Informal art in Belgium and the Netherlands

The group of Belgian and Dutch artists who began working together in the late 1950s under the name Informal Group never adopted a formal ideology. The designation Informal indicated a stance against formalist composing, against the rational and geometric design of, for example, Cubism and Constructivism. It is not so much an individual approach as a more objective, less personal approach to the matter. Not by way of commenting on reality but to intensify reality (Armando).
The Dutch Informal Group originated in 1959 and consisted of five artists: Armando (1929-2018, Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd), Kees van Bohemen (1928-1985), Jan Henderikse (1937), Henk Peeters (1925-2013) and Jan Schoonhoven (1914-1994); most of the artists were from Delft. The informal group held the first exhibition in the TU and Delft mensa. Bram Bogart (1921-2012) also participated in this exhibition. He settled in Paris, and because van Bohemia also worked in Paris for a time, the group became familiar with the new developments. This also created contact with Jaap Wagemaker (1906-1972) and with Wim de Haan (1913-1967).
The Dutch Informal Group has barely existed for more than a year. In the fall of 1960, the Dutch Informal Group dissolved itself to continue as Zero Group. Only Kees van Bohemen continued the informal mode of operation for some years.

The development of Dutch informal art runs somewhat parallel to that of Germany. Belgian art gravitated more toward surrealism and Paris. The initial emphasis was on lyrical abstraction; a spontaneous non-imaginative painting style that relies on paint as matter. The term tachism is also used. Informal art should not only be seen as an interaction between painting matter and the subconscious. There is no coherent Dutch informal style; many contrasts exist (for example, the colorful approach of Kees van Bohemen and the monochrome work of others).

After World War II, the liberation rush was short-lived. In addition to being a period of reconstruction, it also became a time of restoration of pre-war interests and values. The Cold War culminated in the polarization surrounding the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and defined the political-cultural climate in the 1950s.

The Cobra movement had been a short-lived expression of youthful elan and optimistic sense of freedom in the Netherlands, after years of narrow-mindedness and isolation. Appel’s cry for freedom has become the symbol of Cobra. In the Netherlands, Cobra’s optimistic impulse lost its force when the leading artists left for Paris around 1952. The changing atmosphere of the early 1950s was heralded in Constant’s war works on the 1951 theme Scorched Earth. Constant’s war obsession was further fueled by the flaring war in Korea. War continued to occupy many artists throughout the 1950s. Armando is the best example of this.

Modern art was still a controversial issue in the Netherlands in the 1950s. Very little of the developments abroad (Art Informel in France and Actionpainting in America) penetrated here. International contacts were limited and communication was poor. There were hardly any galleries in the early 1950s that set themselves up as defenders of the avant-garde. As a result, the art scene was distinctly provincial.

Opponents of representationless art were the Realists, from the Amsterdam Rijksacademie; these included, Kurpershoek, Van Norden and Wijnberg. They made decoratively stylized figurative art. The artists who worked abstractly were united in the League of New Images and Creation and aligned with the prewar avant-garde ideals of the Stijl movement, usually adopting only the external forms.

Anti-geometric tendencies in abstract art found little support in the Netherlands. Piet Ouborg stood apart with his Surrealist-derived, spontaneously put down imageless signs. Theo Wolvecamp, who picked up Miró’s Abstract-Surrealism, also remained an exception.

The Netherlands was not ready for an Art Autre. Information about what was happening abroad was sparse.

A coherent theory of art cannot be found in the publications of the Informal Group. Beyond that, too, the informal artists and their spokespersons rarely ventured into theorizing.

In a brochure published by the Informal Group, Schoonhoven described what the informal meant to him: “Greater possibility of arriving at an objectively neutral expression of general validity. By avoidance of intentional form (form as infringement and trick) a much greater organic reality of the made in itself. Playing out material in such a way that, although material remained, it rises above itself and becomes a bearer of the spirit of the creator …..”

Bram Bogart (1921-2012) can be considered the founder of informal matter painting in the Netherlands. He was the first Dutch artist to begin experimenting with earth-colored, stucco-like materials in the early 1950s. Bogart emphasized his connection to nature. This naturalism becomes a typical feature of much informal art. There is also a trend toward monochromy. He avoids delineating shapes; he makes each painting an organic whole, according to one critic.

The work of Armando (1929-2018) in the 1950s gives the impression of having arisen naturally. He later stated, “I have always resisted from the beginning the tendency in abstract art to put down one’s own moods or one’s own feelings in color and line …. I have always wanted to express the more existential things.” In 1956, Armando exhibited an entirely monochromatic red painting; a precursor to his later monochromatic black works. In such work, the typical characteristics of informal painting, the far-reaching solution of form and the absence of expressive contrasts, are already fully present.

In 1960, in the transition phase to the Zero movement, Armando, possibly inspired by Fontana, very literally begins to contrast real space, present as holes in the canvas, with concrete objects, in the form of nails reminiscent of Uecker.

In those years, Jaap Wagemaker (1906-1972) created informal matter painting, which gives the impression of not being made by human hands but the result of an organic process. “Nothing can come off the earth, it can only change shape.” It is this quote by Albert Einstein that Wagemaker once quoted during a Q&A, and which to a large extent formed the core of Wagemaker’s artistry. Throughout his artistic life, nature, that which the earth had to offer him, was the source of his work. “[…] Sand, fibers, slates, ashes, bones, metals, wood. […] Jaap Wagemaker added nothing to the earth, he took nothing away from it. He only changed its form.” (from S. den Heijer, M. van der Knaap, Jaap Wagemaker, painter of the elementary, Zwolle 1995, p. 125)

Matter, the disappearance of figurative forms becomes an important means of expression for a small number of like-minded artists in Europe such as Alberto Burri in Italy, Antonio Tapiès in Spain, Emil Schuhmacher and Karl-Fred Dahmen in Germany and Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet in France.

Kees van Bohemen (1928-1985) was actually always a typical expressionist, in that respect he was not so far removed from Cobra. He too had a studio in the hide warehouse on Rue Santeuil in Paris where Karel Appel, Bram Bogart and Corneille also resided. With his spontaneous working method, in which the painting arises directly from the paint matter, Van Bohemen helped lay the foundation for Informal Art.

Jan Hendrikse (b. 1937) is one of the founders of the Dutch Informal Group. He lived and worked successively in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Curaçao, Antwerp and New York. Hendrikse’s work shown in the exhibitions of the Informal Group exhibits the typical characteristics of informal matter painting in its final phase. All traces of personal expression or deliberate composition had disappeared. Instead, all that remained were layers of coagulated layers of gray, or earth-colored matter (a technique borrowed from Bogart but more subdued and less expressive). The impression was given as if the paintings were the result of natural processes not touched by human hands. The most radical consequence of informal painting was entirely monochromatic painting. A white monochrome canvas by Hendrikse exists, probably inspired by Pierre Manzoni (1933-1963), who in the late 1950s influenced many Dutch artists, including Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven. He showed, as Jan Schoonhoven noted, the need to “jettison even the last vestiges of the superfluous.” Manzoni led them to the white, the void, the ideas…. Several Dutch artists were very impressed by his white “Achromes” (on view in Rotterdam in September 1958, a reaction to the all-blue painted works of Yves Klein). Manzoni did not use ordinary white paint for his ‘Achromes’ but plaster, cotton wool, glass wool and even hard-boiled eggs. During the clay’s drying process, the material formed the creases and wrinkles. Manzoni’s idea behind this was that this way the canvas paints itself and not the artist.

For Jan Schoonhoven (1914-1994), the informal was not a dogmatic principle but a counterpoint to an overly deliberate construction of form. He described the informal as a greater possibility of arriving at an objectively neutral expression of general validity. Material had to rise above itself and become a carrier of the spirit of its creator. In 1956 the first cloisonné-like reliefs appeared, initially still following Paul Klee’s semi-figurative gouaches of the previous year. In late 1959, Schoonhoven proceeded to paint the reliefs only white, gray or black. Presumably acquaintance with Manzoni’s achromes led him to this. Order and freedom are the enduring constants in Schoonhoven’s work. In 1960, the first white serial relief was created; an announcement of the Zero Period, in which the expressed need for an objectively neutral expression became universally manifest.

Notable on the eve of the art movement in the 1960s was the irrationalism and anti-intellectualism around 1960. Many felt that they were on the threshold of a new period of consciousness expansion, with the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb still in the background. It was a mindset that would grow massively in the subculture of the 1960s. Incidentally, emotionally charged action painting (La guerre japonnaise by Jan Cremer) was diametrically opposed to the cool anonymity of the Zero movement toward which most members of the Informal Group were moving at that time.

The broadening of abstract art as the dominant international trend evoked much opposition. The seeds were sown for an art conception that differed greatly from traditional figurative art and would become known in the 1960s in the United States as Pop Art, in France as Nouveau Realisme and in the Netherlands as Zero Art.

In 1961, informal artists showed a consistently new face. Armando and Henk Peeters noted that the Dutch avant-garde has reached a period in which it clearly sets itself apart from the informal currents of the 1950s. Besides Yves Klein, Fontana and the German Zero group with Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene were listed as the most important stimulating contacts.

Zero was the title of a major international exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1962. The Informals continued under this name. In a manifesto, Armando et al. declare that with art one can no longer improve one’s status. The artists in question decide to cease the production of art supplies and to promote the liquidation of all institutions that still enrich themselves with art.

Characteristic of the 1960s is the interest in the mass-produced products of consumer society, which before then were viewed with suspicion. A younger generation, including Wim Schippers, presented themselves who were unconcernedly open to all that mass culture had to offer. They were dismissive of anything that hinted at expressionist pathos.

In fact, presenting reality as detached as possible as a given to which nothing needs to be added and which requires no interpretation was already the aspiration in the final phase of informal art. The needs for structuring, or rather exposing existing regular structures, were also grounded in the informal arts. There was no question of a split around 1960, only a new orientation.

Peeters H. et al (1983). Informal art in Belgium and the Netherlands. Haags Gemeentemuseum e.a.