Anton Heyboer

Anton Heyboer (; 9 February 1924 – 9 April 2005) was a Dutch painter and printmaker.

Biography According to the informational booklet "Anton Heyboer: Timeless Work", he was born on the small island of Pulau Weh in the north of Sumatra as the son of a Dutch mechanical engineer and a school teacher. His father worked in the coal harbour there for Shell Oil and his mother worked in the local school for Dutch children. Heyboer was so popular with women that they needed to put an alarm near the entrance of the "Groene Kruis" house they were painting in, in order to keep girlfriends from walking in unannounced. He helped start the club ”Vereniging Drentse schilders” and began painting intensively. After a year the place became known as "Rembrandtplein". His parents divorced that year and in the spring of 1950 Anton married Elsa (Puk). His witnesses were Henri Frédéric Boot and Josef Santen. This first marriage was Anton's initial attempt at free love and it added too much stress. Anton's mental state deteriorated in the course of that autumn and in the winter he was first hospitalized in the hospital behind his house to convalesce, though he later felt he needed psychoanalysis.

Nervous breakdown

In 1951 Heyboer was so struck by a dying cat that he was overcome with feelings of loneliness and felt he needed psychiatric treatment. In January he admitted himself to the Psychiatric Hospital in Santpoort. He was diagnosed with a "Christus complex". This period was another important turning point in his development as an artist, and it was after this period that he developed his "System" for showing others the "innocence" of their lives. He was only allowed out of the hospital if he had a place to live, and he found a sponsor in the art dealer Pieter Leffelaar and the writer Godfried Bomans who organized living space for him at "Het Paradijsje", and a position as barkeeper at Teisterbant. Teisterbant was an art society, that Godfried had founded in 1949, which met in the basement of a café on the Grote Markt, Haarlem. In the summer the club met in the garden of Paradijsje, and Anton and Elsa took boating trips to IJmuiden, where Anton romanticized the "freedom of the sea" and attempted to live completely independently by fishing, collecting leftovers from the eel smokeries and bartering his works for other goods and services with friends, fishermen, and members of the Teisterbant circle. In the spring of 1951 Anton helped form a new arts group called De Groep that split off from Kunst zij ons doel. The KZOD board was upset because they lost most of their young members and started a committee to coax the members of 'De Groep' back and these talks were also held in the meeting hall of Teisterbant. In December 1952 Anton had an exhibition of his work with others from 'De Groep' at the Huis van Looy on the Kleine Houtweg. His bohemian lifestyle ended when Anton and Elsa's son Andries was born in August 1952.

Klein Heiligland

Heyboer moved with Elsa and Andries to Klein Heiligland 1, the printshop of his brother-in-law Ger Henkes. On the Klein Heiligland he made etchings and plaster sculptures and was visited by Bomans and artists from his Haarlem Teisterbant circle.

In the spring of 1953 Anton met the 16-year-old Erna Kramer. They fell in love, and Anton introduced her almost immediately to his friend Godfried and then moved his studio into a shed behind her parents house. Anton had long conversations with Godfried Bomans about Catholicism, but in September 1953 the Bomans left for a year in Rome and Anton spent the winter making etchings and working on his "System", based on the numbers 1-9 from the Kabbalah. He gave lessons and received artists in two conjoined houses on the Klein Heiligland that according to period accounts, were filthy and infested with rats. This launched his career as an artist and in 1958 he wrote to the city of Haarlem to inform them that he would no longer be sending them works for consideration for the SBBK commission.

Amsterdam The success of Heyboer's art did not result in a happier marriage; after convincing Erna to live on a boat again they moved to Amsterdam supposedly en route southwards. The prospect of spending a cold winter on board the boat with a baby made Erna decide to leave and in the fall of 1958 she returned to Haarlem with Marcelle and in 1959 they divorced so that Anton could marry his new love Yvonne. His marriage with Yvonne only lasted until halfway through 1960 and in the fall of that year he moved with his new love Maria to a farmhouse in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel.

Works

After receiving training as a draughtsman, Heyboer made works consisting of landscape drawings and cartoon illustrations, later creating etching plates that he then sold on to printers. Some of these are directly related to the work of other popular artists, as he created them on commission. In the early war years, he made some illustrations for the Joh. Enschedé company, one of the few Haarlem businesses that was still able to support young artists. From 1950 he was in the SBBK and for his "Contraprestatie", he submitted works regularly. This was a support scheme whereby Anton was dependent on the judgement of the artist-commissioners in the judgement committee, and during the years he was in the program these were Levinus Tollenaar and Mari Andriessen.

Commune in Den Ilp

Unlike his earlier wives, Maria (who was formerly known as "Ria") accepted his lifestyle completely, and when they moved to Den Ilp it was in the understanding that they lived in complete "innocence" according to Anton's "System". Heyboer renamed her Maria in honor of the holy mother. Whenever he fell in love with another woman, Maria opened the door of their home and thus Anton's famous commune was founded that is known as "De Bruiden van Heyboer" (the brides of Heyboer), which include the women Maria (from 1960), Ingrid (1964 only), Lotti (from 1965), Marike (from 1974), Joke (from 1975). They still live there and receive visitors to the Heyboer homestead. The fifth, Petra (from 1987), lives on the other side of the road in her own gallery.

Breakthrough Certificate of "honorary engraver" from the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, awarded to Anton in 1964. In the 1960s, Heyboer's art began to receive international recognition. He was a loyal client of the Galerie Espace and participated in various exhibitions recommended by them. He showed works in the Documenta 2 in 1959, the Documenta 3 (1964), and the Documenta 4 (1969) in Kassel, each in the department of graphic arts. In 1962 he received the Ohara Museum Prize in the 3rd International Biennale of Prints in Tokyo, Japan, and in 1964 the "Accademia Fiorentina delle arte del disegno" of Florence made him "Academico Onorario classe incisione".

Break with the art market In 1984 Anton Heyboer broke with Espace and the entire establishment of museums and the art market in general. His wife Petra Heijboer-Timmermans who left her gallery in Laren in order to set up a new "gallery" in Den Ilp, took (and still takes) care of the marketing and sale of his artwork to anyone who showed up on his doorstep. Her "Anton Heyboer gallery" has become a pilgrimage of sorts.

The Dutch comedian André van Duin paid a visit to the Heyboer Den Ilp homestead in 1996 and included it in his comedy TV show in his role as meneer Wijdbeens.

Legacy

On 10 April 2002 Heyboer was awarded the honorary title Ridder in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau. His most valued works are considered to be from his earlier years from the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, before he formally broke with the art world.

In 2012 an exhibition of his Haarlem works was to be shown at the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, but the museum cancelled because the owner of the works, Couzijn Simon, was unable to show the provenance of the works in a way that satisfied the museum's directors. He claimed to have bought from a "Mr. Bijvoet", a friend of Heyboer. A later comment on this TV interview was given by another gallery owner who claimed that he owned a false Heyboer and that more of Heyboer's contemporaries had had forgeries of their works appearing on the market, and that the reservations about provenance made by the art taxation expert Willem de Winter (of Kunst en Kitsch) were probably correct. In the TV interview it was clear from a short clip of Heyboer at work (from TV archives) that the artist would have been delighted to see such posthumous squabbling occurring among art lovers about his work.