NRCcartoonist Siegfried Woldhek has won the Thérèse Schwartze Prize, an award in portrait art. This was announced on Thursday by the Thérèse van Duyl-Schwartze Foundation. The prize will be presented to him on June 7 and is mainly based on the drawings he made in a personal capacity. The jury particularly praises Woldhek’s “sharp approach” to people. “It’s fantastic that my personal work is also appreciated,” says Woldhek. “Readers are mainly familiar with my work for the newspaper, but my personal drawings are less known.”
Although his drawings have been in use for more than forty years NRC and Free Netherlands appear, Siegfried Woldhek (1951) sees himself as an artist rather than a journalist. He doesn’t like a simple portrait: “You already have the photo, right?” Instead, he looks for subtle features – a specific look or a small facial movement – that reveal more about a person’s character. Some portraits tell a whole story about someone’s life.
See the sunken faces and bags under the eyes of his grandparents, for example, in the drawing Till Death Do Us Part, Failed Hidingwhich he made in 2021, based on a black and white photo. Their clothing fades into a bluish ground that refers to their fate: in November 1942, during the Second World War, the Jewish couple was shot dead. They were on their way to their hiding place in Groningen. A month later, a farmer found their bodies buried in a field. “That’s why you see them both standing and lying down,” says Woldhek.
Till Death Do Us Part, Failed Hiding(2021).
© Siegfried Woldhek
In his free work Woldhek explores themes such as aging, decline and migration. For example, he made a series of three naked people who seem to be running from death and a portrait of a group of male refugees who “have no future in their own country.” He also drew the face of a man with dementia: most of the drawing is blurry, but his eyes are still sharp. Woldhek, who is originally a biologist, also likes to draw birds: “I get carried away by what moves me.”
Portrait art
With this prize, Woldhek joins a line of renowned artists. The prize has been awarded since 1920 to artists who distinguish themselves within portrait art. In previous editions, the award went to, among others, Iva van Zyl (2022), known for her intimate paintings, visual artists Emo Verkerk (2000) and Iris van Dongen (2017) and sculptor Eric Claus (1985).
Marlene Dumas, now one of the most influential contemporary artists, also received the Thérèse Schwartze Prize in 1986. Dumas is the first living female artist with work in the permanent collection of the Louvre in Paris.
An exhibition opens in The Hague on June 1 (on view for about a week) with work by both Woldhek and the namesake of the prize Thérèse Schwartze, who became one of the most successful portrait painters in the Netherlands in the early twentieth century. Woldhek shows a wide range of portrait drawings, in which many of the aforementioned themes such as migration and decline are central.
