Geometric-abstract art in the Netherlands

After the Liberation, we see a resurgence of interest in geometric-abstract art. Younger artists in particular tried to break away from realism immediately after the war, which as permitted art by the Kultuurkamer, was often seen as tainted. They oriented themselves to the avant-garde art of the just past, and some of them, such as Pieter de Haard, Harry Verburg and others turned to geometric abstraction for shorter or longer periods of time. Older artists also chose a geometric-abstract idiom after liberation. This trend continued steadily after 1950 and culminated with the founding of the Liga Nieuwe Beelden and the magazine Structure. International contacts were re-established and many artists maintained intensive contacts with typographers, architects and made the case for the creation of collaborations between the various art disciplines; a synthesis of painting, architecture and sculpture, as had previously been realized in community or new art.

The abstract work is the opposite of the nature image. It is using purely painterly means to create an entirely new world. In this art we see the sensitive direction (Kandinsky, Paul Klee), the constructivists (Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin) who create according to measure and number, and artists who are inspired by nature (Henry Moore).
Willy Boers is an artist who, during the last years of occupation and immediately after, oriented himself primarily to abstract surrealism and the lyrical and expressive abstraction of Kandinsky. He worked in a spontaneous, improvisational style, building his compositions out of patches of color and whimsical lines. That artists after the war were mainly oriented toward the somewhat surreal and expressive abstraction, with its emphasis on imagination and emotionality, was also because the Germans had declared art movements such as surrealism, expressionism and cubism; art that stands for freedom of expression, as entartet. This realization was present among the artists of the Experimental Group (later Cobra) and the artists of Vrij Beelden.
A number of artists, including Pieter de Haard and Koos van Vlijmen, who began to work abstractly around 1945 focused more on Cubism, the geometric abstraction of De Stijl and the work of Kandinsky and Klee from the Bauhaus period.
De Haard especially emphasizes that through his abstract compositions he wanted to express his dissatisfaction with the way society functioned during the war. Geometric abstraction apparently embodied his desire for a more harmonious life.

Ger Gerrits wrote of the Vrij Beelden artists’ motives for going abstract, “that they set themselves against all reaction in the pre-war and wartime field …. In opposition to the racial … They are putting themselves on an international standpoint”. The Kultuurkamer had wanted to end international focus. Abstract art was associated by the German occupiers with internationalism and thus Bolshevism, and was thus declared entartet.

One of the ideals that resonated after 1945 is that of absolute art. The term absolute was used from the 19th century to describe music that contains no reference after observable reality but derives its meaning solely from the interrelationships between the tones. Such music was considered universally intelligible and thus would have some universal validity. In the visual arts, the term was applied in the same sense by Kandinsky at the beginning of the 20th century. Paul Klee also worked at the Bauhaus for a visual grammar by analogy with musical principles. For Pieter de Haard, the ideas of De Stijl and Bauhaus were an important stimulus. He also immersed himself in the color theory of Goethe and Wilhelm Ostwald. De Haard came to systematize his use of color; in several postwar paintings, he systematically ordered the brightness, saturation and hue of colors.

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart (1899-1962) studied architecture. From 1919 he is active as a painter, being influenced almost immediately by Constructivist forms. During this period, he also sought contact with other Constructivist artists and groups. In 1924 he became acquainted with Kurt Schwitters and in 1925 with Theo van Doesburg and El Lissitzky. In 1925, he also became a member of the De Stijl art group. The Nazis labeled his work as degenerate art (“cultural Bolshevism”). His writings also influenced the post-war pursuit of an absolute art: “Absolute (abstract – concrete) art is the relationship of pure, elementary proportions, evoked and determined solely by relationship and tension of colors: the absolute color-construction; which is to say: a painting that fully forms from within and is subject to no external influence. The color here occurs exclusively primary and active in the construction; its function is not descriptive.” Vordemberge’s views were much less metaphysically colored than Kandinsky’s. He saw absolute art as a further development of concrete art as propagated by Theo van Doesburg in his manifesto on concrete art (concrete art is often a synonym for abstract geometric art).

Willem Sinemus, in his pursuit of abstract work around 1945, underwent the influence of surrealism. Surrealism (like Dada) had a negative view of existing society, but wanted to make a positive contribution. Dreams, visions and erotic fantasies were central to surrealism. They sought a higher reality behind the outer appearance (sur-realité). Underlying this thinking were the ideas of psychologist Sigmund Freud, who laid the foundation for psychoanalysis. Visual imagination had to be detached from reason and logic, allowing the subconscious to create suggestive representations.

Kandinsky wrote the following in 1938, at the exhibition Abstract Art at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam: “It was claimed that the means of expression of abstract art were so limited and so quickly exhausted that this art pronounced a death sentence on itself … with each truly new work a new, never existing world is created … how this occurs is a complicated question. I can only say one thing: to my belief, this creative path must be a synthetic one. That is, the feeling (intuition) and the head (calculation) work under mutual control … Thus, next to the world of nature a new world of art is placed … an equally real world, a concrete one.”
In 1950, Willy Boers and Ger Gerrits founded the group “Creation”: “Association for the Promotion of Absolute Art. The “Creation” group existed from 1950 through 1954 and had as editors Willy Boers, Eugène Brands and Anton Rooskens, with members Klaas Boonstra, Simon Erk, Mark Kolthoff, Jaap Stellaart, Piet van Stuivenberg, Emil Voeten, André van der Vossen, Ger Gerrits, Hans Ittmann (chairman), Kees Keus (secretary), Juul Neumann, Wim Strijbosch and Andor Weiniger . They were later joined by Wim Crouwel, Armando and Greet van Amstel. Kolthoff, Van Stuivenberg, Van der Vossen and Neumann came from “Free Images.
A total of 4 exhibitions were organized. The opening exhibition, February/March 1951 was held both in Amsterdam at Fodor and in Rotterdam at ‘t Venster. In March 1954, “Creation” broke up and the group disbanded. Willy Boers stepped out of the group, along with Armando. Several formed the “Group 54” that existed for a year. Boers always remained friends with Armando(http://www.hansittmann.nl/Creatie.html).
The foldout sheet accompanying the first exhibition made no statement about idiom; Creation housed artists who practiced a more spontaneous, lyrical-abstract method and those who chose an organic or geometric-abstract formal language.

The idea that there is a harmonic order underlying the material world that can be expressed in numerical relationships sparked an interest in mathematics among artists. Like music, mathematics was seen as a means of expressing cosmic harmony. This idea was particularly popular among symbolists and also underlies much of the geometric-abstract art produced in the early 20th century.
De Haard studied the philosophy of Kant and Spinoza and the writings of the theosophically oriented mathematician Dr. Naber, sources that were also read by the Dutch pioneers of abstract art. De Haard found in the principle of the golden ratio, traditionally associated with the harmony prevailing in the cosmos, a suitable symbol to represent the essence of reality.

Joost Baljeu and Carel Visser started from the idea that there was an underlying order in visible reality that could be expressed with geometric forms. In the journal Structure (1958-1964), Joost Baljeu (1925-1991) explored the legacy of De Stijl, Bauhaus and the Russian constructivists. He fell under the spell of the foreman of De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), about whom he published an international book in 1972. Baljeu was particularly inspired by the artists of De Stijl with their geometric-abstract language of form. He believed that abstract art could fulfill a social function only if it did not lose relation with the natural. Baljeu looked for the structures that underlie nature’s whimsical manifestations. The goal was to create a new, universally applicable language of form (for the community). Art then should not be seen as abstract but as an investigation of the structure of nature, of which man is part and with which he is one. Man must see the individual in the image, which recognizes and repeatedly defines his relationship to the general. In the language of forms, one had to recognize not mathematics, but emotion. In 1954, he made his first design of a relief for a community center in Amsterdam. The requested design had to demonstrate the fusion of architecture, painting and sculpture. He followed a method that Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg had also used and became fascinated by the architectural application possibilities of reliefs.
Baljeu thus felt that geometric-abstract art could only properly fulfill its social function if it ceased to express itself through autonomous works of art and allowed itself to be deployed as total design.

Blotkamp B. et al (1988). A New Synthesis, Geometric Abstract Art in the Netherlands 1945-1960. SDU Publishing.