Author: Marijke Peyser
As a child, J.H. Moesman studied art intensively. As well as drawing lessons at primary school, in 1918 he spent every Saturday afternoon for a year taking lessons in the studio of Josef Hoevenaar, the drawing master of the Utrecht-based Kunstliefde society. Afterwards on those free afternoons, Moesman received training designed for future gold and silversmiths, ornamental painters, stonemasons and furniture makers – occupations in which an outstanding mastery of draughtsmanship is essential.[1] In the 1920s he took drawing lessons at Kunstliefde and took part in the gatherings where drawing was practised under the guidance of the artist Willem van Leusden. During one of those lessons the twelve year-old Moesman made his first drawing of a female nude model.
At Kunstliefde they experimented with drawing models in different styles; there are drawings by Moesman that reference the constructive work of the Russian artist Alexander Archipenko, for example. Moesman’s untitled drawing (1928) shows a woman built up from spheres and cylinders.[2] In 1928-29 Archipenko’s manner of drawing was abandoned and there was an about-turn, initiated by the students, to a Surrealist approach. Moesman and his fellow artists Louis Wijmans and Gerrit van ’t Net explored the borders between figuration and abstraction. They worked by turns with charcoal, pencil, coloured chalk, gouache, watercolours, ink and pastel. Wijmans, Van ’t Net and Moesman had much in common: their drawings were built up from contrasts of black, white and coloured fields, they left out body parts or accentuated them and they also introduced elements in their drawings that had an alienating effect. Moesman’s watercolour Open Doors (1929) for example, depicts a landscape with four open doors with a black cloud coming out of them.[3]
Moesman’s drawing Untitled depicts a man whose upper and lower body are separated from each other. The two body parts are shown stylized, anatomically correct and with realistic proportions. The fact that the drawing seems alienating is because the man looks as though he has been cut in two. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Moesman became inspired by the movement and created his first Surrealist paintings after seeing Surrealist magazines in Willem Wagenaar’s Nord gallery in Utrecht. He regularly made model drawings that he used as ‘aids’ for his painted compositions.[4] The fragmented male figure can be seen as a parody of traditional art education which mainly consists of drawing plaster models and making copies of drawings by old masters, taking into account the right perspective. In these works Moesman was experimenting to his heart’s content: omissions, cross-sections, fragmentation and repetition were the order of the day. The Dutch Surrealists were virtually unknown to their fellow artists in France. Thanks to Her de Vries, who set up the Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes en Hollande in 1959, Moesman’s work came to the notice of André Breton in the 1960s.
