For a very long time she is not in the pack. Shortly after the war, she follows the Rietveld Academy (which is then called otherwise) for a few years and makes admission to the Rijksakademie. She wants to expand her talent as an artist. Because art is who she is, of which she dreams in the silences that can fall between words. The Rijksakademie rejects her. What now? She has a moped, some savings and leaves in 1948 on her own for the Pyrenees. She spends the night in haystacks and in ditches along the road. Occasionally there are jobs as a dishwasher, but she also paints.
Dora Tuynman (1926-1979) is not someone who gets out of the field quickly. From Deventer where she grows up, she moves to Amsterdam, and from there it goes to France. In Paris she works and lives (illegally) for years in the legendary, filthy Cobra studio complex on Rue Santeuil. In 1961 she went to New York for six months. From 1963 she is again in the Netherlands. Her father picks up her last things from the Paris Atelier, which is already being demolished.
The retrospective of Tuynmans work in Museum Cobra in Amstelveen with a lot of love and care, Pim Arts composite, can be seen on how much talent she was endowed with. Her paintings, watercolors, drawings and designs for monumental decorations in churches are delicious, thoughtful, bursting with color (usually) and daring. It doesn’t matter what Tuynman paints – a mountain landscape, a Libelle, the sun, a grasshopper, a bird, a haystack, a factory. For her, the guidelines are on the way to a parallel world of abstract and abstracted forms.
That world may turn into an expression-for example, there is a period of figuration, one of fast, ‘wet in wet’ painted abstract expressionism during her short New York stay-but Tuynman’s work remains searching. And as a viewer you search with her.
Unknown
There is a good chance that you have never heard of Dora Tuynman. I did not have that either, although her work was exhibited once in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in 1991. Her name remains unnamed in the art -historical standard works on Cobra and Dutch Art in the period between 1945 and 1970. Willemijn Stokvis, Kitty Zijlmans and Geurt Imanse – they all forget Dora Tuynman. In this forgotten, female unfriendliness plays a bitter role. Male noise makers such as Karel Appel simply attract the most attention. And if there is something that ‘Doortje’ (as fellow painters call her) does not do, making it noise.
The exhibition shows three moving television fragments from the 1950s, who included the French documentary maker Jean-Marie Drot of Tuynman in her studio. With her palette knife she stands behind the donkey in her studio, while her husband plays the oboe. The paint brings them to the linen as if it is a fragile treasure that is worn from one place to another. Her paintings, she says, are “not to be put into words.” Yet she makes an attempt for the viewers. You can only get admiration for this somewhat shy, but oh so precisely formulating young woman.
The exhibition in Museum Cobra is chronologically and thematically. She sees three -quarters of the upper floor of the museum and that easily fills Tuynman. Almost all works have been taken from private collections. Because which museum bought work from her? Exactly – almost no.
Left: Without title (without year, acrylic paint on canvas, 27 × 23 cm). Right: Landscape (1977, acrylic paint on canvas, 54 × 63 cm) Photo Reyer Bernson
In her earliest work – usually watercolors or oil paint on hardboard from the years 1948/1949 – her color feeling, her dimensions and abstracting capacity. A lake can be blood-red just as well, a bird the same size as a sailboat, and a haystack with little ones around it becomes an almost erotic composition in gold and lemon yellow.
One of the great ensembles that the curator has sought together is the ‘factories’ series that Tuynman made on paper and on canvas in the early 1950s. They are abstract, just recognizable landscapes with a dark basic tone, on which cubes of bright red, yellow, blue, light green and white dance.
Tuynman has the most success in the period between 1955 and 1958. There are canvases that depict summer associations, such as sun, flowers, birds and vibrating insects – but all abstracted and only after repeated viewing to decipher.
One of the most beautiful paintings from that series, which director Drot also buys immediately after the film recordings in Tuynmans Atelier, is called L’été (1955). An old pink cover layer has been applied to a surface of blue with two flower skins that are reminiscent of futuristic fungi. Above it floats in tar light blue, green, red and yellow – look carefully – a dragonfly.
The success will not end in later years. How unjustified that is, shows this exhibition well. After her return to the Netherlands in 1963, Tuynman continues to renew itself. In addition to her landscapes – the mountains she once saw in the Pyrenees return as abstract echoes – she also paints figurative ‘dolls’, as she calls them. She is already investigating these ‘dolls’ in 1958. They are called kings, but are depicted on simple hardboard and wood, without sovereign fuss. In 1973 and 1974 very different ‘dolls’ appear. They are monumental figures on canvas, one of which is reminiscent of work that Marlene Dumas will make many years later.
Tuynman’s figures are androgynous, made up of a few simple, soft and boned color areas, with thin, clear contours in black. Flowers, birds and sometimes abstract shapes float around the figures in light gray.
The disappointments about the years of success, the poor and uncertain existence as an artist take their toll. Tuynman puts an end to her life in 1979. The days before her suicide she visits the people dear to her. She says goodbye without anyone suspect this. Her step is prepared, with attention to her environment and determined. And that is – sad enough – as she also worked in her art for many years.
