of images and symbols. Ouborg shunned fashionable stylistic conventions. It is striking that after 1938, when Ouborg returned to the Netherlands, he would be resuming his pre-war experiments at the same time that museums were trying to make up for lost time in presenting modern art.
Ouborg’s spirituality was rooted in a universal acceptance of a primeval source for the expression of life. The forms of expression that this generated - by primitive cultures, children and ‘nonconformists’ - were things that the young Cobra artists recognized when they saw the work of Piet Ouborg. In 1947, Anton Rooskens and Theo Wolvecamp sought a radical new way of painting, one that the Dutch Experimentalists had yet to make their own. Between 1947 in 1950, Ouborg’s quest for new possibilities of expression led to a breakthrough. He developed a visionary abstract style of painting in which all his experiments from previous years were incorporated into a powerful and colourful visual language.
In 1950, Piet Ouborg was awarded the Jacob Maris Prize for his drawing, Father and Son. The event has always been remembered because it was landmark event in the history of Dutch art. The commotion that it generated demonstrated an overwhelming general ignorance of contemporary and modern art, and a lack of knowledge about abstract art, which was associated with insanity and considered a rip-off. It was comparable to the furious reactions to the Cobra artists. Museum curators who presented modern art in the 1950s and the art critics who wrote about the work were the first to recognize the qualities of Ouborg’s work. That appreciation was not only confirmed by his being awarded the Jacob Maris Prize, but also by international recognition.
New Insight
The work of Piet Ouborg is almost always described in terms of feelings: its leanings towards ‘something higher’, contact with the unconscious, or the primal strength of the primitive. In addition to this, Ouborg was not insensitive to the rational mind. Amongst his possessions were found pages from the Lehrbuch der allgemeinen pathologische Anatomie. Ouborg had drawn into the illustrations of microscopic images. Pen in hand, he had followed the precise lines of diseased organic tissue. He made branches from them, adding tentacles and making connections between them. In investigating his post-war work, it is certainly worthwhile to include his hitherto secret meetings with the sciences.
Book Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated book, published by Waanders Uitgevers and the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, with extensive illuminating texts by art historians Véronique Baar, Katja Weitering (curator for the Cobra Museum), Annelies Haase and Bert Jansen (ISBN 9789040086335).
Press contact:
For additional information and visual material, please contact Lieke Fijen, l.fijen@cobra-museum.nl, tel. 31 (0)20 5475038.
Opening 12 december, 6 pm
Cobra Museum
Sandbergplein 1 - Amsterdam
Tuesday to Sunday 11.00 - 17.00 hours for guided tours, call 31 (0)20 5475031
Admission: 9.50 euro, reductions 5 or 6.50 euro