Nederlandse Informele Groep (N.I.G.)
The Dutch Informal Group – the later Nul group plus Kees van Bohemen – was founded in 1958.(5) Until early 1961 its members showed works in oils or pigments mixed with plaster and sand, usually on panels, linen or jute. The group replaced the expression of emotions in paint with an attempt at an absence of visual signature, resulting in colourless and monochrome works virtually devoid of form or composition. After CoBrA, however, the Nether- lands had little patience for yet another revolution-in-paint. Exhibitions by the Informals were panned by critics, virtually without exception: ‘Beneath the greyish crusts lurks the hand of a craftsman who denies his own gifts’ and, worse still, the painters ‘acknowledge no moral, religious or social imperatives’.(6)
The catalogue for the first exhibition of the Dutch Informal Group abroad, at the Galerie Gunar in Düsseldorf in 1959, included Armando’s text ‘Credo I’: There must be an entirely new art, and everything seems to indicate that it is on its way. No more beautiful and ugly, no more good and evil (they still exist), but an art that is no longer art, but a fact (like our paintings).(7)
The programmatic texts ‘Credo 2’ by Armando and ‘Vuil aan de lucht’ (a play on words alluding to a Dutch expression akin to ‘not a cloud in the sky’, in this case without the ‘not a’) by Henk Peeters, published a few months later, display a similarly sardonic undertone, make digs at people and wrong-foot the critics.(8) Asked for a reaction to a joint text, Jan Schoonhoven wrote: ‘The story, of course, is not quite accurate, but that’s probably irrelevant. Anyway, legends need inaccuracies.(9)
The texts ‘Vuil aan de lucht’, ‘Credo I’ and ‘Credo 2’ were published during the Informal period, but they carried the seeds of Nul. An aversion to theorizing and institutionalized power – museums, galleries and art dealers – as well as mocking the romantic idea of the artistic genius re-emerged in expanded form during the Nul period. Nul was the fulfilment of the Informal aim to disavow the emotionally charged work of art. Not through a different approach to traditional academic materials like paint and canvas, but by seeking out different resources.
In 1958 Henk Peeters saw the work of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri for the first time, at the Venice Biennale. Fontana’s escape ‘from the prison of the flat surface’ by piercing or slicing up the canvas and Burri’s material, burnt plastic, made a big impression on him.(10) Burri and Fontana played a vital role in the transition from paint on canvas or panel to the use of industrial materials and the abandonment of the flat surface. Barely a year later, in 1959, Henk Peeters burned two rows of holes in a painting, 1959-03, and Armando set nails in the ends of a panel, 10 zwarte spijkers op zwart (10 Black Nails on Black). These works marked a transitional phase from painting to Nul work; they are iconoclastic intermediate steps taken by Peeters and Armando on their new path. Henderikse also turned his back on pain- ting in 1959, with assemblages of everyday objects, and toward 1960 Schoonhoven strived, in frozen, increasingly whiter reliefs, ‘by avoiding intentional form . . . for a much greater organic reality of the artificial in and of itself’. These are works that, according to Schoonhoven, offer the possibility ‘to arrive at [an] objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’.(11)
Published by the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and NAi Publishers, Schiedam, 2011
The catalogue for the first exhibition of the Dutch Informal Group abroad, at the Galerie Gunar in Düsseldorf in 1959, included Armando’s text ‘Credo I’: There must be an entirely new art, and everything seems to indicate that it is on its way. No more beautiful and ugly, no more good and evil (they still exist), but an art that is no longer art, but a fact (like our paintings).(7)
The programmatic texts ‘Credo 2’ by Armando and ‘Vuil aan de lucht’ (a play on words alluding to a Dutch expression akin to ‘not a cloud in the sky’, in this case without the ‘not a’) by Henk Peeters, published a few months later, display a similarly sardonic undertone, make digs at people and wrong-foot the critics.(8) Asked for a reaction to a joint text, Jan Schoonhoven wrote: ‘The story, of course, is not quite accurate, but that’s probably irrelevant. Anyway, legends need inaccuracies.(9)
The texts ‘Vuil aan de lucht’, ‘Credo I’ and ‘Credo 2’ were published during the Informal period, but they carried the seeds of Nul. An aversion to theorizing and institutionalized power – museums, galleries and art dealers – as well as mocking the romantic idea of the artistic genius re-emerged in expanded form during the Nul period. Nul was the fulfilment of the Informal aim to disavow the emotionally charged work of art. Not through a different approach to traditional academic materials like paint and canvas, but by seeking out different resources.
In 1958 Henk Peeters saw the work of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri for the first time, at the Venice Biennale. Fontana’s escape ‘from the prison of the flat surface’ by piercing or slicing up the canvas and Burri’s material, burnt plastic, made a big impression on him.(10) Burri and Fontana played a vital role in the transition from paint on canvas or panel to the use of industrial materials and the abandonment of the flat surface. Barely a year later, in 1959, Henk Peeters burned two rows of holes in a painting, 1959-03, and Armando set nails in the ends of a panel, 10 zwarte spijkers op zwart (10 Black Nails on Black). These works marked a transitional phase from painting to Nul work; they are iconoclastic intermediate steps taken by Peeters and Armando on their new path. Henderikse also turned his back on pain- ting in 1959, with assemblages of everyday objects, and toward 1960 Schoonhoven strived, in frozen, increasingly whiter reliefs, ‘by avoiding intentional form . . . for a much greater organic reality of the artificial in and of itself’. These are works that, according to Schoonhoven, offer the possibility ‘to arrive at [an] objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’.(11)
Published by the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and NAi Publishers, Schiedam, 2011
