96. Bram van Velde

At first the interview by the French poet and diarist Charles Juliet (born 1934) with the Dutch-French painter Bram van Velde (1895-1981) on 25 October 1964 did not spell success, but after an uneasy start both got on so well that they only broke up their meeting after eleven hours. Such was the first encounter, as described by Juliet in his Rencontres avec Bram van Velde.

Van Velde was born in Zoeterwoude, and left the Netherlands in 1922 never to return. He went to stay for a few years in Worpswede, the artists' community in Germany, a period that was to be of crucial importance for his artistic development. He subsequently left for Paris in 1924, where he met the Irish writer Samuel Beckett at the end of the 1930s: ‘a Great Encounter, in capitals’, as Van Velde described it. In Beckett he found a kindred spirit, sharing his conviction that an artist cannot possibly express his innermost self in a work of art; all he can do is aspire to achieve a perfect result. And this is what Van Velde tried to do, despite poverty and misunderstanding. It was only at the end of the 1940s that exhibitions of his work were organised, together with that of renowned painters like Braque, Picasso and Miró.

This ‘je ne sais quoi’ - to quote Beckett - as the stimulating power underlying his work made Van Velde naturally unsuitable as an illustrator of books. It is therefore curious to find that his lithographs have often been used for that purpose. Actually they are not illustrations as such: the lithographs do not support the text in the sense of explaining it to the reader, but create a new work of art by their own, individual images combined with the text.

The book belongs to the Anny Antoine - Louis Koopman collection, a collection of French belles-lettres in bibliophile editions, collected by the Belgian teacher Anny Antoine, and after her death continued by her fiancé, Louis Koopman. In 1940 Koopman donated the collection to the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Until his death in 1968 he continued to add modern French belles-lettres to the collection, for the greater part de luxe editions with beautiful illustrations. Even today books are regularly added to the collection, subsidised by the foundation which Koopman had established in his will for this very purpose.

Literature

• C. Juliet. Rencontres avec Bram van Velde. Nouv. éd. [Montpellier] 1984  
• Bram van Velde 1895-1981. 's-Gravenhage 1989
• J.K.F. van Berkel. In liefde verzameld. 's-Gravenhage 1989.