He quit as it is called cold turkey, it had been nice. ‘Playing a little oboe is not possible. You have to play four or five hours a day, otherwise the instrument will punish you. So it was schluss.’ The oboe of Han de Vries (80) has been wandering around in his house for about thirteen years now. ‘I don’t even know which closet it’s in. The instrument is sometimes also an enemy, it has ruled your life. When a ballerina is busy with her pointe shoes, she will say she loves them, but she hates them at the same time. Love-hate: so it is with me and the oboe.’
From the age of 14 to 63, the wind instrument was pretty much his life partner – there was not a day without it. In the kitchen of his monumental house in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark hang evidence of the great heights to which his music took him, or rather: where he brought the music. Casually pinned between his stove and his piano: concert posters, record covers, photos with musicians of the same caliber as De Vries – world stars. At the age of 23 he became the first oboist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, a resounding solo career that took him all over the world, performing with Isaac Stern, Keith Jarrett and James Galway, among others. Music written especially for him by composers such as Louis Andriessen and Willem Breuker. Prices too, cupboards full.
The silence of retirement
And then there was that silence of the self-chosen pension, schluss. From a musical point of view, Han de Vries, retired oboist, from now on continued to play the piano in a relaxed manner in his own kitchen. “But it itched. I thought, damn it, I’ll have to see if there’s any life left in this dried-up well.’ When his wife – psychoanalyst Iki Freud – suggested that he should start drawing again, he thought ‘that won’t work, nothing at all. It must have been too long, 42, 43 years.’
In his teens, De Vries followed courses at both the art academy and the conservatory in The Hague. ‘In music you had your own teacher, one on one. During those classes I performed much faster than in those strict classroom drawing classes where from nine to twelve you were only busy drawing a chair. That’s why I continued in music.’
More than sixty years later, the many corners of his house are still full of paintings and the walls are filled with canvases of his own hand. Recently there is also a large glossy book with almost three hundred pages of paintings in acrylic and oil paint, pen and pastel drawings. Panoramas and portraits, cartoons, abstract work, cheerful still lifes and landscapes full of disaster. ‘The work is like a diary, you can see what moves him, what touches him, what inspires him’, writes artist Marthe Röling in the foreword.
None of the work goes up for sale or to the gallery. “I don’t even know if it’s really good, but they’re all my kids – I love them dearly,” says the creator. That may have been thought ‘damned unprofessional’, he adds, ‘it’s a pleasure to explore your own inner world while painting. Completely different from making music, then you reproduce someone else’s work. If you play a piece by Bach very well, people think that you are Bach himself, you get into the mind of the composer, you are subservient to him. You have to have guts for drawing and painting, that comes from within yourself. And nobody thinks you’re Rembrandt.’
Han de Vries is a war child. Born in 1941, he had Jewish parents. Father survived a concentration camp. “He had already been taken away as a political prisoner when I was born. My mother went into hiding in 1943.’ It was the wife of painter Dick Elffers, Mien Harmsen, who managed to place little Han ‘via the underground’ with a couple in Aalsmeer.
“It was a peasant couple who had no children of their own.” In spite of his foster mother’s wet kisses – ‘I thought that was awful’ – he was well off given the circumstances. ‘I got very good food there and a lot of love and attention. It must have been a maddening sadness for that couple when I was picked up after the war.’
Absolutely no therapeutic hassle
Father De Vries was an architect, he died when Han was 17. Under the pseudonym Chanah Milner, his mother became known after the war as a singer of the Jewish song. His childhood was among those who had survived the camp or who had served in the resistance, artists and performers, and no one was left without scars. ‘On birthdays at Mien and Dick Elffers, the room door was never allowed to close. Mien had survived Ravensbrück and had been in Vught. After an incident, she was locked in a bunker with eighty other women. The next day the door opened and half of them thundered out dead. Mine was still alive. It’s made her totally claustrophobic.’
‘No, no, it is absolutely not a therapeutic thing, that painting of mine,’ he swears. Nevertheless, there seems to be much night and time in his work, raging seas, graves, deaths, ominous birch forests and anonymous masses of hunted creatures. Those images are ‘completely general’, he says, ‘it must have something to do with my background, apparently that comes out, but I am not always aware of that when painting. Sometimes I have a vague atmosphere in my head and it appears on the canvas.’
It works like this for him: ‘Suppose you are still a child, you are sitting on the toilet and taking a pee and suddenly you see a dog in a funny pose in the marble motif of the floor. If you focus on it, it’s suddenly gone. So I sit opposite a canvas or a piece of paper. I just start, and then I suddenly see something that looks like a riverbed, for example. Then there are mountains and then something arises. The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once said that all he had to do was hold his pen and adjust it a bit. So it is with me with painting. I hold that brush and something will come, always.’
Yet the war is never far. “I think about it a few times every day. The war that has been there, which I have dealt with myself, and the war now in Ukraine. It is so unimaginable and terrifying. But I can’t draw and paint on that theme, it’s too depressing. I have largely left those sad paintings behind me. I also made a lot of paintings with beautiful landscapes, with bottles of wine and funny companies – with happy people.’
Racing like crazy on the racing bike
He agrees with Marthe Röling who once called him a tormented but cheerful soul. “I can have an awful lot of fun and laugh liberated.” When someone in a painting of a fleeing crowd thought he recognized a group of lemmings that wanted to plunge into a ravine, for example. ‘I joked that it was just a platoon of cyclists with no numbers.’
Because that’s what he became after his retirement: a cyclist. ‘You can’t come to an orchestra and say: I can’t play because I fell on the back of my head cycling. That’s why I’ve always been physically careful. It wasn’t until after my retirement that I started to drive like crazy on that racing bike. I’ve even cycled in countries like Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines.’
The art of leaning back is still foreign to him, even at the age of 80. Perhaps it is because of the unrelenting music teachers who managed to mold a fairly disciplined agenda man out of ‘the baggy artistic boy that I was’. Still, it sometimes happened that, when he arrived at the Concertgebouw, he had to borrow a jacket from the timpanist because he appeared in a dress suit while protocol prescribed a ‘grey suit’.
Or he was in Groningen by mistake while he had to play in Brussels. ‘I jumped in my sports car and raced like crazy to Brussels. After that madness ride, I appeared in the hall with straight hair and a bow like a propeller. Then the orchestra forbade me to ever come to a concert with my own transport.’
But usually it was ‘half past nine up, half past nine rehearsal in the Concertgebouw. Now to the train for a masterclass in Zurich, then to Schiphol again – all agenda work.’ Besides discipline, he was left with an artistic production urge that has taken on serious forms. ‘Actually, I still think that something has to get out of my hands every day, and that very often doesn’t work.’
A glass of wine at about five o’clock in the afternoon sometimes offers solace. ‘Delicious. I am a heavy drinker and I am not ashamed of that at all. It relaxes me and releases me from feeling guilty. I am a completely free person, but that feeling of guilt… It used to be when I hadn’t studied oboe enough or when I had too much fun. And now it is sometimes enough. When I’m not productive, I feel like a lazy bitch.’
The five is in the clock. He opens the globe next to the fireplace and takes out two glasses and a bottle of Grüner Veltliner. ‘Sometimes I put on something jazzy – not classical, because that is too beautiful, too sensitive, but music by Miles Davis, Count Basie or Paul Desmond for example. I then rummage through the house a bit and now and then look through such a pile of paintings, then I come into intensely happy atmospheres. Yes, looking back, all I can say is that I had a happy life. And yet, I’m alive and kicking.’