Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (commonly called H. N. Werkman; 29 April 1882 – 10 April 1945) was an experimental
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...
,
typographer
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), an ...
, and
printer
Printer may refer to:
Technology
* Printer (publishing), a person or a company
* Printer (computing), a hardware device
* Optical printer for motion picture films
People
* Nariman Printer (fl. c. 1940), Indian journalist and activist
* James ...
. He set up a clandestine printing house during the Nazi occupation (1940–1945) and was shot by the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
in the closing days of the war.
Life and work
![Werkman next call cover](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Werkman_next_call_cover.jpg)
Werkman was born on 29 April 1882 in
Leens
Leens is a village in the Dutch province of Groningen. It is located in the municipality of Het Hogeland. Leens was a separate municipality until 1990, when it was merged with Ulrum, Eenrum and Kloosterburen.
Brief history
Leens is located on ...
, in the
province of Groningen. He was the son of a veterinary surgeon who died while he was young, after which his mother moved the family to the city of
Groningen
Groningen (; gos, Grunn or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen province in the Netherlands. The ''capital of the north'', Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of the northern part of t ...
. In 1908, he established a printing and publishing house there that at its peak employed some twenty workers. Financial setbacks forced its closure in 1923, after which Werkman started anew with a small workshop in the attic of a warehouse.
Werkman was a member of the artists' group ''
De Ploeg
De Ploeg (; en, The Plough or ''The Group'') is an artist collective from the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. The collective was established in 1918 by a group of young artists. Their goal was to create new opportunities for exhibitions and ...
'' ("The Plough"), for whom he printed posters, invitations and catalogues. From 1923 to 1926, he produced his own
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
-named
avant-garde
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
magazine ''
The Next Call'', which, like other works of the period, included
collage
Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...
-like experimentation with
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are list of type ...
s,
printing block
Woodblock printing or block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Each page or image is create ...
s and other printers' materials. He would distribute the magazine by exchanging it for works by other avant-garde artists and designers abroad and so kept in touch with progressive trends in European art. Among the most fruitful contacts were with
Theo van Doesburg
Theo van Doesburg (, 30 August 1883 – 7 March 1931) was a Dutch artist, who practiced painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. He was married to artist, pianist and choreographer Nelly ...
,
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.
Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, pain ...
,
El Lissitzky
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий, ; – 30 December 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Эль Лиси́цкий; yi, על ליסיצקי), was a Russian artist ...
and
Michel Seuphor
Fernand Berckelaers (10 March 1901, in Borgerhout – 12 February 1999, in Paris), pseudonym Michel Seuphor ( anagram of Orpheus), was a Belgian painter.
Seuphor established a literary magazine, ''Het Overzicht'', in Antwerp in 1921. He moved in ...
, the last of whom exhibited a print of his in Paris. This exchange would prove very fruitful, as foreign magazines served as a source of inspiration for Werkman – as he himself admitted, even though he did not always understand the contents, Werkman searched for new ideas on the pages of the magazines he received.
![Werkman tiksel](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Werkman_tiksel.png)
Such contact was vital while Werkman was building up his business and could not leave Groningen. In 1929 he was able to visit Cologne and Paris, after which he developed a new printing method, applying the ink roller directly to the paper and then
stamp
Stamp or Stamps or Stamping may refer to:
Official documents and related impressions
* Postage stamp, used to indicate prepayment of fees for public mail
* Ration stamp, indicating the right to rationed goods
* Revenue stamp, used on documents to ...
ing to achieve unique effects on a simple handpress. The more complex of these required some fifty handlings in and out of the press and could take a whole day to complete. Another of his experimental techniques was the painstaking production of abstract designs using the typewriter, which he called '. After 1929 he also began writing rhythmic sound poems.
Werkman's work was included in the 1939 exhibition and sale ''
Onze Kunst van Heden
Onze Kunst van Heden (Contemporary Artists/Our Art of Today) was an exhibition held in the winter of 1939 through 1940 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Due to the threat of invasion in the years leading up to World War II, the Netherlands' go ...
'' (Our Art of Today) at the
Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum () is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough of Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the St ...
in Amsterdam.
In May 1940, soon after the
German invasion of the Netherlands
The German invasion of the Netherlands ( nl, Duitse aanval op Nederland), otherwise known as the Battle of the Netherlands ( nl, Slag om Nederland), was a military campaign part of Case Yellow (german: Fall Gelb), the Nazi German invasion of t ...
, Werkman started a clandestine publishing house, ''
De Blauwe Schuit'' ("The Blue Barge"), which ran to forty publications, all designed and illustrated by Werkman. Included there were a series of
Hassidic
Hasidism, sometimes spelled Chassidism, and also known as Hasidic Judaism (Ashkenazi Hebrew: חסידות ''Ḥăsīdus'', ; originally, "piety"), is a Jewish religious group that arose as a spiritual revival movement in the territory of contem ...
stories from the legend of the
Baal Shem Tov
Israel ben Eliezer (1698 – 22 May 1760), known as the Baal Shem Tov ( he, בעל שם טוב, ) or as the Besht, was a Jewish mystic and healer who is regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism. "Besht" is the acronym for Baal Shem Tov, which ...
. On 13 March 1945, the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
arrested Werkman, executing him
by firing squad along with nine other prisoners in the forest near
Bakkeveen on 10 April, three days before Groningen was liberated. Many of his paintings and prints, which the Gestapo had confiscated, were lost in the fire that broke out during the
battle over the city.
Heritage
Werkman is buried in the Bakkeveen cemetery. There is now a monument commemorating the ten who were shot then, and another to him at the village where he was born. In 1992 the Dutch director Gerrard Verhage filmed an hour-long dramatized documentary about Werkman's last days, ''Ik ga naar Tahiti'', (I’m going to Tahiti, 1992).
Just before
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
the museum director
Willem Sandberg
Jonkheer Willem Jacob Henri Berend Sandberg (24 October 1897 – 9 April 1984) known as Willem Sandberg was a Dutch typographer, museum curator, and member of the Dutch resistance during World War II.
Early life and career
Sandberg was born i ...
, who was originally trained as a typographer, had paid Werkman a visit and even arranged for him a small solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 1939. Immediately after the war he put on a retrospective at the
Stedelijk Museum
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. and laid the foundation for its large collection of Werkman's work. He also wrote a tribute to his friend, “a man with a craving for freedom manifest in his way of life, expressed in his work, who became an artist at the moment he was economically broken, deserted by everybody, considered a freak – at that moment he created a world of his own, warm, vivid and vital.” A later tribute to his example was paid in an American monograph devoted to his work: “Since Werkman’s death an awareness of his relevance to contemporary graphic design has steadily emerged, and his work has lost nothing of its richness, spirit and optimism.”
In 1983 Werkman’s former warehouse premises were converted into workshops and the building was then named after him. In the city museum's graphic department there is a workshop displaying his printing equipment. In 1999 the H.N. Werkman Foundation was set up to promote awareness of his work and its large collection of prints, drawings, paintings and letters was transferred on permanent loan to the
Groninger Museum
The Groninger Museum () is an art museum in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. The museum exhibits modern and contemporary art of local, national, and international artists.
The museum opened in 1874. The current post-modernist building co ...
.
One of the main municipal secondary schools in the city was later named the
H.N. Werkman College after him and keeps his heritage alive in its art classes and recurring special projects.
Gallery of works
File:HNW Churchgoing.jpg, ''Church-going in the Snow'', oil on canvas 1919
File:HNW Compositie met cijfers, 1924.JPG, ''Composition with numbers'', 1924, print, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
File:HNW compositie 1925.jpg, ''Composition'', 1925, print, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
File:HNW Compositie met letters X, 1927.JPG, ''Composition with letters X'', 1927, print, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
File:HNW sound poem.JPG, ''Morning hymn of homage'', 1936, sound-poem
File:HNW preludium cover.JPG, ''Preludium'', 1938, magazine cover
File:Hendrik Werkman Draaideur van het postkantoor.jpg, ''Revolving door of the post office 2.'', 1941; template and stamp on paper
File:WerkmanChassidischeLegenden.jpg, ''Hasidic legends'' (Chassidisiche legenden), 1942, print
File:WerkmanChassidischeLegenden2.jpg, ''Hasidic legends'' (Chassidisiche legenden), 1942, print
File:Werkman De Grot.jpg, ''The Cave'' (De Grot), 1943; cover-design
References
* Jan Martinet, ''Werkman’s Call'', a study devoted to Hendrik Werkman and The Next Call. Utrecht 1978.
* Alston W. Purvis, ''H.N.Werkman'', Yale University 2004
* K. Schippers, ''Holland Dada'', Amsterdam 1974, chapter on H. N. Werkman pp. 118–131
* ''H. N. Werkman, Typographies and Poems'', Whitechapel Art Gallery 1975
External links
*
*
images of Werkman's art, and texts about the artist, but Dutch language! in the Werkman Archive of the Groningen Museum, The Netherlands
text 'Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman and the Werk (Work)-mania, in the British Library' by Anna E.C. Simoni, pp. 70–88
{{DEFAULTSORT:Werkman, Hendrik Nicolaas
1882 births
1945 deaths
Dutch graphic designers
Dutch people executed by Nazi Germany
Dutch printers
Dutch resistance members
Dutch typographers and type designers
Executed artists
Executed Dutch people
People from De Marne