He had visited Bretagne in 1982 with four friends and slept in a sleeping bag at the beach of the former post impressionist
colony of Pont Aven. Not so much Gauguin had impressed him, but rather the enormous surrealist stone formations
reminiscent of Yves Tanguy's paintings. Realism, as impression or expression, was not van Hanegem's style anymore.
Daily life to Ab was the domain of anecdote. And anecdotes did not belong to visual art. Nevertheless Van Hanegem
was a gifted story teller at social occasions. Of the trip to Pont Aven he especially remembered a girl, that had invited
the four friends to spend the night in her uncle's stable and sleep among enormous boars, waking up by their concerted
rhythmical grunts.
Over most of the 90s, I lost sight of Van Hanegem. For six years our lives went separate ways. I followed his career
through the written media. He participated in the travelling Netherart show, that went from Amsterdam to New York,
Chicago and Winnipeg. Other group shows in The Hague, Rotterdam and Wiesbaden. Solo shows in Antwerp and
Flushing.
In the sunny month of May, in the year 2000, Van Hanegem was back in Breda, where he had a solo show at the Beyerd
Museum and curated a group show in nearby Lokaal 001, called: C (Sea). He invited Gérald van der Kaap, a photographer
and media artist, the artistic duo Driessens and Verstappen, the painters Peter Struycken, Bernard Frize and David Reed,
and UN Studio of architect Ben van Berkel.
Concerning Ab van Hanegem, at the beginning of the new millennium in Breda, was his interest in a return to
improvisation by sloppy painting, with which his career had started during those wild years 1983-1986. In 1999 the
painter had been accepted as a stable member of the Vous Etes Ici gallery in Amsterdam, run by a couple of dedicated
artdealers: Hans Gieles and Francis Boeske. Well established in the Dutch art world since the early 80s, Gieles, with his
keen eye on artistic development in the artist career, welcomed the blob trend in the paintings by Van Hanegem. Blobs
seemd in clear opposition to the strict geometric straight line trend of the earlier postgraduate period. The organic blob
figuration is based on a fascination for bean like forms, strange small living forms of life, characterized by microscopic
movement. The artist adopted a restyling of improvisation in sloppy painting in the late 90s, when the market for his
applied commercially successful works in the Dutch public sector at The Hague, Leiden, Nijmegen and Winschoten
was exhausted.
The new works of the late 90s can be characterized by their dynamic turbulence in color as well as representation.
At closer inspection however, some important differences between both sides of the millennium begin to appear.
The new paintings were based on a loose layer of J>aint, regularly brought about by mops and swabs, also occasionally
by sprinkles directly thrown at the canvas. Paint became the master and Van Hanegem just was its rigorous assistant.
Did van Hanegem want to be a Pollock, the first American abstract painter, in whose immediate wake was a most
important painter friend and rival Willem de Kooning? Hans Gieles' discovery of Van Hanegem's new secret in the
theory of painting was well documented by a series of refined painterly actions by the artist, dubbed pseudo abstract
expression, not a very original formulation. Looking at the combined effect within the image of hard edge and blob
painting, the epitaph "improbability" seems more appropriate.
What really mattered to the artist in our discussions, was his acceptance, January 1986, at the postgraduate royal
academy, at the time situated adjacent to the Heineken Beer brewery. He was glad to get away from his roots at the
Province of Sealand, where individualism is looked upon as kind of an infantile sin, and social life revolves around being
a member of a social club, within which service to the community is the ultimate cultural goal. In a painstaking exposé
Van Hanegem had explained to me his progress in mounting the hierarchy at the academy. In his first year Ab occupied
a studio at the back of the monumental building Michiel de Ruyterkade, facing southWhat did Van Hanegem paint in
the Fall of 1986?
Like other artists of his generation Van Hanegem was impressed by the rapid stardom of the painter Rob Scholte,
who had participated in a february-march 1986 group show called:Youth Works" in the Living Room, located at
Laurierstreet 70, Jordan district, together with Robert O'Brien, Frank van den Broeck, Irene Fortuyn and Peer Veneman.
Van Hanegem demonstrated his painterly skills by copying two famous Scholte paintings, one of which had been on
the cover of the prestigious Museum Journal for its Hermetic Machine issue, 1985. The image of a mechanical puppet
clown painting drawing after Edward Munch's well known icon of a pathological figure giving of his shriek of terror
(dubbed: The Cry) supposedly on some Oslo bridge, had fascinated Scholte years before he finally painted the scene
and added a commonplace pig, ushering out the painting's frame at the very lower left corner. The painting became
VIII I
emblematic for the new banality of the art world in which the first postmodern copycats started to serve an eager
consumer market of the new rich, showing off their cynical hedonism to the traditional and conservative art elite.
When the painting was bought by the progressive art dealer Paul Maenz on the occasion of Scholte's solo show in
the Belgian Quarter of Cologne, the painting immediately became a public scandal. Three years before Wim Beeren,
the new director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam bought Jeff Koons' sculpture: Ushering in Banality" (1989),
there was a critical moral debate in Dutch art media whether artists should get their hands dirty ushering in banality
into the art world, yes or no.
Van Hanegem copied Scholte's 1986 painting, but turned it into something else by painting a calendar of the month
of april 1986. Around the date: 14th of April, a red circle was drawn. I asked Van Hanegem why? Did it have anything to
do with the nuclear catastrophe at Tsjernobyl in the Russian Ukraine that same month? Ab cracked up with laughter.
No. Nothing at all. It was simply because Monday, the 14th of April 1986, Scholte had given a lecture on his work at the
Sint Joost Academy and showed his slides.
The other image Van Hanegem copied was the famous Jasper Johns cartoon, Scholte himself had ripped from an 60s
American magazine, as part of his first series of portraits for the Maenz show. A middle aged couple seated on a couch
in their living room is looking at a painting of a painting of the Stars the Stripes of the U.S. flag, done by the well
known abstract expressionist. The husbands tells his wife: "If this was a Jasper Johns, we could sell it for a million
dollars." Van Hanegem added an advertisement slogan about the financial Dutch Rubeco group: "Met geld omgaan is
ook een kunst" (Dealing with money is art too). In his speech at Sint Joost Academy Scholte had explained his philosophy
of business art in a similar paraphrase: Art is to change what you expect from it, a slogan, which Paul Maenz had adopted
as the motto of his Cologne gallery. The slogan had appeared in another Scholte painting, that was shown as a slide too
in the Breda presentation. A portrait of the fagade of a money-exchange office. The message being that a gallery is just
another financial office where art is exchanged for money.
When asked why Ab repainted two Scholte's paintings and not the paintings of somebody else, Van Hanegem told
me it was another postmodern joke and not to be taken serious. Nevertheless both Van Hanegem's paintings were bought
by art dealer Fred Wagemans in 1987. New in the Amsterdam art world, Ab had just picked up the buzz about the Living
Room stable, that went around town. Scholte had said he wanted to become famous and so did Van Hanegem. The Living
Room gallery was run by the young and ambitious Bart van der Ven from Eindhoven, who quit his projected career as
an art historian, after being a student for a few months at the department of art history at the University of Amsterdam.
Together with his long term friend the sculptor Peer Veneman, he had been renting a cheap apartment in the East district
of the city, which they tinned in a gallery. Soon the new space became a social center of the a quickly developing young
art scene, and attracted dynamic artists like Harald Vlugt, Aldert Mantje, Rob Scholte and Martin van Vreeden.
The gallery exhibits drew a lot of publicity from critics like Paul Groot (Museumjournaal) en Pieter Heynen Volkskrant).
It got official attention from the established art world, when artist Ger van Elk and dealer Wim van Krimpen showed
their interest. When Van der Ven started to sell his art, the gallery moved to the center of town.
I IX
Dalstar, Bosma and Domburg at the Berlin studio of Van Hanegem, spring 2002 Domburg, Elke, Dalstar, Van Wijk at the Berlin Art Room Drei mal Drei, summer 2004
