The exhibition Otto B. de Kat and Contemporaries – Jeanne Bieruma Oosting, Wim Oepts, Kees Verwey a.o.provides an overview of the highlights of De Kat’s works. A selection of works by contemporaries who also tried to capture “the soul of things” places his oeuvre in a broader perspective. Paintings by artists like Jeanne Bieruma Oosting, Johan Buning, and Kees Verwey show that while De Kat had his own unique identity, he wasalso part of a larger movement. While Dutch avant-gardists were in a permanent state of revolution, the work of De Kat and his followers formed an equally strong and constant undercurrent. Detached from time and place, this art possesses a universal eloquence that continues to inspire and move present-day viewers.
Deep-Seated Inspiration
“He can wait,” is how art historian Hans Jaffé characterized Haarlem painter Otto B. de Kat (1907-1995) in 1972. Unlike both the Impressionists and Expressionists, who worked quickly and spontaneously, De Kat kept weighing things up until he had captured the essence of what he saw around him on his canvas.
In this process, he was not concerned with unusual or spectacular things. Instead, he painted those subjects with which he felt deeply connected through everyday interaction: a laid table, an interior with an armchair, the view of a polder in North Holland, or a hilly landscape in the Auvergne. Rather than a fleeting impression or emotional repercus- sion, De Kat’s paintings show a world of deep-seated inspiration that seems to be timeless. It is precisely this atmosphere of timelessness that continues to attract a large and even growing group of fans to his work today. In an increasingly hectic and uncertain society, De Kat’s painting is a welcome beacon of constancy.
Otto B. de Kat
Otto B. de Kat was educated at the Art School in Haarlem and the National Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. In the late 1920s, he went to Paris to learn about modernism without fully surrendering to it.From the start, De Kat showed he was thoughtful and only allowed himself to be influenced bydevelopments that suited him. His stay in the town of Uccle in Belgium, near Brussels, from 1937 to 1940, marked his need to seek his own path in obscurity. Impressions he picked up in his immediatesurroundings or during travels were worked into layered paintings in muted, often familiar colors in theprivacy of the studio. He ignored the post-war “wild painting” of Cobra, as well as the informal andconceptual art that followed. His examples were French masters like Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard,Albert Marquet, and later, Nicolas de Staël. Commuting between Amsterdam and his second home inFrance, De Kat built an oeuvre that steadily grew into a close synthesis of the French and Dutch schools.The atmospheric polders that he painted at the end of his life in the Beemster area are among his best creations.
04.10.2024 – 06.04.2025
www.museumjan.nl