Jan Schoonhoven

Private Collection, United States (acquired from the artist)
Sotheby's New York, 13 May 2010, Lot 232
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Jan Schoonhoven, 1968, no. 34
Nuremberg, Biennale Nürnberg - Konstruktive Kunst: Elemente und Prinzipien, 1968-69

James van Sweden, Architecture in the Garden, London 2002, p. 14, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is very slighter brighter and warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals evidence of light handling in places towards the edges, as well as some superficial dust fibres in some of the recesses. Extremely close inspection reveals a few very thin and unobtrusive hairline cracks to some of the edges, notably around the overturn edge, as well as a minute speck of loss to the upper left corner tip of the outer board. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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On a morning in September 1967, just as he was about to take the train from Delft to the Dutch telecom offices in The Hague, Jan Schoonhoven received an unexpected telegram from São Paulo: “Schoonhoven got prize, De Wilde.” This cryptic message from Edy de Wilde, then director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, quickly became national news, and by lunchtime the offices where Schoonhoven worked as a civil servant were filled with journalists wanting to interview the Dutch artist who had just been awarded the second prize at the São Paulo Biennale for his white relief paintings.

Winning the prestigious prize signalled the culmination of Schoonhoven’s artistic development, but the anecdote also reveals an often misunderstood side to the artist’s life and work: whilst he indeed had a day job as a civil servant and only worked on his reliefs in the evenings, Schoonhoven was not the outsider artist that he is often portrayed as. In fact, by the end of 1967, the year in which he represented The Netherlands at the biennale and produced Quadratenreliëf met Schuine Binnenvlakken in 4 Richtingen, Schoonhoven had already exhibited with artists such as Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani and Yayoi Kusama; mostly in the Netherlands but also in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, England, the United States and Taiwan. Schoonhoven, like many other ZERO artists such as Yves Klein, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, had a day job that removed the commercial pressures on his art. When his employer offered him an early pension in recognition of his contribution to the arts, he politely declined - he had always insisted that his monotonous office life was the key to his art: “the order, the discipline is mirrored in my work” (the artist quoted in: Antoon Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, Rotterdam 2015, p. 107).

As beautifully exemplified by Quadratenreliëf met Schuine Binnenvlakken in 4 Richtingen, Jan Schoonhoven’s white reliefs emerged as a response to the gestural art informel of the previous generation. After the heavy and symbolically loaded art of the 1950s, a new generation of artists throughout Europe pursued a formally objective art, characterised by novel approaches to abstraction often made with everyday materials, thus emphasising a picture-as-object approach that insisted on the autonomy of the art object as a self-referential entity. Instead of complicated symbolism and psychological intentions, they strove for an art that reflected the reality of everyday life both formally and materially, which strongly resonated with Schoonhoven’s artistic circle. As Henk Peeters, who together with Schoonhoven founded the Dutch NUL group, described it in a letter to Barnett Newman, the artists shared “a desire for silence, emptiness and space” (Ibid. 53). Whilst Schoonhoven’s early reliefs from the latter half of the 1950s were still inspired by the somewhat messy aesthetic of surrealist automatism and Pollock’s drip-technique, they also drew on Lucio Fontana’s break with representational space and exploration of the three-dimensional possibilities of painting. Like Fontana, Schoonhoven considered a more sculptural approach to painting as the logical way forward, quoting Peggy Guggenheim’s statement that there wasn’t much left to do with painting. However, it was the Italian artist Piero Manzoni who left the biggest impression on Schoonhoven. The two first met in 1958 to discuss the idea of establishing an international exhibition group, and not long afterwards Manzoni exhibited 17 of his achromes in Rotterdam. As Jan Henderikse recalled: “It was a real shock to see work that was so provocative. Jan [Schoonhoven] was incredibly impressed by the structure in Manzoni’s work. And of course everything was white, stark white!” (Ibid. 43). The admiration was mutual, and not long afterwards Manzoni and Castellani featured Schoonhoven’s work in the first (of only two) editions of the influential Azimuth magazine that laid the foundations for a new wave of European art, alongside Lucio Fontana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene.

Schoonhoven’s encounter with Manzoni’s paintings, as well as the work of Mark Rothko, Enrico Castellani, Yves Klein and Günther Uecker in the 1960 exhibition Monochrome Malerei in Leverkussen, acted as a catalyst for his own reliefs, which soon began to take on the formal structure of his mature oeuvre. From 1960 onwards the artist condensed the loose compositions of his earlier reliefs to simple geometric structures of horizontal and vertical lines made with a cardboard base, covered with papier-mâché and finally overpainted with white wallpaint. Schoonhoven’s reliefs of the 1960s would almost never exceed the size of the present work as anything larger than 127 by 103 cm. wouldn’t fit through the steep staircase of his canal house in Delft, where he used the living room table as a studio whilst his wife Anita organised lively jazz evenings. As the artist became more confident with this production method, his reliefs gradually took on more complicated compositions, incorporating the subtle interplay of light and shadow as compositional tools. Quadratenreliëf met Schuine Binnenvlakken in 4 Richtingen is an outstanding example of the compositional lyricism that Schoonhoven achieved in his work after 1966, in which the geometric layout of his earlier reliefs was juxtaposed with slanting planes in different directions that create a complex and rhytmic pattern of shadows, yet maintain a very harmonious and balanced effect.

It was this more refined body of work that finally thrust Schoonhoven into the limelight with increased international interest and the presentation of his work at the 1967 São Paulo Biennale. The artist’s work was singled out by the American Arts Magazine as “by far the most sensitive three-dimensional works in the biennale” (Ibid. 107), and the following year he was honoured with exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague. Within the highly acclaimed group of thirteen reliefs that were presented at the biennale, one work stood out in particular. Quadratenreliëf met Schuine Binnenvlakken in 4 Richtingen from 1966, an earlier version of the present lot, was purchased by the Rhode Island Museum of Art in Providence, further emphasising the significance of these reliefs. Moreover, after the present work from 1967, which is subtitled 2nd interpretation, Schoonhoven made a third interpretation in 1969 that is now in the permanent collection of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, as well as subsequent variations on the Quadratenreliëf motif, in which the geometrically arranged squares are filled with slanting planes to create captivating optical patterns, that are now housed in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. This makes the present work not only a stunning example of the artist’s iconic reliefs stemming from the height of Schoonhoven’s creative powers, but indeed a masterpiece from his idiosyncratic oeuvre with sister pieces residing in prominent museum collections.