Kees Verwey [antikvár]

It is difficult to fit Kees Verwey's many-sided work - as painter in oils, water-colourist, draughtsman - into the pattern of influences and trends of modern Dutch art; it is rooted in the stiff, wilful personality of its creator. Anyone who has regularly viewed Ver- wey's canvases or drawings at exhibitions or has only seen and remembered the occasional work here and there will have felt the need to work out how they are interrelated. Searching for some clearly perceptible development in the artist, he might look into the dating of the works - and the dates will not make him much wiser. Nor will the few bare facts of Verwey's biography give any answer: Verwey, the man and the artist, hides behind his work and lets the observer puzzle over the enigma of his versatile mas- tery. Dark, boldly constructed paintings stand beside canvases whose lively brushwork throws out colour as a brass band throws out sound; the picture is made more complex by water colours with a flashing, impressionistic scintillation, and his drawings - sharply stylized pages mingled with hasty sketches - add still more facets to his intriguing versatility. And yet the viewer will confi- dently and unmistakably feel this work - which seems to lack any central theme or unifying artistic approach - as the work of one hand and one mind. Here lies the enigma with which Verwey confronts the viewer again and again, and which must be the theme of this essay in its attempt to approach Verwey's work and person- ality. Dates and facts throw but little light on the puzzling phenomenon Verwey has presented to us in his work. Yet they do place the artist in a context from which his work and his personality can be approached. Verwey was born in Amsterdam in 1900. His father was a brother of Albert Verwey, the poet, youngest of the 'Tachti- gers' (a group of writers of the 1880s), and one of his mother's sis- ters was married to Berlage, the great architect and author of the revival of Dutch architecture: tradition and innovation were both attendant upon his birth, then, and given the year of his birth he seems predestined to take up a position between two ages. Ver- wey has made these signs of destiny come true: the faces of Janus, looking back and ahead, have become more and more characteris- tic of his work, and now, sixty-four years old, he seems to be a 'Wandler zwischen zwei Welten' who has accepted this as his lot and made it the guiding principle of his work and life. This aware- ness of his beginnings, but at the same time the realization that they are only a starting point and that he can move forward, this makes Verwey's work an undertaking of unequalled significance in modern painting here in Holland. Verwey's youth was dominated by the atmosphere of the 'fin de siecle' writers - both by their attitude to life and by their artistic output. One of his earliest recollections is of a portrait of his uncle Albert Verwey painted by Willem Witsen. This sombre, noble,