Collection News – Jacoba van Heemskerck: Dorp

DORP

Jacoba van Heemskerck and Piet Mondrian are considered two of the artists who decisively influenced the development of abstract painting in the Netherlands. For both of the latter, sojourns in the Domburg artists colony represented key experiences. Getting to grips with the structure of the village and the landscape around this coastal settlement, led both van Heemskerck and Mondrian to intuit that a spiritual sphere existed behind the perceptible world, something art could visualize in shapes and colours. In Germany, too, during his lifetime van Heemskerck’s oeuvre received a great deal of attention. Alongside Paula Modersohn-Becker she was one of the few female artists to be honoured with a solo exhibition at Museum Folkwang in Hagen. Museum Folkwang has recently acquired her Cubist painting ›Dorp‹. In the gallery where it now hangs, it is juxtaposed to works that are a response to van Heemskerck’s aesthetics or that were produced in the same setting.