Jan Meefout

About: In the postwar decades, when art was rapidly reinventing itself through movements such as CoBrA and later Zero, Jan Meefout produced an exceptionally consistent and timeless body of work. Rather than development, it is characterized by craftsmanship. He was a master of the centuries-old techniques of wood carving and stone cutting, and from an early stage he drew inspiration from ancient Egyptian art, with its geometric forms, raw materials, static figures, and autonomous female sculptures. Ultimately, the reclusive sculptor created some two hundred works, in which the female figure was the central subject. He regarded her as sensual, alluring, and the core of all life. Time and again he was inspired by beauty, love, and life, which he usually translated en taille directe into dream images and archetypes of women. No model was involved in this process.

Within his oeuvre, however, a gradual transition emerged in the 1960s: from a more angular visual language toward a more naturalistic form with rounded shapes. Until then, the material largely determined his representations. These remained closed and compact, in keeping with an anecdote he liked to tell his students: “A Chinese emperor possessed a precious piece of jade and gave it to a sculptor with the instruction to carve something beautiful from it, while losing as little of the jade as possible. After some time, the sculptor returned to the court and presented the emperor with a jade bird and a thimble filled with grit: all the waste from the stone.” According to Meefout, as little as possible should be lost from a venerable stone that had taken millions of years to become what it is.

Meefout’s most monumental works, however, belong to a kind of transitional period that lasted roughly until 1970. The sculptures still originate from the rough form of the material, yet they challenge the block-like shape. Young Couple may well be the most important example of this. Meefout played with form by seating the two figures on opposite sides of the bench. The man looks diagonally over his shoulder toward the woman, who in turn looks away. This creates a line within the sculpture, allowing the movement to extend beyond the rectangular base form.

The teakwood version of Young Couple was included in the 2010 retrospective Jan Meefout at Beelden aan Zee, which also holds a substantial number of his works. A monograph of the same title was published in conjunction with the exhibition, featuring the sculpture reproduced full-page.