Bram Bogart: ‘He took a tradition begun in northern Europe by Rembrandt and Rubens, and he exploded it’

Around the beginning of the 1950s, a handful of renegade painters decided to rethink the boundaries of their practice. In America, Jackson Pollock was intuitively pouring enamel paint over unprimed cotton to create work that fused gesture with chance. In Italy, Lucio Fontana began puncturing holes in his canvas in order to explore the void beneath its surface. And in the Netherlands, Bram Bogart (1921-2012) started to paint with great globs of encrusted matter, a practice that would imbue his pictures with an intense physical presence.

‘The artist is constantly trying to find new ideas, i.e., to use the same material to make new works that are totally different, in form and colour, from the previous ones,’ Bogart would reflect in his 1986 manifesto, Sculptural Paintings. ‘A contributory factor has been the influence of abstraction, which has allowed works of art even more freedom.’

At the height of his career, the Dutch-Belgian painter was creating huge, radiant abstractions that could weigh up to 300 kilograms apiece. Sometimes they required floor supports, and even reinforced gallery walls.

‘Bogart was constantly challenging the limitations of two-dimensionality,’ says Peter van der Graaf, a senior specialist in Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in Brussels. ‘He took a tradition begun in northern Europe by Rembrandt and Rubens — who pioneered the application of thicker areas of paint in order to create shadows within a work’s own frame — and he exploded it.’

Bogart was born on 12 July 1921 in the Dutch city of Delft. The son of a blacksmith, he graduated from the local technical college aged 15 as a qualified house painter — an experience he later said gave him a singular command over his medium.

After a brief stint designing movie posters, Bogart began painting landscapes and still lifes inspired by Low Countries painters such as Van Gogh. They caught the attention of a dealer named Bennewitz in The Hague, who mounted the artist’s first public show in 1939. But within months of the exhibition’s opening, the German invasion of the Netherlands forced the artist into hiding. In 1943, to avoid deportation to a forced labour camp, Bogart enrolled at The Hague’s Fine Arts Academy.

Bogart’s early work is often associated with the CoBrA group, a collective that existed from 1948 to 1951 and championed primitivism and spontaneous interpretations of Nordic myths.

His paintings are perhaps better understood, however, in terms of Art Informel, a movement that embraced intuition and irrationality. Bogart often attended meetings at the circle’s de facto headquarters, Caffè Rosati in Rome, mingling with other European players including Fontana, Alberto Burri and Karel Appel, as well as Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning visiting from America.

Monochrome dominated Bogart’s work from the late 1950s, sometimes with hints of vermilion or Prussian blue hidden beneath a dense knot of grey brushwork. Fontana would later recall the power of the Dutchman’s paintings: ‘For many years now I’ve met the painter Bogart in Paris, and yet I cannot forget the impression that I had when watching his paintings the first time I saw them in his studio.’

Many continental critics didn’t share the avant-garde vision of Bogart and Fontana. One Dutch newspaper labelled Bogart’s mountains of unmixed colour: ‘paint in its most stupid manifestation’.

In London Bogart’s work was more warmly welcomed. In 1957 he was invited to exhibit alongside Jean Dubuffet in a touring show organised by the Arts Council. The following year he landed a solo show at Gimpel Fils gallery, where The Times described his pictures as ‘sensuous’ and like ‘rock faces’.

In 1959, Bogart also exhibited alongside the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who was so moved by the heavy impasto of his surfaces that she was inspired to create her ‘shotgun paintings’, taking aim at bags of coloured paint placed over canvases caked in white.

By 1962 Bogart had relocated to Belgium with his wife, Leni — settling first in Brussels, then in rural Ohain, where he enjoyed a more spacious studio. ‘The influence of this emptiness was soon noticeable in my work,’ he said.

Bogart’s pictures swelled as he pushed the boundaries of his material even further. Bulky forms — created with raw pigments, oil, powdered chalk, glue and varnish — outgrew the parameters of their frames to such an extent that wooden stretchers had to be swapped for metal supports. Colours also become bolder, echoing the rise of Pop art.

Archive video from this period shows Bogart in his studio, surrounded by buckets of cement-like paint, which he frenetically pours over jute-covered panels laid on the floor. Then, with sweeping, powerful strokes, he uses a large trowel to manipulate it like the icing of a cake.

‘I was starting to see how important the borders of a painting were,’ he recalled. ‘Extending the material over the borders of the painting to give a certain looseness of broad outline.’

During the 1960s, Bogart also started to garner attention from museums, exhibiting in group shows at the Louvre in Paris and the Guggenheim in New York, and in one-man shows at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. This recognition culminated in 1970 with the artist being selected to represent Belgium at the 35th Venice Biennale.

Some 40 years later, however, on 2 May 2012, Bogart passed away in Belgium at the age of 90 in relative obscurity. Van der Graaf acknowledges that although Bogart has remained a local hero, his work never gained international recognition equal to many of his peers. ‘If Bogart was French or Italian, it might have happened,’ says the specialist, ‘but his domestic market was just too small.’

In December 2019, White Cube announced that it would be representing Bram Bogart’s estate, beginning with a solo show at its flagship gallery in Mason’s Yard in London. Around the same time, Bogart’s 1974 work White plane white went on display at Tate Modern. In 2022, Museum Prinsenhof in Delft opened a Bogart retrospective, confirming the artist’s posthumous resurgence.

Today, his works are to be found at Tate Modern in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Yuan Art Museum in Beijing, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, among other institutions.

Accordingly, prices have climbed. ‘Bogart’s later works represent his iconic style. These pieces are more in demand in Holland and Belgium, where people know and love his work,’ Van der Graaf explains. ‘On the flip side, his works from the 1950s and 1960s represent the artist at his most experimental, and are often more popular with international collectors.’

His auction record, however, stands at just $130,499. Could that be about to change? ‘Last November, a small painting from 1979 called Kleingroen (Small Green) sold for €52,920 [around $57,000], more than 10 times its low estimate of €4,000,’ notes Van der Graaf. ‘It’s great to see Bogart finally re-emerging. He deserves it.’

20th/21st Century: Amsterdam is live for bidding online until 23 April 2024, with viewing from 16 to 23 April at Christie’s in Amsterdam. The sale explores pioneering artists of the post-war era and includes works from the Neue Wilde movement, alongside exceptional contemporary pieces