Piet or Pieter Ouborg (10 March 1893, Dordrecht - 3 June 1956, The Hague) was a Dutch artist. He started out in life as a teacher; this profession was threatened with interruption by the outbreak of World War I when Ouborg was liable to enlistment. He managed to evade military service by taking up a teaching position in the Dutch East Indies. While there, Ouborg took up drawing and painting. Returning to the Netherlands after the war, Ouborg found himself drawn to the work of Vincent van Gogh. In 1923 he began to experiment with painting in the Cubist style. In 1931, Ouborg visited Brussels and found himself drawn towards

surrealism Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

. During World War II and its immediate aftermath, Ouborg was drawn increasingly into the circle of the COBRA (avant-garde movement) and its members such as

Karel Appel Christiaan Karel Appel (; 25 April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-gard ...

and

Corneille Pierre Corneille (; 6 June 1606 – 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. As a young man, he earned the valuable patronag ...

Early life

Ouborg was born into an environment as far removed from art as possible. His father ran a storekeeper and bookkeeper. Ouborg's life was hard due to the fact that his family was a large one. He was one of ten children and his parents could not provided amply for all of them. His family was a strict Protestant.

References

1893 births 1956 deaths 20th-century Dutch painters Artists from Dordrecht Dutch male painters Modern painters 20th-century Dutch male artists {{Netherlands-painter-stub