Willem Hussem (1900-1974) was active as a painter, sculptor and poet and is considered one of the most important abstract working Dutch artists after the Second World War. 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of his death.
Hussem’s oeuvre is built on a constant aspiration towards simplicity and clarity. It was in Zen Bhuddism that he discovered an intellectual basis for his universalistic outlook on the world, which would determine his thought and work. In the late 1950s and 1960s he formulated a particular verbal and visual language that tied in with his philosophical views. In poetry, he found this in short lyrics, while in art he found it in a style that steered a middle path between expressionism and lyrical constructivism.
Our presentation in the Showcase section at TEFAF Maastricht 2024 focuses on a series of paintings that Willem Hussem made when his work became less dense and geometric elements started to float within the framework of the canvas – which would become his distinctive visual signature. This transformative period (1958-1964) within his practice coincided with one of the exhibition-highlights of his career: his representation of The Netherlands at the 1960 Venice Biennial.
Two of the eight paintings that were included in his Biennial presentation, known as “painting VII” (1958) and “painting VIII” (1959), are paired with three comparable paintings from this transformative period and works on paper from the first half of the 1960s
During his lifetime Willem Hussem had solo exhibitions at the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, Museum Het Princessehof in Leeuwarden and Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam and participated in major group exhibitions in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He also exhibited twice at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, US.
After Hussem’s death in 1974, the ‘Hussem Committee’ (consisting of museum director Wim Beeren and artists Peter Struycken, Hein van Haaren en Rinus van den Bosch) kept his legacy alive. Retrospectives were mounted at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, Museum Dordrecht and at Museum Belvedere in Oranjewoud.
Since Dürst Britt & Mayhew took over the representation of Hussem’s estate in 2019, we have increasingly been placing his work in a contemporary context and an international perspective. We presented his work at Artissima in Turin in 2021 and at Art Cologne in 2022. In the summer of 2021 we curated a retrospective in two of the monumental exhibition spaces of Pulchri Studio in The Hague with loans from museums, corporate collections and private collections.
Willem Hussem’s work is held in many private and public collections, including Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Dordrechts Museum, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and the collections of AKZO Nobel, ABN Amro, AEGON, Shell and Post NL.
Willem Hussem’s work has recently been shown at PS Project Space in Amsterdam, Museum Jan Cunen in Oss and Proyecto Paralelo in Mexico City.
