Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #14
Willem Sandberg, Chris Engels, and the Midcentury “Birth” of Modern Art in Curaçao
by Stephanie Lebas Huber
by Stephanie Lebas Huber
September 24, 2024
By the midpoint of the twentieth century there was a commonly held, although erroneous belief that the island of Curaçao did not produce visual art of any kind.
The Antillean poet Cola Debrot remarked on the perspective that Curaçao was a “place where absolutely nothing existed. Nada. Nadita.”
He recalled the words of a government draftsman who described the island as consisting of “a single rock, with a single tree, with a single branch and a single leaf, on which the only goat registered on the island feeds.”[1] In light of this view, the exhibition titled Curaçao, Painting and Painted, held October 2–26, 1953, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (fig. 1), can be described as a turning point in the establishment of a modern art practice in the Dutch Antilles.
The story of its patronage, however, is a bit more complicated. Beginning in earnest as a partnership between Stedelijk Museum director Willem Sandberg (1897–1984) and the local expatriate doctor and writer Christiaan Joseph Hendrikus (Chris) Engels (1907–1980), Curaçao, Painting and Painted was held during Sandberg’s tenure as director between 1945 and 1963. The first to highlight Curaçao, this exhibition is one of many efforts by Sandberg to foster ongoing cultural exchanges with an increasingly global number of constituents.
To the director’s credit, the 1953 exhibition opened up a path for Curaçaoan modernism in a number of ways: firstly, by initiating the reception of Antillean art into Dutch mainland institutions such as the Stedelijk; and secondly, by stimulating painting practice among artists native to the island. Still at question is the imperialist manner in which the exhibition was organized, as the following historical account will interrogate.
Figure 1. Han de Vries, Curaçao, Painting and Painted, exhibition catalog, 1953. Printed by Van Munster’s Drukkerijen, and published by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
The idea that Curaçao was an artistic blank slate had, of course, never been true. Like many places in the Antilles, prehistoric rock art and Arawak ceramics had a long history on the island. While the local Caiquetío people had lost any living artistic traditions since they had been forcefully brought to Hispaniola in the sixteenth century, other cultural practices still persisted. For example, the descendants of the enslaved population in Curaçao in the twentieth century were known for their oral music (tambú, tuma) and storytelling (nanzi) traditions.[2] Although easel painting may not have been native to the island, visiting artists such as Johannes Robertus Post Brants (1811–ca. 1848) had been producing them since the nineteenth century, while Curaçaoan-born but European-trained artists such as Cornelis Gorsira (1848–1924) began practicing not long after.[3] Glass painting was one art form seen as native to Curaçao—even noted in the catalogue for Curaçao, Painting and Painted. The precise historical origins of this local practice, however, were difficult to trace, due to the fragility of the material.
This myth of a modern Renaissance, a common narrative in the Caribbean, was certainly true in Jamaica, where the British-born Edna Manley (1900–1987) was credited with jumpstarting artistic practice with her arrival in 1922. Likewise, Haiti’s celebrated “naïf” painters Hector Hippolyte (1894–1948) and Philomé Obin (1892–1986) were seen as bringing forth an artistic rebirth. Behind this framing in the very first book published on Haitian art, appropriately titled, Renaissance in Haiti (1948), was an outsider—the American Selden Rodman (1909–2002). According to Rodman’s telling, the Black Republic had been so traumatized by the history of slavery that it suffered a near-total suppression of African carving tradition and other visual art forms.[4] To remedy this lack, another American, DeWitt Peters, founded the Centre d’Art, an institution designed to cultivate a local artistic tradition, with a penchant for primitivizing aesthetics. Narratives such as these—which selectively overlooked long-standing practices in the visual arts—contributed to the false idea of the Caribbean as an untapped font of primitivist creativity, a belief that could only be true if one were to ignore the Fabre Geffrard administration’s establishment in 1861 of the École de Peinture et Dessin in Port-au-Prince.[5] While the ambitions of Willem Sandberg toward Curaçao were not nearly as comprehensive or developed as that of Rodman, it is clear that the exhibition Curaçao, Painting and Painted resonated with a larger inclination among foreign-born interlopers to “rediscover” the Caribbean. Engels, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue—clearly influenced by Rodman—went so far as to question whether or not the word “Renaissance” could truly be applied to the Caribbean, saying “nothing was born again, because there was nothing before.”[6]
Using the Stedelijk exhibition Curaçao, Painting and Painted as a case study, this article will examine the degree to which—and to what end—the Netherlands participated in the myth of a cultural reawakening widespread in the Caribbean at mid-century. In my telling of this microhistory, I call into question the reasons why European and expatriate art world figures were so invested in this contrivance in the first place. Held during a crucial period for Dutch domestic policy in its overseas territories, I argue that Curaçao, Painting and Painted laid bare a number of different imperialist impulses while also introducing the public to Antillean art in the decades that followed. This collaboration between Sandberg and Engels—one in a long string of programming that they co-helmed—speaks to the way both men sought something mutually beneficial for their respective museums.
When the exhibition opened in Amsterdam, Engels was still building the credentials of the relatively new Curaçao Museum in Willemstad (founded in 1948) as a serious institution dedicated to art and local history. For its earliest iteration, Engels privileged didactic displays on the Indigenous Caquetíos, but had ambitions to house a selection of local native and colonial furniture, tools, and Old Masters, as well as working artists from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.[7] It was Engels who first approached Sandberg on a trip to Amsterdam in 1946 to exchange ideas about the museum; he continued to correspond with the Stedelijk director in the years that followed.[8] His initiative paid off. Beginning in the museum’s inaugural year, Sandberg provided the loans that led to the realization of several modern exhibitions in its galleries, including the work of Henk Chabot, Charles Eyck, and Charley Toorop, followed by a show on the Cobra group in 1952. Thus began a series of exhibitions, first at the Curaçao Museum and then at the Stedelijk.
At the other end of this exchange, Sandberg was on the hunt for new modernist idioms, and was especially interested in tapping avenues outside of Europe. In the decade that followed World War II, the director introduced a series of exhibitions that demonstrated his ambitions to make the Stedelijk a center for the display of international artwork such as Figures from Italian art after 1910, Six Swiss Artists, America Paints, and 19 Painters from Haiti, all shown simultaneously in early 1950.[9] More than that, Sandberg wanted to be a tastemaker, and to pick at the right moment, a fact that may have also impacted the choice of Caribbean artists that entered the collection.[10] Many of the changes that the director was implementing at the Stedelijk demonstrated his indebtedness to MoMA as an example of a museum dedicated to modernism. While some of his interventions included whitewashing the halls of the museum’s historic building or emphasizing typography and pictograms in the didactics, Sandberg always betrayed a commitment to populism. One major concern of his was how to make works of art accessible to the public—which he achieved through approachable, user-friendly designs that countered the elitism endemic to art institutions.[11] In my view, Sandberg’s interest in expanding the cultural reach of the Stedelijk into overseas territories such as the Caribbean was simply another part of this project.
The Rotterdam-born doctor, painter, and poet Chris Engels had a different set of intentions from the Stedelijk director when it came to cultivating modernist practice in Curaçao. Upon arriving at the island in 1936 and remarking upon a perceptible absence of modern art, Engels began work on the museum plan, inviting art world figures such as his good friend Gerrit Rietveld to visit him in 1949.[12] Engels had ambitious ideas to bring about exchanges between Curaçao and Haiti, Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico; he was particularly keen on fostering cultural reciprocity between the Netherlands and the Caribbean. To this end, he sought the help of Willem Sandberg, who was perfectly suited to the role, given his directorship of the Stedelijk Museum, a post that made him as a well-connected figure of the Dutch art world. The latter’s vested interest in modern art also likely appealed to Engels’s financial supporters, who desired similar works for the new collection. From his earliest contact with Engels, Sandberg acted as an important liaison in the growing network between Curaçao and his home country, helping to directly facilitate connections between Curaçaoan artists and those based in Europe, such as sculptor May Henriquez, whom he introduced to Ossip Zadkine while in Paris in 1949. Henriquez, in turn, played a hand in bringing an exhibition of Zadkine’s sculptures to the Curaçao Museum in 1952.[13]
When it came to acquisitions for the Curaçao Museum, Engels often passed ideas by Sandberg, intent on seeking out the latter’s advice about expanding the Curaçao Museum’s collection as well as ideas for exhibition programs, which the former described as “dead.”[14] In one letter, he expressed interest in a sculpture by Maria Martins Pereria e Souza, whom he knew as the wife of a Brazilian envoy.[15] Engels’s persistence ultimately paid off. With Sandberg’s assistance, a number of paintings entered the permanent collection of the Curaçao Museum produced by prominent modern Dutch artists, including Charley Toorop, Wim Schuhmacher, Carel Willink, and Jan Sluijters, alongside non-Dutch works, such as a painting by Tsuguharu Foujita.[16] By 1950, Engels seemed to find his footing and embarked on the first iteration of what would become an annual event, Exhibicion di Nos Arte, held at the Curaçao Museum, dedicated to showing the most prominent modernist artists working on the island.[17]
As for Engels’s influence on Sandberg, it was the latter’s trip to Haiti in 1949 and the exhibition that followed that truly shifted the trajectory of the Stedelijk director’s programming aims, ultimately leading him to organize the exhibition Curaçao, Painting and Painted. In fact, Sandberg was on a visit at the Engels’s home when, after viewing a book—likely Rodman’s Renaissance in Haiti, published the previous year—he decided to alter his plans and redirected his voyage to Port-au-Prince, where he offered to give a lecture to defray his travel costs.[18] Engels helped return the favor to Sandberg for staging those early exhibitions at the Curaçao Museum by arranging for loans of Haitian School paintings to the Stedelijk that would ultimately result in the 1950 exhibition titled 19 Painters from Haiti.[19] Ultimately traveling to Paris, London, Munich, and Bern, the show was well-received in the press, and Sandberg also received letters from friends praising the show.[20] Comparisons were made between the artists’ naïf style and Rousseau or Van Gogh; critics expressed a desire for the show to include musical performance and folktale recitations associated with the islands.[21] Engels then put on an exhibition of Haitian painting the following year in collaboration with the American painter DeWitt Peters, who had by that time fully dedicated himself to promoting local artists through the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince.[22]
Indeed, the ultimate realization of Curaçao, Painting and Painted, held in 1953, should be seen as a direct result of the Haitian show’s strong reception, combined with the urging of Chris Engels, and lastly Sandberg’s desire to seek out new modernist artists abroad. Some of these ideas came through the correspondence that the two men maintained over the years. For example, as early as 1949 Engels sent Sandberg photographs of Charles Eyck’s wall paintings of religious subjects, such as a Pietà, the conversion of St. Paul, or Saints Mary, Joachim, and Lucy, perhaps hoping to spark the director’s interest in modernist examples created locally on the island.[23]
As the title suggests, Curaçao, Painting and Painted comprised a variety of artists who were either native to the island of Curaçao or more recent transplants. Figuring in the former group were Charles Corsen (1927–1994), Tharcisio Pieters Kwiers (1931–2019), and Ru Jas (1926–2011). Representing the latter were Charles Eyck (1897–1983), Dolf Henckes (1903–1989), Giel Hagedoorn (1911–1988), and Frieda Hunziker (1908–1966), a painter who had by then taken up residence at Engels’s “museum house,” dubbed Stroomzicht.[24] The somewhat artificial-composition of this Creolized grouping—that included both locals and expatriates—speaks to the goals of the multipronged exchange project and its attempts to achieve the desired results for not only Sandberg and Engels but also to appease the cultural funding bodies of the Netherlands and its Kingdom during the postwar years.
Engels’s aspirations for the Curaçao Museum are really an extension of the ideas that he began exploring over the course of the 1940s. Along with his wife, the artist Lucila Engels-Boskaljon, Engels turned their home on Molenplein in Otrobanda into a salon where poets and painters produced artwork and shared it with their colleagues. As a result of their efforts, the couple burnished their credentials as important cultural figures in Curaçaoan society.[25] It was in his cultivation of a literary community where Engels first truly established the international Caribbean connections that later influenced his collection and exhibition practices as a museum director. Along with the journalist Frits van der Molen, Engels co-founded the first literary magazine in Curaçao, called De Stoep (1940–1951), an organ that sought to publish the work of native literary figures.
Featuring the writing of Dutch expatriates such as Engels himself (under the pseudonym Luc. Tournier), Charles Corsen, Tip Marugg, Oda Blinder, and Frits van der Molen, De Stoep quickly developed a surrealist character inspired by Aimé Césaire’s Les Tropiques (1941–1945).[26] Curaçao was one of the geographic areas along the distribution routes for Les Tropiques, which also reprinted excerpts from other Caribbean literary magazines, including Viernes (1939–1941), a high-quality journal presenting the work of writers from all over South America as well as translations by Rainer Maria Rilke and other foreign poets.[27] Engels would have been well aware of the important dialogues taking place across Les Tropiques and Viernes that transcended the French and Spanish languages in their discussion of literary theory and the role of social art.[28] It was likely these exchanges across the Caribbean in the early 1940s that formed Engels’s concept for the Curaçao Museum.
Engels’s exposure to Viernes during his time at De Stoep brought him to Caracas, an event that instigated a series of attempts to carry out cultural exchange with Venezuela. In 1951, aided by Sandberg and Dr. Riemens, the Dutch envoy to Venezuela, Engels helped bring a number of Dutch paintings to the Museum of Visual Arts in Caracas, an event that was well-received, despite fears that that the “modernity” of the works on display might not appeal to the public.[29] The works then went on to travel to the Curaçao Museum, as Engels thought that such a back-and-forth exchange between Europe and the Americas might benefit his institution.[30] By 1952, he and Lucila had bought an eighteenth-century home in Otrobanda—the Stroomzicht—which they then turned into the permanent home for the Curaçao Museum, complete with twentieth-century additions by Dutch modern architects Gerrit Rietveld and Ben Smit.[31]
The immediate postwar moment was an important period for emerging Pan-Caribbean cultural discourses, some of which began before the end of World War II. Emerging dialogues in literary magazines sought a rapprochement of the islands through a discovery of shared historical, geographical, and cultural traits. Notions of autonomy and self-determination were central to this bond, particularly as the Caribbean became an important strategic military location due to its capacity to carry out naval blockades.[32]
How, then, did these two cultural institution leaders, in conjunction with the Dutch government, help shape discourse on visual culture of the Antilles—and Curaçao, more specifically? Curaçao, Painting and Painted may have originated as an official collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum and the Association of Antillean Students in the Netherlands, but the funding came from the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company (KNSM) and Sticusa, or the Stichting voor Culturele Samenwerking (Foundation for Cultural Cooperation).[33] Sticusa played an important role in stimulating but also shaping cultural transmissions by Antillean artists that went well beyond the scope of this exhibition. As a postwar government agency often criticized as a neocolonialist enterprise, Sticusa arose from the perceived need to reinforce cultural bonds between the Netherlands and Indonesia at a time when the Kingdom was at risk of losing the territory. Because Indonesia had gained its independence in 1949, the Dutch holdings in Suriname and the Antilles received exclusive attention from Sticusa shortly after its inception, even though the organization continued to operate in Java up to 1954.
The mid-20th century was indeed an inflection point for many countries struggling to sort out their foreign policies on cultural exchange. The United States, for example, underwent sweeping changes to its Pan-American Union, headquartered in Washington, D.C. In an effort to Latin Americanize its work culture by removing Anglo-Saxon, paternalistic, and colonialist trappings, the organization favored programs that could strengthen the relationship between the United States and its important trade partners. During that time, the chief of the Visual Arts Unit, Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre, used the wide latitude offered by US Pan-American policy to valorize Latin American artists.[34] Alfred Barr, an important model for Sandberg, had certainly taken these important political transitions into consideration in his own exhibition programming as the director of MoMA between 1929 and 1943. The Netherlands, by contrast, sought to maintain or even strengthen the Kingdom’s relationships to the West Indies in what was ultimately a losing battle. In 1954, the year after the Stedelijk exhibition, Curaçao and Suriname were recognized as separate countries in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (while Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba became special municipalities).
In 1948, the year of its founding, Sticusa reached out to the poet Cola Debrot with an offer to stimulate cultural exchange with the Netherlands. Debrot, known for his best-selling 1935 novel My Sister the Negress, was a Bonaire-born poet of Dutch origins and later governor of Curaçao; he also happened to be a good friend of Chris Engels. Agreeing to take up the post if the decision-makers at Sticusa assented to his conditions, Debrot demanded that the organization bring to bear the cultural achievements of the Antilles while facilitating the practice of new activities and expanding contacts with other European nations regarding similar exchanges with the Caribbean.[35] Despite Debrot’s intentions, Sticusa faced accusations of simply recreating a colonial framework from the time of its inception.
This allegation held true when it came to the establishment of several local cultural centers, or rather “sister organizations,” affiliated with the Sticusa foundation, which included Cultureel Centrum (Cultural Center) Aruba (CCA), Bonaire (CCB), Curaçao (CCC), Sint Maarten (CCM), and Suriname (CCS). Despite the similar names of each Cultureel Centrum in the Dutch Caribbean and the Centre d’Art in Haiti, the aim and scope of these organizations were not comparable. The extent of the artistic training provided at the Sticusa-run centers was limited, offering only drawing lessons beginning in the 1960s, and none of them became official art schools. Sticusa was primarily interested in disseminating Dutch culture to these areas, rather than the other way around.[36]
Not surprisingly, money was a primary concern for Sticusa and Engels, who nixed a plan to bring an exhibition of Dutch Old Master paintings loaned from the Rijksmuseum to the new Curaçao Museum due to the exorbitant expense. The money could be better spent, Engels argued, on the acquisition of modern art for the new museum. While he still hoped to carry out the Rijksmuseum loans, he wanted to find a way to do it at a minimal cost that would not require funding from Sticusa.[37] Although the Old Master show never got off of the ground, Sandberg did help Engels realize a Vincent van Gogh exhibition at the Curaçao Museum in 1954, the first in the Antilles, or anywhere in South America.[38] Following a series of well-attended shows celebrating the centennial of Van Gogh’s birth, the iteration of the exhibition held at the Curaçao Museum should be seen as one of the first major exhibitions to lend the institution an air of legitimacy from an international perspective.
The origins of the exhibition Curaçao, Painting and Painted plausibly derived from a desire to capitalize on an emerging Caribbean aesthetic tendency and place Curaçaoan painting within a novel Pan-Caribbean Creole idiom associated with Wifredo Lam and the Haitian School. In his introductory essay for the Curaçao, Painting and Painted catalogue, Engels compared the nascent cultural awakening taking place in the Caribbean to the flourishing of great artists across Central America, from Los Tres Grandes in Mexico (naming David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, specifically) to Candido Portinari in Brazil and Armando Reverón in Venezuela.[39]
As the checklist came together, Dutch-born Charles Eyck took a prominent place in the show. Sixteen of his works depicted local subjects, such as a ferry boat, a sunset, and more than one Willemstad street scene. He was also largely responsible for the selection of artists, some of whom were not originally from Curaçao or did not currently live there. Regularly in contact with Sandberg by mail, Eyck wrote to the director about his experiments with glazed tiles inspired by motifs from the Antilles, which he manufactured in a factory in Maastricht.[40] In fact, the exhibition catalogue described glass painting as the sole local tradition in the visual arts that may or may not have been a long-standing tradition in Curaçao, a practice represented by just one artist in the show: Paulita Cornet.[41] Cola Debrot, in his review, sought to make sense of these works, and of Cornet’s practices in general. Stopping just short of praising the artist, he described her shell mosaics as remarkable, but at the same time rarely achieving the status of a work of art. He then went on to place the Curaçaoan artists on display within the context of the visual arts of the day, describing them as “transitional” in form. In contrast to the modernist idioms offered by the Americans, these transitions, Debrot argued, were deeply tied to local geology, rather than universal ideals.[42]
Of all of the works said to have made a marked impression on the public, Charles Corsen’s Madona Pretu (Black Madonna, 1950) stood out from the rest (fig. 2). This painting has been described as a “turning point” for Curaçaoan modernist art in the way that it combined various traditions into a creolized interpretation of a traditionally Catholic subject.[43] The Virgin Mary is depicted as a Black woman adorned in a headdress of a Santería priestess; the pained expression in the subject’s eyes suggests the burden of colonial oppression. Other than being a provocative subversion of an important Western symbol, this image spoke to the continued marginalization of racialized communities on the island. Of note is the influence of Marcus Garvey on the religious anti-colonial movement in early twentieth-century Curaçao. Based on his foundational concepts for the Universal Negro Improvement Association, one of Garvey’s ideas was to visualize God—as well as Jesus and the Virgin Mary—as Black, much like Europeans had depicted these figures after their own image.[44] When compared against one of Chris Engels’s submissions to Curaçao, Painting and Painted, the politics of Corsen’s painting become even more apparent. His painting Communicantje (1953), for example, depicts a young Black girl dressed in white for her holy communion (fig. 3). As the only work from the checklist to enter the Stedelijk collection (gifted by Engels himself in 1954), Engels’s attention to local color and culture better exemplifies the predominant themes that dominated the show.
Figure 2. Charles Corsen, Madona Pretu (Black Madonna), 1950, oil on cardboard. Courtesy of Curaçao Museum.
Figure 3. Chris Engels, Communicantje, 1953, oil on plywood, 80 × 45 cm. Gift of Chris Engels, 1954. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Despite the provocative inclusion of works such as Madona Pretu, the reception of the Stedelijk exhibition was not as effusive as that of 19 Painters from Haiti. Upon its opening, one reviewer heralded the exhibition as a welcome correction to the commonly held image of the island nation, stating, “When you think of Curaçao, you think of oil, of tropical heat, and perhaps also of immature political wrangling, which is an outgrowth of a community that is becoming independent.” In this muted assessment, the critic stated that Curaçao, Painting and Painted might not be the exhibition of the year, but that it certainly outshone the other shows also on view at the Stedelijk: a group of “mediocre” Danish painters and Argentine abstractionists. The reviewer did, however, praise the folk art quality of the paintings on display, noting the potential of the works to form a bond with the museum-goer by creating “room for impractical daydreaming.”[45]
This idea of somehow forging a cultural connection was a priority for the organizers, and likely came at the prodding of Sticusa. After its run at the Stedelijk, the show toured in the provinces, where each new host venue sought various ways to foster interest in the island, by appealing either to the perceived musical tastes of the local community or to their sense of civic pride. First traveling to Hoensbroek Castle in Limburg, the opening featured the music of Willemstad native Julian Coco playing Curaçaoan melodies on the guitar, followed by a poetry recitation by Henk Dennert, then-secretary of the Antilles Student Organization. Monny Kremer closed the evening with piano music by composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frédéric Chopin, and Gabriel Fauré.[46] The show then went on the Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, where Cola Debrot gave an introduction that drew attention to the ties between Curaçao and Brabant, noting the fact that a local religious congregation had founded both a hospital and contributed to the “flourishing of education” on the island.[47] This traveling exhibition appealed to the value of Curaçaoan art by ingratiating the local population’s sense of noblesse oblige. After all, Sticusa’s stated dedication to “reciprocity” in this cultural exchange avoided any appearance of self-interest or one-sidedness that would make obvious the aim to spread Dutch culture overseas.[48]
By 1953, on the heels of Curaçao, Painting and Painted, Engels staged another installment of his annual Exhibicion Di nos Arte that included the work of Charles Corsen, among others. Open to the public, Engels viewed this exhibition as a potential modernist laboratory, inviting Sandberg to see the show and potentially discover new artists.[49] At this same time, Engels was looking for ways to expand into South and Central America to discover more modernist artists and exhibit them to the public. To that end, he encouraged Sandberg’s planned travels to Mexico and Brazil to find new artists and ideas for exhibitions. In late January of 1954, Sandberg served on the jury at the second São Paulo Biennial, a prime venue for identifying South American artists whose work could potentially travel to the new museum for a future show.[50] Engels offered to help pay for Sandberg’s travel costs, so the latter could make an extended layover in Willemstad, but there was little funding other than Sticusa and the museum itself.[51] While Sandberg did not collect any of the works shown in Curaçao, Painting and Painted, the strides he had made in bringing visibility to Curaçaoan modernist practice did not go to waste. In many ways he continued to have a profound influence on the expansion of postwar modernist practice on the island, but also on institutional collecting of Caribbean art in the Netherlands.
The question as to why Sandberg opted not to collect the artists on view at his 1953 show may not have a simple answer. It has been suggested that he likely did not seek out these works because of their Western character, however, the frequent praise of the “primitive” paintings on display contradicts this assertion.[52] Unlike Alfred Barr and René d’Harnoncourt, Sandberg did not have in place a clear cultural objective equivalent to the MoMA directors’ Pan-American acquisition goals. For Barr, this meant using the museum to abet US foreign policy in order to bolster relationships with neighboring Latin American countries in the postwar years. Such initiatives existed in cooperation with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy and the Pan-American Union. By contrast, the Netherlands’ desire to preserve its identity as a kingdom with holdings in the Americas during the postwar period undermined the potential of using culture in the same kind of ambassadorial way when it came to the Antilles. As a result, Sticusa and the organizers struggled to pique the interest of Dutch museum-goers. It could also simply be that Sandberg was following the lead of major international trends when he put on the Haitian exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 1950, only a few years after the two major UNESCO modern art exhibitions in Paris, in 1946 and 1947, both of which featured the work of Haitian naïf painters.
It was not until after Sandberg stepped down as director that the Stedelijk began to purchase Curaçaoan art, although never on a large scale. In 1967, under the leadership of Edy de Wilde, the museum acquired four new paintings by Hipólito Ocalia (fig. 4–6). This marked a shift in the acceptance of Curaçaoan art in the Netherlands more generally, particularly when it came to the collection of naïf-style painting, such as the opening of Galerie Hamer in 1969, the first venue in Amsterdam dedicated to the collection and sale of outsider art. By the 1970s, even Sticusa—trying to rid itself of its neocolonialist pallor—began to build a collection of Antillean art, including Ocalia’s paintings.[53] All things considered, Sandberg’s 1953 Curaçao, Painting and Painted may not have had an immediate impact on the purchase of Antillean artwork in the Netherlands, but his early efforts helped Engels further the development of a local modernist idiom. Some of the methods used in the exhibition’s organization certainly bear the imprint of Sticusa—most notably the importation of Dutch-born artists painting subjects inspired by the culture and beauty of the island.
Figure 4. Hipólito Ocalia, Seroe grandi, Curçao, 1967, oil on plywood, 62 × 122.5 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 5. Hipólito Ocalia, Lodge. Central de teléfonos Curaçao, 1966, oil on plywood, 40 × 55.5 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 6. Hipólito Ocalia, De Tafelberg bij Nieuwpoort, Curaçao, 1965, oil on plywood, 60.5 × 67 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 7. Hipólito Ocalia, Lange Straat 34, Curaçao, 1966, oil on plywood, 39 × 58 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Where, then, does the more widespread notion of an artistic “rebirth” in the Antilles—or simply “birth” in the case of Curaçao—fit within this narrative? I view the concept of a Caribbean Renaissance as a vehicle for building the reputations of key cultural figures responsible for “discovering” local modernist practitioners on the islands. This is particularly evident when considering the unique project of the Centre d’Art in Haiti and the work of Rodman and DeWitt Peters—two American impresarios who placed a premium on the selling point of undistilled “authenticity.” As Carlo Célius has since argued, after 1945, the identities of socially marginalized and untaught painters appealed to Western audiences because of their perceived status as true local creators.[54] Such artists served their white benefactors as grist to the mill, to be discovered and cultivated, echoing colonialist ambitions for the islands themselves.
How might we consider the historical roles of Sandberg and Engels in light of the part played by DeWitt Peters and Selden Rodman in Haiti—two white foreigners—who often drew talent from the pool of local, untrained artists in their quest for a local primitivist style? Any consideration of the Curaçao Museum and its legacy should frame the institution’s origins as a natural outgrowth of the literary magazine tradition and its attendant spirit of Pan-Caribbean exchange. While Sandberg and Engels were certainly appreciative of the Haitians’ naïf qualities, they did not make plans to build a paternalistic institutional framework equivalent to Centre d’Art. Taking a prototypically Dutch-egalitarian approach, Engels—an artist himself—was primarily interested in finding new exhibition opportunities for himself and the friends who frequented his informal salons. The fact that no art training facility existed on the island until the foundation of the Curaçao Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s speaks to the lack of urgency on the part of the Dutch government to invest in such opportunities, except when it served an expressly political purpose.
In the end, what Sandberg and Engels’s intervention into Curaçaoan modernism reveals is that the Dutch investment in “primitive” aesthetics did not find success in answering the Sticusa directive to strengthen bonds with former colonies. After all, Peters and Rodman were really mining the tastes of an audience with a very similar demographic profile to their own, meaning white, upper class, and educated. If we are to judge from the positive reception in the Netherlands to naïf folk qualities of the Haitian painters, then there did in fact exist a receptive Dutch audience to such a style in Curaçao. Engels’s commitment to his circle, combined with Sandberg’s ambivalent regard for Curaçaoan modernism, however, meant there was neither the infrastructure nor the will to exploit the market for naïf painting at the time of Sandberg’s tenure.
Stephanie Lebas Huber received her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she concentrated on twentieth-century painting and film history. Her writing has appeared in Modernism/Modernity, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Millennium Film Journal, AfterImage, Burlington Magazine, Hyperallergic, and ARTMargins. Her book titled, “Dutch Neorealism, Cinema, and the Politics of Painting, 1927–1945″ will be published with Routledge Taylor/Francis in 2024.
[1] Cola Debrot, “Een voorgoed begonnen begin ofwel een Curaçoase tentoonstelling in Nederland,” in Cola Debrot, Verzameld werk I: over Antilleaanse cultuur (Meulenhoff: Amsterdam, 1985), 227.
[2] Adi Martis and Jennifer Smit, Arte Dutch Caribbean Art, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 2002), 9–12.
[3] The writer John de Pool serves as a source for these histories. He recorded the activities of these artists in his book Curaçao que se va (1935). See Martis and Smit, Arte Dutch Caribbean Art, 16–17.
[4] Selden Rodman, Renaissance in Haiti: Popular Painters in the Black Republic (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948), 4.
[5] Michel-Philippe Lerebours, Brief Overview of Two Centuries of Haitian Painting (1804–2004) (Éditions de l’Université d’État d’Haïti, 2005), 31.
[6] Chris Engels, Curaçao, Schilderend en Geschilderd, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1953), 3.
[7] Maarten Jager, Tropisch Koninkrijk: Hedendaagsce Kunst van Aruba, Curaçao, St. Maarten, Bonaire, Saba en St. Eustatius, exh. cat. (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgeverij de Kunst, 2013), 16.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ad Petersen and Pieter Brattinga, eds., Sandberg: Een Documentaire (Amsterdam: Kosmos, 1975), 63.
[10] Ank Leeuw Marcar, Willem Sandberg: Portrait of an Artist (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013), 87.
[11] Stedelijk Collection Reflections: Reflections on the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum and nai010 publishers, 2012), 303–305.
[12] Jager, Tropisch Koninkrijk, 13.
[13] Ibid., 17–18.
[14] Undated letters from Engels to unknown recipient, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2688.
[15] Letter from Engels to Sandberg, dated June 1949, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2685.
[16] Jager, Tropisch Koninkrijk, 16.
[17] Martis and Smit, Arte Dutch Caribbean Art, 45.
[18] Jager, Tropisch Koninkrijk, 45. Petersen and Brattinga, Sandberg: Een Documentaire, 64.
[19] Petersen and Brattinga, Sandberg: Een Documentaire, 64.
[20] Cornell sculptor Jason Seley, who praised the paintings on display in a letter from 1950. See letter from Jason Seley, dated August 11, 1950, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2691.
[21] Ed Hoornik, “Culturele uitwisseling: De expositie-Engels maakte Haitiaanse indruk,” Amigoe di Curaçao, November 11, 1950, 6.
[22] Jager, Tropisch Koninkrijk, 45; Yvette Mutumba and Maurice Rummens, “Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at 125 Years,” Stedelijk Studies, no. 11 (2022).
[23] Letter from Engels to Sandberg, dated June 1949, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2685. See also three photographs by Foto Fischer in Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2687.
[24] Typewritten letter from Engels to Sandberg, dated December 30, 1951, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2688.
[25] Martis and Smit, Arte Dutch Caribbean Art, 20.
[26] Jan de Heer, De Stoep: Chris Engels en de Literatuur op Curaçao, 1940–1951 (Edam: LM Publishers, 2018), 73–74.
[27] Ibid., 77.
[28] Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, Writing in the Caribbean in Magazine Time (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 140–141.
[29] Typewritten letter from Engels to Sandberg, dated December 30, 1951, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2688.
[30] Ibid. See also “Schilderijen Tentoonstelling in Curaçaos Museum,” Amigoe di Curaçao, October 9, 1951, 2.
[31] Jennifer Smit, “Curaçao: Hub in the Caribbean,” in Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World, eds. Deborah Cullen and Elvis Fuentes, exh. cat. (New York and New Haven: El Museo del Barrio and Yale University Press, 2013), 171.
[32] Seligmann, Writing in the Caribbean in Magazine Time, 1–2.
[33] For an announcement of these different partners see “‘Curaçao, schilderend en geschilderd’ Hedenavond opening van tentoonstelling,” Amigoe di Curaçao, October 2, 1953, 3.
[34] Claire Fox, Making Art Pan-American: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 3–4.
[35] Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, “Introduction: Emergence of Language and Literature,” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean: English- and Dutch-speaking countries (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1994), 361.
[36] Martis and Smit, Arte Dutch Caribbean Art, 30–31.
[37] Undated letters from Engels to unknown recipient, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2688.
[38] Jager, Tropisch Koninkrijk, 17.
[39] Engels, Curaçao, Schilderend en Geschilderd, 3.
[40] Letter from Charles Eyck to Willem Sandberg, dated 1953, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2689.
[41] Jager, Tropisch Koninkrijk, 20–22.
[42] Cola Debrot, “Een voorgoed begonnen begin ofwel een Curaçoase tentoonstelling in Nederland,” in Verzameld Werk I: Over Antiliaanse cultuur (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1985), 227, 230.
[43] See Jennifer Smit and Felix de Rooy, Curaçao Classics: Visual Arts/Artes Plásticas, 1900–2010, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stichting Arte ’99, Curaçao, and KIT Publishers, 2012), 19.
[44] Stephanie Archangel, “Harlem and the Dutch Caribbean,” in The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, ed. Denise Murrell, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2024), 106–107.
[45] Curaçao, Schilderend en geschilderd,” Provinciale Drentsche en Asser courant, October 24, 1953, 5.
[46] This Hoensbroek Castle exhibition ran from November 12 to December 7, 1953. See “‘Curaçao, schilderend en geschilderd’ Tentoonstelling in Hoensbroek,” Gazet van Limburg, November 13, 1953, 11.
[47] The ’s-Hertogenbosch exhibition ran from December 19, 1953 to January 11, 1954. See “Curaçao, schilderend en geschilderd,” Provinciaale Noord Brabantsche Courant, December 21, 1953.
[48] Gert Oostindie, Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 208.
[49] Letter from Engels to Sandberg, dated October 28, 1953, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2689.
[50] Ibid. Lucila Engels’s painting The Blue Woman (1951) was the first Curaçaoan work shown at a São Paulo Biennial, in 1955. Both Chris and Lucila would regularly show their work at subsequent biennials in the 1960s. See Martis and Smit, Arte Dutch Caribbean Art, 22.
[51] Letter from Engels to Sandberg, dated October 28, 1953, Stadsarchief Amsterdam 2689.
[52] See Mutumba and Rummens, “Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at 125 Years.”
[53] See “Sticusa Koopt Twee Werken,” Amigoe di Curaçao, January 2, 1974, 8.
[54] Carlo A. Célius, Création plastique d’Haïti: Art et culture visuelle en colonie et postcolonie (Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2023), 20.
Huber, Stephanie Lebas. “Willem Sandberg, Chris Engels, and the Midcentury ‘Birth’ of Modern Art in Curaçao.” Stedelijk Studies Journal 14 (2024). https://doi.org/10.54533/. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
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