Herman de Vries (1931), who prefers to have his name spelled ‘herman de vries’ to avoid hierarchy in capital and lower case letters, was trained as a gardener in the early 1950s. After a spell as an agricultural worker in France, De Vries worked in Wageningen at the Institute for Research Plant Diseases from 1952 to 1956. During that period he started his long and fertile practice as an artist. The monochrome and informal paintings from…
L’Assiette au Beurre was an anarchist French satirical magazine founded by Samuel Schwarz in 1901. The magazine was published as a weekly from 1901 to 1912 and as a monthly from 1921 to 1925. Under the editorial supervision of Schwarz – which only lasted from 1901 to 1903 – the magazine invited established artists, such as Félix Valloton, Jacques Villon, Kees van Dongen and Frantisek Kupka, to take care of the design. In January 1902 Kupka produced an issue of L’Assiette au Beurre…
Soon after Ischa Meijer was born in Amsterdam in 1943, he and his parents were deported by the Nazis to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The young Jewish family survived the camp and returned to Amsterdam after the war, where two more children were born. Fearing the rise of communism in Europe, Meijer’s parents and their children moved to Paramaribo in the early 1950s but, unable to adjust to life in Surinam, returned to Amsterdam a couple of…
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1942, Ron Padgett started writing poetry at an early age and developed an interest in visual arts in high school. Together with fellow high…