Come and visit the Chabot Museum, located in a beautiful modernist villa in the heart of Rotterdam. The current, unique exhibition consists of a selection of mainly figure paintings the artist Henk Chabot (1894 – 1949) made during World War II. Standing on the dike, next to his house and studio barn, Henk Chabot saw the inferno after the German bombardment on Rotterdam on May 14, 1940. Later, he captured this scene on canvas and named it ‘Brand van Rotterdam’ [‘Rotterdam is burning’]. In the subsequent war years, Chabot painted several landscapes, but also an intense series of figure pieces of war victims. Undergo gripping works as The persecuted and Refugees, but also the joyful works of the liberation such as Summer (‘Peace’).
Humanity and freedom
The title of the exhibition comes from a 1945 letter Henk Chabot wrote to his friend and fellow-artist Peter Odijk (1889 – 1963) he met at the Rotterdam art academy. In this letter, Chabot mentions his admiration for Rembrandt; he writes that this painter will still be modern in a thousand years’ time. Chabot refers to Rembrandt’s ‘humanity’, the ‘freedom’ this artist possessed, with whom he must have felt an inner kinship. Compassion and an urge for freedom were very much at the heart of the paintings Chabot made of refugees, people in hiding and prisoners during World War II. In the exhibition, the relation between Rembrandt and Chabot is illustrated by means of visual similarities: the claire-obscure, the way they depict eyes and hands and the monumentality of the composition.
Research
At the heart of this exhibition is an investigation into Chabot’s statements on his works, inter alia, during the war years. Art historian Simon Oosterhuis conducted this investigation in 2023/2024, by courtesy of the Vereniging Rembrandt (also thanks to her Fund for Research into Modern and Contemporary art).
Don’t miss this exhibition. Experience the timelessness of Henk Chabot’s paintings!