Toon Kelder - Abstract

Show Cellar (1894 -1973)
There have been few Dutch artists in the 20th century who have experienced as much recognition and admiration during their lifetime as the painter/sculptor Toon Kelder. Important art critics such as Kasper Niehaus, Albert Plasschaert, W. Jos De Gruyter, Dolf Welling and Frank Elgar praised his works, exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions between 1927 and his death in 1973.

There were also few Dutch painters in the 20th century who broke with their past as rigorously as Toon Kelder in 1948. From a "romantic sensivist" he became an Abstract Artist, in search of an ever further letting go of representation, Color and Form.


Works by Kelder can be found in various Dutch museums: the Rijksmuseum Kröller Müller, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where Sandberg greatly admired his work, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Groninger Museum and last but not least the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

After the Second World War, Kelder came to the conclusion that much in art distracted from what really mattered and that you had to dare to throw away in order to actually have something left. That is why, halfway through his life, he distanced himself from much that he had cherished before: his figurative work, his paradisiacal landscapes and sultry nudes.

He limited himself more and more to what he saw as the core of all visual art: black, white, line and flat. The brush became too soft and sweet for Kelder and he switched to a firmer way of designing: sculptures made of metal wire. Finally, from these wire sculptures grew the need for sculptures composed of solid, plastic forms.

With that, the sculptor Toon Kelder was born and painting was a thing of the past. With the path he took then, Kelder acquired a place within the modernist avant-garde in the Netherlands, but the public that appreciated him for his figurative work dropped out. It meant a decline in income for Kelder, but he remained unyielding until his death in 1973, faithful to his new course.