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Description
Johan Mekkink (1904-1991)

Type of artwork	Drawing / Aquarelle
Year	1976
Technique	Pastel/Crayon
Support	Japanese Paper

Framed	Only in Passe-partout
Dimensions	45 x 60 cm (h x w)
Passe-partout	60 x 80 cm (h x w)
Signed	Hand signed

Description

Translated with Google Translate. Original text show .

Johannes Mekkink was born on 27 August 1904 in Velp as the only son of Jannes Mekkink (1876-1958), a furniture maker, and Klazina Scholts (1871-1958), a maid by profession. The couple had two more daughters. On July 25, 1945 Johannes Mekkink te Velp married Wilhelmina Maria Lukasina van den Brink, born on November 8, 1904 in Monster and died in Emmen on January 26, 1984. She was divorced and brought two sons with her in her second marriage. Mekkink died on October 30, 1991 in Oosterbeek.
http://www.historici.nl/media/bwg/images/4/-028.jpg
Johan Mekkink around 1974 (from: J. van der Woude,

Johan's parents settled in Velp in 1901 in the smallest part of the farm, which was located directly opposite the driveway of the Biljoen castle. The Mekkink grandparents lived in the other part with an unmarried son, a wallpaperer and upholsterer by trade, and a niece who did the household. The houses were separated by the part where the workshop of the old furniture maker Mekkink and his son Jannes was located. Johan's parents worked long hours in this family business. They were small traders who suffered from the great stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis of the 1930s. Jannes Mekkink hoped that his son Johan would become co-owner of the furniture workshop 'Mekkink en Zonen' with him and his grandfather and uncle.

However, Johan's childhood was so affected by the financial problems that were discussed daily that he did not feel anything for it. He was good at drawing and in primary school he designed furniture that he made himself. That left him with his great love for wood. Later he also preferred to paint on panel. “You have to sand it with pumice stone and it has a firmer surface than linen, which you always have to support.” He loved wide wooden frames, which he often made himself, and has always seen himself more as a craftsman than an artist. His father, who had strong social feelings and a solid craftsman, had a great influence on Johan. After his initial disappointment that his son did not want to join him in the business, he was later proud of him as well as of his two daughters who both obtained a teaching diploma.

In the year 1924 Mekkink obtained the LO certificate and in 1929 the MO certificate. In the same year he took his final exams at the secondary school for Applied Arts 'Art exercise' in Arnhem, now the Academy for Visual Arts. He received painting lessons from the then director of this institute, the painter GJ van Lerven. In addition to being a portrait and still life painter, Mekkink has also trained in the 'monumental' direction under the guidance of the glass painter Schilling. Over the years he executed various mosaics and stained glass windows, including in churches in Velp, Spaarndam, Hillegersberg, Zevenaar, Veenendaal, Zetten and Silvolde.

On 'Art exercise' he met the painter Dick Ket (1902-1940). His friendship with Ket continued until the latter's death. Johan felt related to Ket because, just like himself, he had a special interest in small still lifes. Mekkink was twenty-six when Ket drew a portrait of him, which is now in the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem. Ket commented: “And he is so sober, so sober, he demands nothing for himself. He's a vegetarian, he doesn't drink more than one glass of wine, afraid he wouldn't be able to control himself. A perfectionist, in everything, including as a person, and very, very dutiful.” A fellow student of Mekkink, Leo Braat, draftsman and sculptor, also made a drawing of Johan in the same period and a few years later a head of him in bronze, which can be seen in the museum in Arnhem. Mekkink never had a decent living painting and to remain independent he had to look for a job. He found one as a teacher of hand and decorative painting for ten hours a week at the Nijverheidsavondschool in Zutphen. He did that work from 1931 to 1939. After that, until 1952, Mekkink tried to stand on his own two feet as a painter as much as possible, but he did not succeed. When the then director AJ de Lorm of the Arnhem Municipal Museum offered him a full-time job as a scientific assistant at the museum, he accepted the position. He found satisfaction in this work, although it limited his output as a painter. This was difficult for him, but the fear of poverty that remained sharply remembered from his youth has prevented him from giving up this job. Mekkink was a child of his time. Growing up in an environment where making a living was considered the most important task, hopes and desires for prosperity and luxury came last for him. Despite that, the position in the museum gave him the certainty that he could not get as an independent artist. He became financially independent, allowing him to put aside his childhood frustration. From 1954 to 1967 Johan Mekkink was then deputy director and from 1967 to 1969 director of the Gemeentemuseum. When he retired he was able to continue his life as an independent artist, but now without financial worries. On the day of his farewell he already received the necessary assignments for portraits. He and his wife traveled to Italy and Germany to draw and paint. Although this meant no innovation in his work, it did broaden his horizons. After his wife died in a traffic accident in 1984, many of Johan Mekkink's final years were lonely and sad.

Mekkink is sometimes classified with the magical realists. He admired them and later in his museum policy he exhibited and purchased their works. The objective of this policy was to purchase Gelderland and contemporary work. In contrast to De Lorm, who was a craftsman, Mekkink, as a Gelderland man, had a strong bond with Gelderland painters. Both his own work and that of Dick Ket formed the starting point for expanding the collection of magical realists. In the period that he was director, he was able to pursue a purchasing and exhibition policy, as a result of which the museum now possesses the most important collection of magical realists in our country. He himself had an understandable fear of being classified and cataloged as such and thereby losing his identity. At his farewell to the museum on August 31, 1970, he said: “If I have to be assigned to something, it would be traditional Dutch painting, which in so many centuries has had the tradition of relatively fine painting, of fine brushwork, of a professional technique. cool painting that has a long shelf life and is carefully approached in fine touches and colors.” When a painting by him entitled 'Still life with flute' was purchased in 1934 by the then director Van Erven Dorens for an amount of NLG 225, Mekkink was very satisfied with it, because his annual salary at the Nijverheidsschool in Zutphen was 229 guilders. and 44 cents! This purchase was a recognition that meant a lot to him. Almost forty years later, in 1973, his successor Pierre Janssen bought a painting with the same motif for the museum for NLG 3,500. These purchase amounts illustrate the development of the valuation for Mekkink. From a still-life painter with a rather busy composition in the beginning, he had become a painter of a more simplified design in later years. According to Mekkink painting a still life was not that easy at all, because the objects have to tolerate each other and he wanted to know them through and through and be familiar with them.

Mekkink's still lifes, portraits and landscapes are modest in size and executed in a fine realistic technique. Initially his still lifes showed influences from the work of Dick Ket. In the end, however, Mekkink arrived at a very personal style with the portrait as a specialty. The figures are often depicted frontally, with sharp color contrasts and penetrating eyes. He treated fabric and material with great care. At the end of the 1930s, Mekkink made many portraits, including a double portrait of his parents. He portrayed his model with the background, landscape, interior or attributes of the work or the function the sitter fulfilled. A good example is a portrait of the Vice Admiral of the Royal Navy, Mr. AM baron de Vos van Steenwijk, from 1971. A state portrait with the uniform as a status symbol full of awards.

Mekkink had a harmonious palette, his landscapes are spacious, the sky above is immensely wide and the light is spread in large areas with a lot of dark shadow in grey, green and blue colours. Red hardly appears in his paintings. In his still lifes, his predilection for wood is expressed through images of planks, a table and an open drawer. Mekkink was a member of the national associations: the 'Independents' (1933/1934) and 'De Brug' (1935/1942), both in Amsterdam. He was also a member of the 'Haagse Kunstkring'. He himself was secretary of the Society 'Artibus Sacrum', which organized exhibitions of contemporary art in the Korenbeurs building in Arnhem. After the aforementioned director De Lorm took him on as a scientific assistant in 1952, this association was transformed into the 'Association of Friends of the Gemeentemuseum Arnhem' and Mekkink became secretary. Between 1933 and 1953 in the Netherlands and England he participated in numerous group exhibitions of contemporary Dutch art, including in Amsterdam and Amersfoort, Hull, Leicester, Norwich and Petersborough. One-man exhibitions took place in Arnhem in 1941, in Utrecht in 1958 at the Stichting Utrechtse Kring and again in Arnhem in 1970 on his retirement as director of the Gemeentemuseum. This last exhibition was a retrospective of seventy-one paintings, portraits and drawings made between 1927 and 1969. At his farewell reception, Mekkink said: “Although I have always enjoyed serving the museum, I have always felt like a painter in my heart.”

At an auction in 2000 at Sotheby's, where modern and contemporary paintings by Charley Toorop, Pyke Koch, Raoul Hynckes and Wim Schuhmacher, among others, were auctioned, a still life with vegetables by Mekkink from 1939 was offered for a price between 12,000 and 15,000 guilders. This shows the growing appreciation for his work. The Frisia Museum in Spanbroek (North Holland) houses a unique collection of paintings and drawings by the artists who defined the face of Dutch painting in the 1930s, the magical realists. The museum also shows works by other realistic Dutch artists of the 20th century, such as Edgar Fernhout, Jan Mankes and Johan Mekkink. In 2003 an exhibition was held there under the title 'Artists around Ket', including paintings and self-portraits by Mekkink, in which the beautiful wooden frames around his weeks were particularly striking. At the end of 2003 there was another exhibition in Spanbroek called 'Magic realism in context', which was expanded with work by Dutch contemporaries who painted in a realistic style in the period 1915-1950 without adding the 'magic', but with a lot of attention for detail and technique. The announcement states: “The room alone, where the tranquil poetic work of Jan Mankes, who died young, is combined with that of his admirer Johan Mekkink, is worth the trip”.

Condition

Good

is in good condition.

Shipment

Pick up

The work can be picked up on location. As a buyer you must bring your own packaging materials. The location is: Purmerend, The Netherlands

Shipment

Parcel post

Price

> 10KG or bigger than 1.00 x 0.50 meter

Within The Netherlands	€17.00
To Belgium	€15.00
To Germany	€40.00
Within EU	€40.00
Worldwide	€75.00

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Start time	11-6-2023 at 22:30
End time	18-6-2023 at 22:37

Johan Mekkink - Fraaie Houtskooltekening "Terschelling strand en Brandaris" 1976 - GROOT! - Sold

Johan Mekkink (1904-1991) (10)

Johan Mekkink (1904-1991)