Aart Kemink

Aart Kemink (1914-2006) (variant names Arie Kemink, Art Kemink) was a Dutch-Canadian painter, born in 1914 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

In the late 1940s, Kemink shared a studio with the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher and, in the early 1950s, became a member of the Federation of Professional Artists. Before emigrating to Canada in 1958, he worked with compatriot artist Karel Appel, best known for his involvement in the Danish-Belgian-Dutch CoBrA movement. In 1957, Kemink participated in an exhibition of artists working for the theatre and circus at Amsterdam's nonextant Fodor Museum. While Kemink held his own among Amsterdam and Rotterdam's artistic elite (a disparate group that included Piet Mondrian, Anton Rooskens, Corneille, Eugène Brands, and others), his reticence to adopt a style or affiliate with a movement shielded his work from what he considered banal trends in Modern and Post-Modern Dutch painting. Upon his arrival in Canada, he settled in Manitoba, then finally in Toronto, Ontario. Kemink's works are distributed throughout Canada and the United States by Maurice Amar, curator of Toronto's Laurier Gallery.

Kemink's work is largely abstract and tangentially influenced by the oeuvre of Marc Chagall and Willem de Kooning. Much of his work of the 1940s and 1950s was affected by World War II and the deleterious effects of the Nazi presence in Holland. During the war, Kemink fought for the Dutch resistance. As a result of his efforts and abilities, he was later commissioned by the City of Amsterdam to produce a series of gouaches depicting the city's old Jewish neighbourhoods and the tragedy of their destruction (see Holocaust in History of the Jews in the Netherlands). In 1995, Kemink completed an important large-scale commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Holland.

While bucolic representations of Kemink's native Holland figure prominently in his work, the swathes and swatches of colour found in his abstractions - a possible result of his contact with Appel - dominate his mature work of the last quarter of the twentieth-century. The artist's rarefied palette calls to mind the colour signatures of Chagall, Raoul Dufy, and André Derain, while concomitantly evincing a new force in European émigré Canadian painting.

Despite a paucity of writings about his life or work, Kemink's paintings are highly valued by private collectors in Canada, the United States, and Europe. It is difficult to gauge the market value of his paintings since they are rare and seldom sold at auction. Kemink's best pieces, however, have been praised and coveted by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Toronto's Consulate General of the Netherlands, and art collector Kenneth Thomson. His artistic achievement holds an important place in the history - beginning with Cornelius Krieghoff in 1840 - of Dutch painting in Canada. Kemink's foreign roots, however, as with those of myriad other artists, became indelibly marked by Canada's passive but persistent influence on the psyche. Despite a career pockmarked by relative obscurity, the quality and significance of Kemink's oeuvre is beginning to come to the fore.

Selected exhibitions

* 1992-2006: "Laurier Gallery", Toronto, Canada: "New Oils & Works on Paper: Annual Exhibition"
* 1957: "Fodor Museum", Amsterdam, Netherlands: "Painting for the Theatre & Circus: An Exhibition of Work by Amsterdam's Leading Artists"

References

* [http://english.rkd.nl/ Netherlands Institute for Art History] ("Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie") - see under [http://www.rkd.nl/rkddb/search.aspx Kemink]
* Scheen, Pieter A. "Lexicon Nederlandse beeldende kunstenaars 1750-1950". Vol. 1 (A-L). The Hague: Kunsthandel Pieter A. Scheen, 1969-1970.
* VanderMey, Albert. "Aart Kemink." "The Dutch Touch in Ontario." Ed. Marten A. Mol. Toronto: Mol, 1997.

External links

* [http://www.stedelijk.nl/ Stedelijk Museum] (National Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
* [http://www.cobra-museum.nl/en/home.html CoBrA Museum] (CoBrA Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, Netherlands)
* [http://www.codart.nl/ CODART] (Worldwide network of museum curators of Dutch and Flemish art)