Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Werkman around 1915

Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (born April 29, 1882 in Leens , Netherlands ; † April 10, 1945 in Bakkeveen , Netherlands) was an artist and graphic designer who was one of the outstanding personalities of the Dutch avant-garde . As a printer and typographer, initially occupied with conventional printed matter, after the economic collapse of the printing company he ran, he began to work experimentally with letters made of lead and wood, but also with so-called dummy material and even with non-printable objects such as door hinges. In doing so, he discovered the artistic and symbolic power of letters and filled them with new visual life. For his avant-garde work, he created his own medium in 1923 with his magazine The Next Call (“The Next Call”), which he produced together with an assistant and sent to friends and acquaintances by post.

In addition to typographic work, Hendrik Werkman's work also includes lithographs , etchings and paintings, as well as stencil and cylinder prints . In addition to cards and posters, he also created calendar works and his own interpretation of the Turkish calendar , in the text of which he not only expressed his great love of freedom, but also hidden criticism of the occupation of the Netherlands by the German Wehrmacht. On March 13, 1945, he was arrested by the German security service on false suspicions of producing and distributing illegal political printed matter . Together with nine other prisoners, Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman was shot dead in Bakkeveen on April 10, 1945 - five days before the city of Groningen was liberated from the German occupiers.

Origin, education and profession

Nicolaas Hendrik Werkman was born on April 29, 1882 in Leens, a small village in the province of Groningen. According to his biographer Hans van Straten , this area in the north of the Netherlands bears a remarkable resemblance to areas in Ireland that are also characterized by "... hunger, religious fundamentalism , resistance to the authorities , superstition and considerable emigration to the USA ." Father, the veterinarian Klaas Jacob Werkman, died in an accident in 1891 and left his wife Grietien Alingh Louwes with three sons in considerable economic difficulties.

After a one-year stopover in the city of Assen , the family settled in the provincial capital of Groningen in 1894. From his school education, an exhibition organized by students with works by the impressionist Vincent van Gogh deserves mention. It made such a deep impression on young Hendrik that he declared this painter to be his idol . In 1900 Werkman took a job as an assistant to the printer and publisher TJ Borgesius in Sappemeer and gained his first experience in typesetting and printing . But his interest in photography and journalism also arose, so that he wrote a few small articles for Borgesius' newspaper Oost-Gorecht .

In 1903 he started as a journalist for the Nieuwe Groningsche Courant and wrote around fifty articles under the pseudonym "Farao" in order to differentiate himself from the status of an ordinary writer. In 1908 he ended his journalistic career and founded his own small printing company in Groningen. After initial difficulties, this company developed quite successfully and in 1917 was one of the largest printing companies in the northern Netherlands with 27 employees. However, this success is largely due to the support of his wealthy in-laws, who themselves ran an iron foundry in Groningen and supported Werkman not only financially but also commercially.

When his wife Jansje died of a stroke (April 2, 1917) and Hendrik remarried a year later (May 8, 1918), he finally lost the support of his previous in-laws. He could only buy his way out of her share in the company with the help of a high-interest loan. In doing so, Werkman lost not only his capital but, above all, all commercial know-how . Thinking in terms of “useful” or “economical” remained alien to him throughout his life, and so it is not surprising that in 1923 he was finally forced to close down his company. What he had left, he and his last employee Wybren Bos took to the upper floor of a Groningen warehouse with the distinctive address “Lage der A”.

First artistic work

Once there, the production of family advertisements , brochures and posters was enough for a modest living. This small company was no more economically prosperous than the previous one. This gave Werkman a lot of time to pursue his own ideas. He later wrote that up to this point he did not actually lead an independent life, but was solely subject to the conventions of a bourgeois existence . But now he had complete freedom to devote himself entirely to poetry , detached from the previous constraints . He began to discover the letters, which he only ever used on behalf of third parties during his time as a printer and typesetter , as physical and soulful symbols. For the next twenty-two years he immersed himself "in a world of signs, shapes and colors".

His interest in free art is not new: after his first attempts at painting in 1917, he joined the De Ploeg artist group that had been founded two years earlier in Groningen in 1920 . It initially included Job Hansen, Jan Wiegers, Ekke Kleima, Johan Dijkstra, Jan Altink and Simon Steenmeijer, and later Jan G. Jordens, Jan van der Zee, Hendrik de Vries, Johan Faber and Wobbe Alkema also joined. To make the work of “De Ploeg” available to the public, Werkman produced a monthly magazine called Blad voor Kunst between October 1921 and March 1922 . In addition to woodcuts and reproductions of drawings and paintings by the “De Ploeg” group, it also contained critical considerations of contemporary art, including a review of the expressionist work Bezette Stad (“Occupied City”) by Paul Van Ostaijen.

The next call

The Next Call (1926)

On September 12, 1923, Hendrik Werkman surprised his friends and artist colleagues with a puzzling pamphlet in their mailboxes. "Groningen - Berlin - Paris - Moscow 1923 - the beginning of a violet season," it said confidently. Nothing less than the birth of a new era was announced by referring to the new publication "The New Call". The mere mention of the three international art metropolises of the time indicated that there were higher demands. "Art is everywhere", was Werkman's sovereign justification, who was only responsible as editor in a hidden form as "Travailleur & Cie", ie "Werkman and consorts ". The only consort was that Wybren Bos, who stayed by his side after the liquidation of the once large printing company.

When the first issue of "The Next Call" actually landed in the mail of the selected recipients two weeks later, the narrow and unusual magazine announced the message in oversized, worn-out capitals , which brought Werkman's creative impulse to the point like a leitmotif : EEN RIL DOORKLIEFT HET LIJF DAT VREEST DE VRIJHEID VAN DE GEEST (“A chill runs through the body that fears the freedom of its spirit”). This first edition is just eight pages long. But not only the completely self-written and avant-garde content, but also the printing technique used aroused the astonished viewer. In the process used for “The Next Call”, the printing elements were placed flat on the press and coated with layers of paint of different thicknesses. After the paper was put on, the printing took place, which was deliberately so irregular that no two issues are alike. By arranging the material in this way, Werkman was completely free of the restrictions that would otherwise arise from the handicraft.

The personal style

With its page layout he resorted to stylistic elements that even with Russian avant-gardists such as El Lissitzky or when Merz art of Kurt Schwitters were used. But his technique was in its spontaneity of painting at least as close as the classic art of printing . And unlike Dutch graphic artists such as Jan Schuitema and Piet Zwart , Werkman avoided the detailed planning of his designs that they practiced. Alston W. Purvis wrote that "at Werkman, design does not precede typesetting and printing, but these three processes are combined into a single creative process". "The Next Call" appeared at irregular intervals until 1926 in a total of nine issues. Also in 1923, the first series of a total of around 600 “Druksels” (small print things) fell. In it he perfected the already described use of different raised objects and partly damaged wooden letters as well as the use of "paint" of different densities.

These elements create a liveliness and an expression of playful freedom that are lacking in the designs of Piet Zwart, which are determined by order and precision : while the latter tries to exhaust the expanded possibilities of modern printing methods to their limits, it is precisely the limitations of traditional technology that from which Werkman draws his ideas. It is precisely the imponderables of his method as well as the shortcomings of his materials - often caused by lack of money - that exert a special attraction on Werkman. By designing human or architectural figures from worn wooden letters simply by arranging them accordingly, he creates atmospherically dense portraits that, despite similar designs, for example by El Lissitzki or Kurt Schwitters, speak a very independent formal language.

Relationship to other artists

With these works, Hendrik Werkman aroused the interest of numerous artists at the time, such as Theo van Doesburg in Paris or El Lissitzki in Hanover, where he lived at the time . He himself felt drawn to the works of Pablo Picasso or Marc Chagall , Michel Seuphor (pseudonym for Fernand Berckelaers), Wassily Kandinsky or Jean (Hans) Arp . Especially the exotic fantasies Paul Gauguin fascinated him so much that he was considering a short time, the invitation to the emigration to Tahiti to accept. He describes the few trips he actually made, which took him to Paris and Cologne in 1929 , as disappointing, as he did not manage to meet the artists who interested him personally.

Technically, he continuously developed the range of his possibilities . While he was studying direct paint application on paper with a rollerball from 1929 , he gained a new stylistic device from 1934 with his punching and stencil technique . He combined printing using cut-out forms of paper with individually colored wooden letters , a process that, in his enthusiasm for “hot” jazz music, he calls “hot printing”. Depending on the intensity of the pressure applied, Werkman achieved either light or deep colorations, which he differentiated further by using a contact method (pressure from pressure).

Working under German occupation

In the years that followed, Hendrik Werkman printed not only posters and cards, but also calendars , for example in 1931, 1938, 1939 and 1940. When the Second World War broke out and the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans in May 1940, Werkman looked paralyzed great is his horror at the events of the war. With the exception of a few small jobs, the print shop's production almost came to a standstill, and Werkman turned back to painting. That he was able to work freely at all at that time was due to his job title as a printer. Because every visual artist, like writers, musicians or actors , was obliged to be a member of the Kultuurkamer set up by the Germans and was therefore subject to strict controls. Unregistered artistic activity not only threatened fines, but also reprisals up to and including imprisonment .

Werkman was exempt from this compulsory membership . Perhaps for this reason too, FRA Henkels approached him in November 1940 , a Protestant preacher from Winschoten . Together with Adri Buning and Ate Zuithoff , he was looking for a printer for the new edition of a poem that should contribute to the moral support of the population ("Het Jaar 1572" by Martinus Nijhoff ). This was not only the beginning of an intense friendship between Werkman and Henkels, but also the hour of birth of De Blauwe Schuit (“The Blue Bark”), a booklet collection of texts and poems with a partly religious and partly patriotic orientation.

Resistance to the National Socialists

Revolving door in Post Office 2 (1941)

Manufactured with mostly primitive means, “De Blauwe Schuit” is based on the design language of “The Next Call”. In contrast to purely illegal printed matter, De Blauwe Schuit lacked open expressions of resistance; the criticism is more likely to be found between the lines: if, for example, a song of praise is sung to the biblical David or to “freedom in our fatherland”, this was not enough to let the occupiers become active - but certainly enough to encourage the reader .

By December 1944, the magazine appeared in a total of forty editions with different page sizes and in such small numbers that the Germans did not bother with it. Nevertheless, Werkman, Henkels, Buning and Zuithoff worked permanently on the verge of legality . Henkel was arrested from May to December 1942 and went underground for good in July 1944. The two did not see each other again until December 1944, and Werkman offered his friend, wanted by the Gestapo, shelter . Several times before, he had offered persecuted Jews shelter in his house without being discovered. The fact that Werkman tried to avoid the production of openly illegal printed matter during the entire occupation seems to be less due to concern for his own safety than to the enormous risk to the people living in his house.

Arrest and Assassination

Hasidic Legends (1942)
Hasidic Legends (1942)

Nevertheless, it is his printed matter that brought him into the sights of the Germans, especially the Hasidic legends , which were interpreted as a show of solidarity with the Jewish population. Another suspicion against Werkman grew out of the prints he made for De Bezige Bij (“Die industrious bee”), a publishing house founded in Amsterdam in 1943 for authors who were censored by the German occupiers and whose proceeds were used to support the persecuted benefited. On the morning of March 13, 1945 Hendrik Werkman was arrested together with his friend Henkel by German SD and the SS - headquarters in Groningen Scholtenhuis brought. The works he found were declared Bolshevik after the first inspection , for which references such as the " subversive " literature by Fyodor Dostoyevsky , which were found in Werkman's bookshelf.

The exact course of the further events remains unclear. Apparently, at the beginning of April 1945, the SS headquarters in The Hague ordered the execution of three groups of ten prisoners each in retaliation against the activities of the Dutch resistance . While the shooting of the first two groups went according to plan, a delinquent from the third group managed to escape on the way to the place of execution . The operation was initially canceled and the van drove back to Groningen. The next morning, the remaining nine sentenced to death were again loaded onto a truck. In order for the original quota to be met, the lost tenth man had to be replaced. The choice fell on Hendrik Werkman. Together with the other nine victims, he was executed by a German firing squad near the town of Bakkeveen - two days before the first Canadian troops reached the outskirts of Groningen. But not only he himself fell victim in the last days of the war: His work, which was confiscated when he was arrested and stored in the German headquarters in the Scholtenhuis, went up in flames when the German ammunition dump exploded during the fierce fighting for the liberation of Groningen .

Outside the Netherlands, his work is only known to a small circle of art lovers. In his home country, however, he was honored as an outstanding personality immediately after the end of the war. As early as July 1945, the city of Amsterdam posthumously awarded him the Hendrik Werkman Prize for Typography, which was named after him, for his “Turkish Calendar”, printed in 1942 . In October of the same year, numerous works by Werkman were made available to the public in an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum , organized by Willem Sandberg , who only took over management of the museum in September 1945. The largest collections of the works of Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman are now in the Groninger Museum and the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach am Main . In 1964 some of his posters were shown posthumously at the documenta III in Kassel in the graphics department .

His first marriage to Jansje Cremer (marriage on April 10, 1909) had a son and two daughters. With his second wife Pieternella Johanna Margaretha Supheert (marriage on May 8, 1918) Werkman fathered another son. After this marriage was divorced on June 23, 1930, he went to Margaretha Cornelia van Leeuwen on November 5, 1936 a third marriage, which remained childless.

Web links

Commons : Hendrik Werkman  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans van Straten: Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman. Meulenhoff-Verlag, Amsterdam, 1980, p. 1.
  2. ^ Hans van Straten: Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman. Meulenhoff-Verlag, Amsterdam, 1980, p. 66.
  3. ↑ a b Alston W. pulvis: Dutch Graphic Design 1918-1945. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York 1992, p. 141.
  4. ↑ Jan Wiegers: De Buitenlandse Reis. Approx. 1945.
  5. ↑ on the history of "De Bezige Bij" see also http://www.debezigebij.nl/
personal data
SURNAME Werkman, Hendrik Nicolaas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch artist
DATE OF BIRTH April 29, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Leens
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1945
Place of death Bakkeveen , Netherlands