What’s In a Name?
Helen Levin
Come the late fall of 2006, this sleepy 17th century Dutch village will see the world’s first museum devoted solely to abstract art and abstract thought as it relates to the arts and sciences, global and corporate stewardship. The Yellow Fellow Foundation is the brainstorm of art collector and business entrepreneur, Jan Verhoeven, and his partner, Menna Kruiswijk, an MBA who shares his abundant enthusiasm and eye for art. They will specialize in the New York School of the 40s and 50s and its tremendous influence on Dutch art, right to the present international new media. Both Verhoeven and Kruiswijk have an ambitious and somewhat Utopian hope of influencing the public and corporate colleagues toward becoming as enlightened and freethinking as, say, the artists in their highly energized collection.
When asked if Yellow Fellow’s artworks and ideas might have "come and gone," Verhoeven replied: "No, because good art is eternal. Besides, abstract art may have been, in fact, the first conceptual art. This is because it’s based on the paradoxical concept of creating a picture that is not a picture (of something) for the first time. Also, it turns out to be a much more universal language, not like the literacy-dependent conceptual ideas that require translation. Certainly, the best new media artwork contains the aesthetic values engendered in the non- objective art we’re talking about."
Verhoeven is an independent thinker in his selections for the Yellow Fellow Foundation Museum and "Think Tank" collection of paintings and sculpture, now numbering three hundred works by about thirty-five artists.
The majority of the work is by abstractionists whom Verhoeven and Kruiswijk feel history and the art market have ignored. For instance, in 2005 the Foundation gave a solo show to the Greek born, New York based painter, Nassos Daphnis at their interim temporary space in the high towers of the Martinus Church. Daphnis began working in a geometric, hard-edged style in Europe in the late 40s and early 50s, intrigued by the work of Mondriian. Interestingly, neither he nor Mondriian’s paintings sold well in the U.S. at that time.
A recent exhibition in the tower displayed a second side of the Daphnis oeuvre, his work as a botanist: the artist succeeded in developing a new strain of peonies, and his plant propagation methods were displayed. A disciple of Mondrian, Daphnis is focused on expanding the parameters of simple geometric forms and his most well-know work is his 90′ long Continuous Painting, currently in the Castelli collection.
A signifying artist in the collection and for whom the name Yellow Fellow is derived, is Erik van der Grijn ("yellow fellow" is his nickname). Van der Grijn, now residing in Argentina, was picked up by Verhoeven around 1984 in Amsterdam. Van der Grijn had just returned from 20 years of creating and exhibiting muscular, large, abstract paintings for an appreciative, buying public in Dublin. His is a very austere palette comprised of strong acidic yellows and heavily scraped black and white surfaces, rendered with an added hard-edged black geometric shape, a cross or a rectangle often in the center. The works are textured and layered, and at times, recall graffiti on walls of disintegrating urban buildings. He also paints in a somewhat minimalist style. e.g. Black Painting # 8, which consists of one discreet, eccentric white line breaking up a black ground. The Foundation owns thirty works by the artist.
Not interested in what he calls "trademarks," Verhoeven is very comfortable with stylistic variations within the work of his many artists. The eclectic Verhoeven-Kruiswijk team brings with it more than 45 years of art study, and more than that in business management experience. Among their ten exhibitions since 2003, they recently closed a show by Daniela Presta, and artist from Argentina, and they will host the exhibit in Sept. 2005 of a New York based Dutch abstractionist, Jan Mulder, who creates loose, abstract canvases in square, mid-sized format. In contrast, both of these artists are of the younger generation. All shows are mounted in the historic Martinus Church in the town square in Woudrichem for the time being, and showing the really large scale works is on hold until the Museum is operating, projected to the late fall of 2006.
Many other artists in their collection, like Seymour Boardman, Nieves Billmyer, Jaap Egmond, Gilbert Decock, Luc Peire, and Mark Verstockt have thematic involvements with the square, rectangle, and circle. Ernest Briggs, Seymour Boardman, and Nieves Billmeyer represent a more expressionist vein. Interestingly, their works span the extremes at times. Billmeyer, a former student of Hans Hoffmann, and now deceased, has some of the most powerful work in the Foundation collection. Boardman’s gestural and painterly oil paintings recall the palette and grid of the early Philip Gustin. Around 1970, the painted shapes became monolithic. Yet Boardman, described by the critic, Gerald Nordland, as "a rigorously untheoretical practitioner," has been successful in at least two distinct styles. For instance, in the 90s, a few of his exquisite very small works in acrylic and oil sticks on paper (e.g. Untitled, 1995) attest to the fact that he was correct to care less about issues of stylistic consistency. As with Daphnis, Briggs, and Boardman, Verhoeven collected them up after seeing their work in New York City in the gallery of art dealer, Anita Shapolsky. August at the Foundation was active with an invitational show about connections of basic geometric shapes in the works of 80 artists, curated by Mark Verstockt, an artist and philosophy professor in Belgium. He pointed out that some of the concepts can be seen in the minimalist cubes of Donald Judd.
When asked why she puts in a 70 hour week for the Foundation–mounting exhibits, making translations, developing catalog text, even sewing the booklets by hand–Kruiswijk cites the need for continuous audience development and education. "We are now finding non-objective art on the walls of our three neighbors’ homes, but it has been a hard sell!" No one is exempt from cultural lag, it seems. She says that the Foundation think tank is comprised of people in management, mathematics, the arts, philosophy, music, choreography and architecture. Currently, connections with new media art are taking place, in an effort to keep the project as current as possible.
Another ongoing project of the Yellow Fellow Foundation is the creation of a virtual museum with the Ziggurat Group, their web designer. This museum will expand the current parameters of the collection and be a resource and archive for all past events and exhibits, accessible to visitors to the Yellow Fellow Foundation. With Ziggurat, the two entrepreneurs are making an interface that will help answer questions about art and try to bridge the gap, and to address the rap that abstract art is elitist and has little to do with people.
We asked Verhoeven and Kruiswijk what such a foundation as Yellow Fellow might mean in our age of Koon’s post-pop, time-based, everything-under-the-sun, the current zeitgeist of anything goes (went?), not to mention the stupefying condition of our planet.
"Of course the new dictum, ‘It’s art if the artist says it’s art,’ still has to include abstract painting and sculpture. As far as the ‘art object’ being passé, conceptual artists still create art commodities in the form of documentation of their events or work. So, their point about de-materializing art never, ever occurred, despite the predictions. If artists want to add ‘meaning’ as the new value in art, that’s fine–but it doesn’t make the Ab-Ex artist passé. The fact is what moves me personally is a chance to buy the work I love and then to share it. I chose the work by the deep feeling it conveys, not by what the critics had to say."
Verhoeven acknowledges the contributions of conceptualism in the linea
