His nine-to-five job with the Dutch postal service PTT gave Jan Schoonhoven’s life the regularity that also makes his reliefs and drawings instantly recognisable. In his free time he developed into the figurehead of the Dutch Zero Movement and an artist of international renown. The Gemeentemuseum, which owns an important collection of Schoonhoven’s work, last staged a solo exhibition exactly 25 years ago. The intimate exhibition that can be seen this autumn in the Triton Room will include both reliefs and drawings, some of the key works in the oeuvre of one of the most important Dutch artists of the past half century.
Jan Schoonhoven (Delft, 1914-1994) drew from a very young age, and later trained as a draughtsman in The Hague. He did not however end up as an art teacher, but spent his entire working life at the PTT. A secure income enabled him to remain independent as an artist, which perfectly suited the image of a man with a great fondness for order and regularity. Once he had developed his own style in the 1960s, this order and regularity lay at the core of his work.
Along with Armando, Henk Peeters and Jan Henderikse, Schoonhoven established the Dutch branch of the international Zero Movement in the early 1960s. Zero stood for a return to the essence – by working with everyday materials, for example, as in a relief made of toilet rolls that will be included in the exhibition. Schoonhoven saw the spatial works of Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana, and began to produce reliefs. Slowly but surely his paintings transformed into sculptures: objects with a regularly divided plane, repeated patterns that never become mechanical because the hand of the maker is always visible. ‘You have to strive for the minimum, but you can never do it anonymously’, Schoonhoven once said, in perhaps the best explanation of what he was striving for in his art.
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag began to buy Schoonhoven’s reliefs, drawings and graphic works in the 1950s, gradually forming a carefully composed collection which has been shown several times in group or solo exhibitions. In 1964 the museum staged one of the first exhibitions by artists of the Dutch Zero Movement. A unique reverse glass painting from 1937 was recently added to the collection, and will be shown to the public for the first time in the forthcoming exhibition.
There has been a sharp revival in interest in Schoonhoven’s work in recent years, and it is also increasingly attracting international attention. Schoonhoven and Constant, whose New Babylon has also recently enjoyed a great deal of attention both at home and abroad, are regarded as the most important Dutch artists of the second half of the 20th century.
The collection currently provides a fantastic overview of Schoonhoven’s development as an artist, showing how form and meaning slowly but surely became focused into repetitions and patterns, shadow play and depictions of form and formlessness. The exhibition features works from a private collection and from the Gemeentemuseum’s own collection. A unique documentary entitled Jan Schoonhoven – Beambte 18977 made in 2005 by Sherman de Jesus will also be shown in the Triton Room, allowing visitors to enjoy the world of Jan Schoonhoven once more, exactly 25 years after his last solo exhibition at the museum.
