Bram Van Velde

Biography of Bram Van Velde

Bram VAN VELDE was born near Leyden (Netherlands) in 1895. The second of four children, young Bram joined a painting and decorating firm at the age of 12, having to provide for his family which had fallen into poverty since his father's departure.

Noticed and financially supported by the Kramers (the firm's owners), he traveled to Germany in 1922, where he discovered the work of a new generation of painters, having until then only known the paintings of past centuries, those he had discovered in museums. He then embraced modernity.

In 1924, he settled in France and after exhibiting for the first time in Berlin, he was admitted (with Geer, his brother, also a painter) to the Salon des Indépendants. In 1928, he married Lilly, a German artist-painter, and moved to Spain. It was the Civil War and Lilly's death that brought him back to France. Hosted by Geer, he lived in great deprivation.

He then met Marthe, who would become his new companion, and painted, in 1939, the first of the three major gouaches that establish his pictorial language.

The Occupation years saw him working little, as he was simply unable to create in such a climate.

In 1947, he signed a five-year contract with the Maeght Gallery, but due to various commercial failures of his exhibitions, the famous gallery owner terminated the contract with the painter, while retaining his stock of works.

Once again, Van Velde entered a financially difficult period. And despite the first exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Bern, the late 1950s were still marked by tragedy for Van Velde, as Marthe died, hit by a car in Paris.

Between Paris, where he stayed with Jacques Putnam, his mentor and friend (who would write the catalogues raisonnés dedicated to the artist), and Geneva, where he met the third woman of his life, Madeleine, Van Velde began to see his talent and modernism recognized. Knighted in the Arts and Letters, he began in the early 1960s his production of lithographs (a technique that allowed him great freedom of expression and in which he quickly excelled in translating both his love of movement and flat colors).

In the 1970s, besides his breakup with Madeleine and his definitive settlement in the south of France, Van Velde became once again one of the artists of the Maeght Gallery, while the Museum of Art in Geneva acquired 6 of his paintings.

He passed away in Grimaud on December 28, 1981.

Thus Bram Van Velde (his real first name was Abraham, which is why he signed his works with an A, a small v, and a capital V) whose life was marked by almost permanent fate, only very late in life had the happiness of seeing his work recognized. While in the same years, Americans Rothko, Pollock, Francis, or Motherwell, in styles comparable to his, experienced fame and recognition, he, the Dutchman, far from the agitation of the pro Action Painting against the pro Colorfield Paintings, alone in walking on this path in Europe, did not have the reward of the general public in the years when he reached the expressive maturity of his art...

(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES