Bram Bogart

Vocation

Lifestyle

Notable

Dutch born Belgian abstract painter. Bram Bogart was the son of Abraham van den Boogaart, a blacksmith and Cornelia Stichter, who married 27 October 1915 in Delft. He was educated as a house painter and decorator. This background stimulated him to make more sustainable action and dripping paintings then his abstract painting contemporaries did. Thick layered oil paintings tend to burst and crack and are thus a horror to Museum curators. From 1933 till 1936 he got his education at the Delft "ambachtschool" (school for crafts) and took a 2 years course of drawing paid by his father. In 1939 he became a full time artist, thanks to the financial support of art dealer Robert James Willemsz Bennewitz (1902-1976) from Den Haag. In 1943 he studied at the art academy in Den Haag, from 1944 till 1945 he had to hide to escape the ArbeitstsEinsatz (forced labour) in Nazi Germany. After the war he hitch-hiked to Paris, as that was the place to be. Here he met the Dutch Cobra artists Karel Appel, Corneile and the Begian writer and painter Hugo Claus. Bogart refused to become part of the Cobra movement, as he believed that the work of Appel and Corneille to much depended on chance and impulsiveness. Bogart on the other hand stressed the craftsmanship in his work and like the old masters made his paint him selves. In 1947 he became sick and returned to Delft, where he was hospitalised for two months. In the autumn he returned to France, where he spent most of the time in the South. He had first problems finding galleries. In the middle of 1952 he changes name, now signing his work as Bram Bogart. In 1953 he experiences a kind of liberation. He becomes befriended with painter Bengt Lindström. In February 1955 he holds a big private exhibition in the Creuze gallery in Paris, that year also in Frankfurt. Bogart found inspiration with Cezanne, Van Gogh and Constant Permeke, but in 1950 started abstract painting. Under the influence of the mystical painter Piet Mondriaan he wrote: "Everything in nature can be reduced (in its simplified form) to the sign, rectangle, square, cross and circle. They are also always those forms that have played a role in the development of my work." In 1958 he met the artist "Leni" Abelina Sjoukje Vos (4 October 1936, Eindhoven). On 14 February 1962 they married in Brussel. The couple got three children: Cornelia (15 Jan 1964), Inge (5 Jan 1967) and Bram (5 April 1971). In 1969 he took the Belgian nationality. In July 1984 he bought an old paper factory in Brussels, to make a studio of it, but on 13 May 1987 it was completely destroyed by fire. A number of his works were damaged. He died at age 90 on 2 May 2012 in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. Link to Dutch Wikipedia