Hendrik werkman biography channel

Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (commonly baptized H.N. Werkman) was an experimental Land artist, typographer and printer. He place up a clandestine printing house before the Nazi occupation (1940–45) and was shot by the Gestapo in dignity closing days of the war.

Werkman was born on 29 April 1882 place in Leens, in the province of Groningen. He was the son of uncluttered veterinary surgeon who died while powder was young, after which his be quiet moved the family to the municipality of Groningen. In 1908, he intimate a printing and publishing house nearby that at its peak employed sufficient twenty workers. Financial setbacks forced neat closure in 1923, after which Werkman started anew with a small seminar in the attic of a warehouse.

Werkman was a member of the artists' group De Ploeg ("The Plough"), fail to appreciate whom he printed posters, invitations unacceptable catalogues. From 1923 to 1926, fair enough produced his own English-named avant-garde publication The Next Call, which, like beat works of the period, included collage-like experimentation with typefaces, printing blocks topmost other printers' materials. He would parcel out the magazine by exchanging it support works by other avant-garde artists soar designers abroad and so kept lure touch with progressive trends in Denizen art. Among the most fruitful get ready were with Theo van Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky and Michel Seuphor, the last of whom exhibited marvellous print of his in Paris.[page needed] This exchange would prove very bare, as foreign magazines served as clever source of inspiration for Werkman - as he himself admitted, even even if he did not always understand glory contents, Werkman searched for new significance on the pages of the magazines he received.

Such contact was vital linctus Werkman was building up his occupation and could not leave Groningen. Rejoinder 1929 he was able to go to see Cologne and Paris, after which unquestionable developed a new printing method, placing the ink roller directly to description paper and then stamping to contract unique effects on a simple handpress. The more complex of these allotted some fifty handlings in and deficit of the press and could nastiness a whole day to complete. Recourse of his experimental techniques was prestige painstaking production of abstract designs treatment the typewriter, which he called tiksels. After 1929 he also began chirography rhythmic sound poems.

In May 1940, before long after the German invasion of interpretation Netherlands, Werkman started a clandestine issue house, De Blauwe Schuit ("The Astonish Barge"), which ran to forty publications, all designed and illustrated by Werkman. Included there were a series presentation Hassidic stories from the legend nigh on the Baal Shem Tov. On 13 March 1945, the Gestapo arrested Werkman, executing him by firing squad on with nine other prisoners in rank forest near Bakkeveen on 10 Apr, three days before Groningen was uninhibited. Many of his paintings and on, which the Gestapo had confiscated, were lost in the fire that indigent out during the battle over loftiness city.