1876 The Hague – 1923 Domburg
Bild 54 (Image 54)
oil on canvas, 32.2 x 40 cm
signed lower right: Jacoba van Heemskerck
dated on the side of the painting: 1916.
provenance:
with Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, 1917;
with Kunsthandel M.L. de Boer, Amsterdam, 1961;
Mr. Bertus Meijer, Wassenaar, inv. no.335, probably acquired from the above;
thence by descent.
exhibited:
- Berlin, Galerie Der Sturm, Dreiundachtzigste Ausstellung: Jacoba van Heemskerck, Gemälde und Aquarelle, Zeichnen, Holzschnitte, Januar 1917, no 27;
- Berlin, Galerie Der Sturm, Zweiundsechzigste Ausstellung: Jacoba van Heemskerck, Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnen, Holzschnitte, March 1918, no 23;
- Berlin, Galerie Der Sturm, Hundertneunundzwanzigste Ausstellung: Jacoba van Heemskerck, Gedächtnis-Ausstellung, March 1924, no 16;
- Amsterdam, Kunsthandel de Boer, Stillevens van Ensor tot heden, May-June 1964.
Bright colors, dynamic shapes and strong black lines characterize this composition straddling abstraction and expressionism. While Bild 54, the title given by the artist Jacoba van Heemskerck, does not give away what the beholder can see, recognizable elements such as the white bird identify the composition as as an abstracted landscape. The rounded form in the upper left may refer to the sun or moon, while the blue areas suggest water or sky, and the greens and browns evoke vegetation. Alongside these vibrant colors, the broad black lines play a decisive role in structuring the composition. The landscape does not adhere to traditional notions of spatial depth; instead, the composition is carefully constructed and restricted to the two-dimensional realm. In some areas, no paint has been applied, leaving the canvas visible reinforcing the emphasis on materiality and surface.
Jacoba van Heemskerck’s artistic career gained decisive momentum in 1913, when she was invited to participate in the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin, a landmark exhibition of the international avant-garde. Three years later, in the midst of the First World War, Van Heemskerck painted Bild 54. At this time, the influential Berlin art dealer Herwarth Walden, founder of the gallery Der Sturm, had become a close friend and held exclusive rights to sell her work and played a decisive role in positioning her within the international avant-garde. Walden’s Galerie Der Sturm constituted one of the most extensive and influential modernist networks of the early twentieth century. Operating from Berlin, it connected artists, writers, and composers across Europe, Russia, and the United States through a multidisciplinary platform that included a gallery, journal, art school, and lecture program. Through exhibitions organized in multiple countries and through the magazine Der Sturm—on whose cover Van Heemskerck’s work appeared no fewer than twenty times—modernist ideas and artistic practices circulated rapidly across national boundaries.
Bild 54 was exhibited at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin in 1917, 1918, and again in 1924, where it was shown alongside works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke. This context underscores Van Heemskerck’s close alignment with the spiritual and intellectual ambitions of the Der Sturm circle, in which abstraction was understood as a means of revealing non-material realities and art’s transformative potential. Like Kandinsky and other artists associated with the gallery, Van Heemskerck drew on theosophical ideas that conceived abstraction not as a rejection of nature, but as a distillation of its underlying spiritual structures and universal principles.
Van Heemskerck’s international success was received ambivalently in the Netherlands, where her work was often viewed critically and at times with a measure of resentment. Within the Dutch art world of the early twentieth century, she occupied an exceptional position as a strong and independent woman—openly homosexual and radically modern in outlook—who stood apart from prevailing artistic and social norms. Contemporary Dutch art criticism was largely conservative and, when modernist tendencies were acknowledged, tended to privilege developments in France over those emerging from Germany. The visual language of German modernism, with its pronounced contour lines and expressive structural emphasis—formal qualities central to Van Heemskerck’s work—contributed significantly to its uneasy reception in her home country.
Jacoba van Heemskerck was the most successful Dutch female avant-garde artist of the early twentieth century. Born into an aristocratic family in The Hague as the daughter of the painter Jacob Eduard van Heemskerck van Beest, she received a rigorous academic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. Formative periods in the artists’ colony in Het Gooi and in Paris at the Académie Eugène Carrière further exposed her to progressive artistic currents and encouraged an early departure from academic naturalism. Exhibitions in Paris attest to her ambition to position herself beyond a purely national framework.
From 1911 onward, Van Heemskerck spent the summer months in Domburg, which between 1908 and 1914 functioned as a center of artistic innovation in the Netherlands. Drawn there in part by chronic health concerns, she found in the coastal landscape both physical relief and artistic stimulus. Within the progressive Domburg circle, which included Piet Mondrian, she engaged with questions of spirituality and the abstraction of nature. Her work from this period marks a decisive turn toward abstraction, often grounded in landscape motifs and informed by theosophical thought.
Central to Van Heemskerck’s artistic independence was the support of her lifelong partner, Marie Tak van Poortvliet, whose financial autonomy, intellectual engagement, and commitment to modern art enabled the artist to pursue an uncompromising trajectory. Despite considerable international visibility during her lifetime, Van Heemskerck’s work was received ambivalently in the Netherlands, where it was often perceived as overly aligned with German modernism. After the Second World War, this perception—reinforced by anti-German sentiment and the structural marginalization of women artists—contributed to her relative absence from canonical art-historical narratives. Her early death in 1923 further curtailed her ability to consolidate her position. Recent scholarship, however, has reasserted Van Heemskerck’s importance as a pioneering figure of early abstraction, whose oeuvre exemplifies the transnational character of modernism and the close interrelation of spirituality and artistic innovation.