Bram VAN VELDE

Bram van Velde – Life, Original Lithographs and Prints

Bram van Velde (Abraham Gerardus van Velde, born at Zoeterwoude, near Leiden, on 19 October 1895; died at Grimaud, in the south of France, on 28 December 1981) was a Dutch painter who spent almost his entire working life in France and Switzerland. To English-speaking readers he is best known as the painter whom Samuel Beckett admired above all others: the Irish writer's essays and his celebrated Three Dialogues made van Velde the very emblem of an art of failure and impossibility. Neglected for decades, he was recognised in the 1960s, and in the last twenty years of his life produced a large body of original colour lithographs, now catalogued by Rainer Michael Mason and Jacques Putman.

Le Coin des Arts holds some thirty Bram van Velde lithographs dating from 1966 to 1981, among them Tête (1969), Forêt (1970), Écoute and Combat (both 1974), La chose (1976), Éloignement (1977), Ce qui reste and Dans leur voix les eaux (1980), and three sheets from his final year, Séparation, Nord and Désertique (1981), together with many untitled prints and posters for Galerie Maeght (1978) and Galerie L'Œil (1994). Each impression has been chosen for the freshness of its colour, its edition and its condition.

A decorator's apprentice: The Hague and Worpswede

Born into a very poor family, Bram was apprenticed in 1907, aged twelve, to the painting and decorating firm of Schaijk & Kramers in The Hague, alongside his younger brother Geer van Velde. He painted lampshades and copied the Old Masters in the Mauritshuis. His employer, Eduard Kramers, became his patron and paid him an allowance until the early 1930s. In 1922 he travelled to Munich and then to the artists' colony of Worpswede, near Bremen, where Expressionism, and Edvard Munch in particular, transformed his painting. He showed in Bremen and Berlin in 1927.

Paris, Corsica and Majorca

Settling in Paris in 1924, he was joined by Geer, and the brothers exhibited together at the Salon des Indépendants between 1928 and 1932. He discovered Matisse and married the German painter Lilly Klöker in 1928. In 1930 he worked on the Provençal coast and in Corsica; from 1932 to 1936 the couple lived on Majorca, where the Mediterranean light freed his colour. The Spanish Civil War and Lilly's death in 1936 forced him back to France. In 1939 three large gouaches announced his mature idiom, but between 1941 and the autumn of 1945, destitute, he stopped painting altogether.

Samuel Beckett and the painter of 'impediment'

Beckett met Bram in the late 1930s through Geer, whose exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London in 1938 belonged to the same circle of friends. During the lean war years Beckett was one of Bram's chief supporters. When the Galerie Mai in Paris gave Bram his first one-man show on 21 March 1946, Beckett published 'La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon' in Cahiers d'art; for the brothers' joint exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in 1948 he wrote 'Peintres de l'empêchement'. In 1949 came the Three Dialogues with the critic Georges Duthuit, published in English in the review Transition, in which Beckett describes van Velde as the first painter to accept that to be an artist is to fail. These texts were later gathered in Disjecta (John Calder, London, 1983), and they remain the principal route by which British and Irish readers encounter his work.

From Bern to Paris: belated recognition

Maeght, who had signed him in 1947, dropped him after a poorly received show in 1952; the collector Jacques Putman, met in 1949, and his family then sustained him. Recognition came from Switzerland and the Netherlands: in 1958Franz Meyer organised his first museum retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam followed with a retrospective prepared in the autumn of 1959. In the 1960s came Knoedler in Paris and New York, documenta III in Kassel (1964) and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. Living in Geneva from 1967 with Madeleine Spierer, he was honoured with a retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris in 1970 and another at the Fondation Maeght in 1973–4. Charles Juliet's Rencontres avec Bram van Velde (1978) recorded his spare, painful conversation. After leaving Geneva in 1977 he settled in Provence, where he died in December 1981. The Centre Pompidou retrospective (19 October 1989 – 7 January 1990) and the centenary exhibition at the Musée Rath, Geneva, in 1996 confirmed his standing.

The lithographs: technique, printer and catalogue

Although the catalogue opens in 1923, lithography became central to his work only from the early 1960s, first for posters and catalogues, then, encouraged by Putman, in extended series. Van Velde painted by hand on transfer paper, which the printer then transferred to the stone; no print used more than seven stones. His principal printer was Pierre Badey in Paris, and most of the large sheets of the 1970s and 1980s were published by Maeght. The prints are reinterpretations rather than copies: Embrasement, a painting of 1965, became a lithograph only in 1980. The book Dans leur voix les eaux (Maeght, 1980), with a text by the poet André du Bouchet, contains five original lithographs in an edition of 165.

The standard reference is Rainer Michael Mason and Jacques Putman, Bram van Velde. Les lithographies, three volumes covering 1923–1973, 1974–1978 and 1979–1981, published in Paris by Yves Rivière and, for the final volume (1984), with the Cabinet des estampes of the Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva, which holds almost all of his lithographs. Dealers cite it as 'Mason' or 'MP': Écoute (1974) is Mason 133, Éloignement (1977) Mason 267, Nord (1981) Mason 396 and Séparation (1981) Mason 403. In Britain, the Tate holds an untitled van Velde lithograph of 1975–6, which may be seen by appointment in the Prints and Drawings Room at Tate Britain.

Collecting Bram van Velde: a buyer's guide

Check the Mason number. Any genuine lithograph should correspond to an entry in Mason and Putman, with matching date, dimensions and edition size.

Edition size. The large Maeght sheets of the 1970s are typically numbered out of 100 on Arches wove paper; some earlier plates were issued in 50 impressions, and some exhibition-related prints in 250. Artist's proofs exist outside the numbered edition. See our notes on the printing.

Signature. Impressions are signed and numbered in pencil. The brushed 'Bram' monogram printed within many compositions is part of the image and is no substitute for a pencil signature.

Condition and light. The sheets are large, often around 90 × 60 cm, and easily creased. Van Velde's translucent yellows, mauves and blues fade in daylight, so insist on full margins and UV-filtering glazing; our framing service can advise.

Posters and book plates. Exhibition posters, even when printed by lithography, are not signed prints, although certain exhibitions gave rise to separate signed editions, such as the 1970 Musée national d'art moderne print (Mason 65, 250 impressions). Plates from illustrated books should be described as such. Our guarantees are set out on our authenticity page.

We select van Velde's lithographs alongside those of the artists closest to him in spirit: Geer van Velde, Alberto Giacometti, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Antoni Tàpies. Explore the School of Paris and Lyrical Abstraction and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Rainer Michael Mason and Jacques Putman, Bram van Velde. Les lithographies, 3 vols, Paris, Yves Rivière / Geneva, Cabinet des estampes, 1974–1984 · Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, John Calder, 1983 · Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Bram van Velde, Fata Morgana, 1978 · Bram van Velde, exhibition catalogue, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989 · Tate – Bram van Velde · Centre Pompidou – Bram van Velde, 1989–1990 · Galerie Lelong – biography