The Bergen School

At the beginning of the last century, a group of artists exchanged the bustle of the city for the nature and tranquility of Bergen. They preferred to work outdoors, inspired by the earthy beauty of the landscape and the people who are part of it. In Back to the Source, Museum Kranenburgh presents work by several early representatives of this avant-garde known as the Bergen School. These include Henri Le Fauconnier, Arnout Colnot, and Piet van Wijngaerdt. But later, major influencers of the artists’ village, such as Charley Toorop and Matthieu Wiegman, are also featured. The exhibition’s starting point is Kranenburgh’s own collection, the foundation of the museum.

The Essence of Life

The Bergen painters focused their artistic attention not only on each other, but also on developments elsewhere in the Netherlands and Europe. The French painter Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946) is considered the founder of the Bergen School. He painted the Breton town of Ploumanac’h (1908) years before his extended stay in Domburg and Bergen. His work and distinct ideas made a deep impression on his fellow Bergen painters, including Piet van Wijngaerdt (1873–1964). In 2016, he wrote a pamphlet based on Le Fauconnier’s ideas in the artist’s magazine Het Signaal, in which he calls upon fellow artists to engage socially and create pure art: “The essence of life itself speaks through art.”

Nude

Inspired by the nudes of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, Harrie Kuijten (1883–1952) painted his Nude in the Forest (1912). We see man in his natural environment, stripped of adornment. The forest was an ideal studio where the model could display herself naked with impunity. Matthieu Wiegman (1886-1971) painted a large nude in 1927 and called it Suzanne. By presenting his model as a religious subject, he made this genre, still unfamiliar in the Netherlands, acceptable.

Dynamic

The colorful oeuvres of the artists working in Bergen demonstrate that the village was not an artistic island with a fixed idiom, but a place constantly open to new stimuli, developments, and ideas. This is also evident in the work of individual artists like Charley Toorop. Her early work, Zus Boendermaker (1926), as well as one of her last works, Vase with Flowers (1949), are on display.