Still Life of a Home Seamstress

Author: Sandra Kisters

The Rotterdam-born artist Wout van Heusden is known mainly as a printmaker. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen holds more than a hundred of his prints, made between 1929 and 1979, and only three paintings. One is Stilleven van de huisnaaister. Van Heusden painted it in 1936, some years after he had encountered Surrealism. French Surrealism had only really come to the attention of Dutch artists in the 1930s, in part through the influence of Willem Wagenaar and his art gallery at 25 Nieuwegracht in Utrecht, where he and Paul Citroen staged a number of high-profile exhibitions.^[1] Artists with leftist views were attracted by the unconventional, political and anti-establishment character of Surrealism.

What most impressed Van Heusden was the technique of ‘psychic automatism’ – drawing without the interference of reason, often with eyes closed.^[2] This can be seen in his etchings. By contrast, Stilleven van de huisnaaister is a well-considered composition with Surrealist components, suggested by dream images. Three false noses and a rotting apple lie in a desolate landscape. In the sky and behind one of the noses float eyes and eyeballs, a needle and thread holds it all together – or perhaps not. In the foreground there is a lone thimble. Eyes play a key role in Surrealism and refer to voyeurism. When they lie around as they do in contemporary photos by Wally Elenbaas and Piet Zwart, they become terrifying objects that can be linked with Freud’s concept of the fear of castration.^[3]

Van Heusden was born in Rotterdam in 1896 and lived and worked there all his life. While working as a house painter he attended evening classes at the Rotterdam art academy. He later opened an arts and crafts shop to support himself and worked on his printmaking. He led a fairly reclusive life, but before the Second World War he did exhibit with contemporaries like Herman Bieling and Hendrik Chabot and with fellow printmakers like M.C. Escher and Harry van Kruiningen after the war.^[4] He was also socially engaged and an active member of the League of Rotterdam Artists and the R33 Circle of Visual Artists (founded in 1933), which championed artists’ interests.^[5] Although Van Heusden is often characterized as a hermit, he went on trips to Munich and Paris and was well up to date with contemporary developments in art.

His most surrealistic paintings – nine in all – were made between 1932 and 1942.^[6] He also produced a number of works that came somewhere between Surrealism and Magic Realism. After the war the focus shifted to abstract works, exclusively in print form. After a retrospective in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in 1962 he began to paint again, as can be seen in Porte d’Orléans (1963) and Composition with Five Holes (1969-73), both in the museum’s collection. The latter was acquired at the same time as Stilleven van de huisnaaister by J.C. Gaertman, a good friend of the artist.