Summaries issue 2 volume 19 2003  

Sint Maarten  | H.P. Berlage | Thorn Prikker



Onder den Sint Maarten (1900-1941)
Peter de Rijcke

The firm of Onder den Sint Maarten was one of many businesses that began life as home workshops in the late nineteenth century. Thanks to the economic prosperity of the period, it grew into one of the largest furniture manufacturers in Holland, an accomplishment that would have been impossible without the large supplies of gas and electricity for power and lighting which had newly become available.
It was around 1899 that Johan Adam Pool Jr. (1872-1948), a structural engineer by profession, began building simple but tasteful furniture at his home in Zaltbommel. Shortly after a visit to the 1900 world exhibition in Paris, where he was impressed by the designs of the English Arts and Crafts movement, he happened to meet his former teacher at the Polytechnic School in Delft, Th. K. Sluyterman (1863-1931). It was on the initiative of the latter that Pool set up his factory that same year. Sluyterman was to serve as the main designer of furniture and copperwork for Onder den Sint Maarten until 1903 and up until his death he remained Pool's trusted adviser. It was through him that Pool met the idealistic W.C. Hoeker (1862 - after 1906), director of a factory for arts and crafts objects which was founded on socialist principles. Amstelhoek, as the factory was known, specialized in modern design, producing furniture, ceramics and metalwork. During the nineties Sluyterman had been adviser to the Amsterdam jewellers Hoeker & Zoon, a firm with contacts in progressive artistic circles - including the then unknown architect H.P. Berlage (1856-1934) -and above all a firm which propagated the modernization of Dutch arts and crafts products. Pool and Sluyterman recognized that the simple designs of Willem Penaat (1875-1957), the furniture designer at Amstelhoek, were eminently suited for the machine production in series which they envisioned, and they used many of his designs as 'models' for their own products and processes. But not everything was borrowed. From the outset, Pool displayed a keen eye for talent, and many later well-known designers began their careers as anonymous employees at Onder den Sint Maarten, including J.W. de Graaff (1876-1936), T. Landré (also a publicist),
D. van Dorp (b. 1871), J.C. Stoffels (1878-1952), and J.A. Muntendam (1882-1938). In the spring of 1902 Pool took over the Amstelhoek furniture factory in Haarlem, which had run into difficulties due to poor financial management and the departure of its best designers. It was in that year that the Amstelhoek designer J.C. Stoffels produced his first metalwork designs for Onder den Sint Maarten, including the clocks which were to make such a great contribution to the firm's reputation. In 1902 Pool attracted attention at home and abroad when he was awarded a silver medal at the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin. In the summer of the following year he made a spectacular presentation at the Exhibition of Modern Applied Art in Arnhem. In the years that followed, the construction of a new factory in Haarlem, which featured separate showrooms, and the opening of stores in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Haarlem established Onder den Sint Maarten as one of the major firms of its kind in Holland. That status was retained well into the twenties. In retrospect, the most interesting period in the history of the firm was from 1900 to 1906, when the emphasis was on simplicity of design. After 1906 public interest in this new form of constructive art began to wane, and this led Pool to opt instead for the production of the chic English furniture in various historical styles which was then becoming popular. This enabled him to keep the business going until after the First World War, but the stock market crash of 1929 was the beginning of the end. In 1936 the factory in Haarlem was closed, followed in 1941 by the dissolution of the company.
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H.P. Berlage as fellow traveller
A journey to Soviet Russia in 1929
Lieske Tibbe

Throughout his long career the architect H.P.Berlage (1856-1934) had made no secret of his socialistic views on architecture and society, and in his later years he visited Soviet Russia. In the period 1917-1918 there was considerable enthusiasm among Dutch architects for the Russian Revolution. Then and in the years that followed, Berlage wrote extensively for communist and socialist publications. He foresaw a new society, in which a kind of 'community architecture' would take shape: solid, standardized construction crowned by a large public building, the material and symbolic representation of that sense of community. By 1929, when he embarked on this journey, Berlage no longer had any sympathy for communism in a political sense. However, he did expect great things of Soviet Russia, notably in the area of architecture. He believed that the primitive but talented and vigorous Russian people were capable of injecting new life into the world-weary culture of Europe.
Like many other artists and architects, Berlage's high expectations for the new Russia led him to join the Holland-New Russia Society, an organization set up to promote cultural ties between Holland and the Soviet Union. To that end, the society published a magazine, entitled New Russia, and also organized study trips to Russia. The organizers of the 1929 trip were eager to make political capital out of Berlage's participation. The political persuasion of the group, which included his brother and eight other travellers, varied from extremely sympathetic towards the Soviet regime to downright critical. It later came out that two of them, the secretary of Holland-New Russia and organizer of the trip A. Prins, and the reporter and draughtsman H.C. Pieck may have been secret agents acting for Russia. In 1929 a trip to the Soviet Union was considered an unusual and even risky undertaking, and six members of the group, among them Berlage, felt called upon to write an account of their journey. Berlage's version may be seen as midway between the pro-Bolshevist accounts and those that were highly critical: he refrained from explicit criticism, but did not make propaganda for the model institutions which they visited along the way. Berlage concentrated on his own area of expertise - architecture - and did a series of drawings of historic buildings.
Like many other prominent Western intellectuals, Berlage was welcomed as a true fellow traveller. In Moscow he delivered a talk on Dutch architecture which was much publicized and well received. On his return he was long regarded as an 'expert on Russia', due largely to a series of lectures he gave on his experiences there. A sonnet which he wrote during the trip, entitled 'To the Volga', was published in several different media. Berlage was flattered, but did what he could to prevent his name from being used for communist propaganda. It is clear from statements made towards the end of his life that he remained true to his idealistic views on the salutary effect of Russia on Western culture.
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Three Christ Paintings of 1892 by Johan Thorn Prikker
'An art of their own flesh and blood'
Een Liefde and The Bride (part 2)
Joan Greer

The paintings A Love and The Bride are quite different, both from each other, and from Christ on the Cross. A Love is described by Thorn Prikker as representing a cowherd standing in the sea, bending over to allow cows to use his back to jump to safety on the other side of the water. The cowherd, back bleeding, suffers so that the cows might be saved. Thorn Prikker states the cows represent the bourgeoisie, the cowherd, Christ. Christ once again serves as an image of the artist, but now there is a shift from the notion of isolated suffering towards an emphasis on Christ's role as server of humankind. The imagery, and particularly the identification of the cows as the bourgeoisie, is related to the idea of the artist as anarchist. The implied idea of conjoining the image of Christ with that of a radical revolutionary fits logically within a rising tradition in religious discourse well represented by Ernst Renan's Vie de Jésus which presented the Christ figure as an anarchist-like social reformer.
The second painting, The Bride, represents a bride and a crucified Christ, defined with line in radically simplified terms. In the foreground "lilies" and "passionflowers" relate to the two figures and, in their vaginal and phallic forms, reinforce the subject of sexual initiation inherent within the bride theme. These flowers also feature in Carloz Schwabe's illustrations for Emile Zola's Le Rêve which, in its culminating passages, likewise deals with the theme of a bride.
Thorn Prikker's The Bride emphasizes ecstasy and mystical union, and attempts to reconcile or otherwise address the polarized concepts of physical and spiritual love. It, too, functions as an image of the artist, here in the guise of Christ in mystical union with the bride. The theme is informed by Plato's doctrine of divine love, in which the human soul aspires to unite with the divine. It is also part of the tradition within Christ-mysticism in which Jesus is represented as "Bridegroom of the Soul"; although the bride/soul is feminine in form it may represent a male or female individual seeking unity with the divine in Christ. Thorn Prikker was aware of this topos in earlier writings and would later write that his imagery had been informed by his readings of Sister Bertken of Utrecht. The sublimated eroticism found in the theme was not unusual within fin-de-siècle art and literature and the combination of the religious and the erotic is also addressed, although never explicitly, elsewhere in Thorn Prikker's oeuvre.
While Thorn Prikker was familiar with the brides by Matthijs Maris and knew Jan Toorop's work The Three Brides, the figures in Thorn Prikker's The Bride, taken as a whole, are conceptually closer to an image by the theosophist K.P.C. de Bazel which represents an androgynous figure of the creator. De Bazel's idea of artistic creativity, contained both female and male characteristics. Thorn Prikker, while not a theosophist himself, shared with theosophists these ideas as well as an interest in eastern religions and art. In this context, returning now to Een Liefde, Thorn Prikker, in choosing a cow above a lamb or sheep may be making a reference to Krishna as the divine cowherd. In respect to both Een Liefde and The Bride, De Bazel's ideas concerning artistic creativity and Thorn Prikker's artist's image of self sacrifice and service to others and of mystical union, are both informed by the current tendency of conceiving of the artist's task as a spiritual one.
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