Hail Mermaid

Author: Esmee Postma

To Willem Wagenaar, Surrealism was first and foremost a mindset: ‘Surrealism is an attitude to life. It is not linked to time. The whole of life is Surrealism. You just have to have an eye for it. A true surrealist is a voyeur, he does no more than observe’.[1] As a book and antiques dealer, exhibition organizer, professor and artist, he applied this rule of life to many things. After completing his training at the Minerva Art Academy in Groningen, Wagenaar encountered Surrealism in Paris.[2] He did not make direct contact with the protagonists of the movement, but when he returned to the Netherlands in 1927 he brought stacks of art magazines, posters and prints with him. With this initial stock, and barely twenty years old, Wagenaar opened an art dealership and bookshop called Nord in Vinkenburgstraat in Utrecht. The name was a reference to an advertising poster designed in that year for the Nord Express by A.M. Cassandre, as well as to his own Groningen roots.[3] The assortment consisted of paintings, furniture by Gerrit Rietveld, jazz records, films, ethnographica and the material he had imported from Paris. It was above all the avant-garde magazines which were in great demand by young Utrecht artists like J.H. Moesman, Willem van Leusden and Louis Wijmans, who followed the latest developments and learnt about Surrealist ideas.

In 1933 Wagenaar, who had also opened a gallery in Nieuwegracht in 1931, staged a one-off exhibition in Paris. The ‘Exposition des Oeuvres de W. Wagenaar et quelques autres peintres hollandais’ which contained a number of works by Moesman, Van Leusden, Wijmans and the psychiatric patient Pieter Terpstra, as well as four paintings, seven watercolours and five drawings by Wagenaar himself, ran from 3 to 15 July 1933 in Galerie La Grande Masse. The brochure mentions a painting titled La Neireide, which may have been Hail Mermaid. However, Wagenaar’s attempt to draw international attention to Utrecht Surrealism went unnoticed by the Parisian Surrealists.

This exhibition was one of the few occasions on which Wagenaar presented himself as an artist. During his lifetime, he only rarely made his own work public.[4] Nevertheless, from the late nineteen-twenties onwards, every so often and between other activities he built up an eclectic oeuvre that reflected his passion for experimentation. Dream images and absurd fantasies were always the point of departure for his work, in which different phases can be identified. Wagenaar’s interest in prehistoric rock drawings and mythology initially resulted in portrayals of mythical beings with an emphasis on fantastical lines. This painting of a bright pink mermaid in the middle of a deep blue coral-like environment is a prime example. The artist gave her an angelic radiance by accentuating the undulating silhouette with white. She looks at the viewer plaintively with a fish in her hand. The sparse elements in this scene are in contrast to paintings from 1933 onwards, in which he incorporated all kinds of symbolic motifs in great detail.

Wagenaar is now remembered above all as a driving force behind the Utrecht art scene and champion of Surrealism. Although his business ventures were not very successful and only lasted for a short time, they were an important meeting point for like-minded people.[5] Surrealism gained a firm foothold in Utrecht thanks in part to Nord, the art gallery and the Utrecht Free Academy for the Decorative Arts that Wagenaar founded in 1934.[6]