Anton Heyboer (1924-2005)

Aliases: Anton Heijboer

Professions: Painter

Anton Heyboer (Dutch, 1924-2005)
Anton Heyboer (Dutch, 1924-2005)
Anton Heyboer (Dutch, 1924-2005)
ANTON HEYBOER (1924-2005)

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Anton Heyboer Biography

(b Sabang, Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia], 9 Feb 1924). Dutch printmaker and painter. His experience in a Nazi concentration camp in 1943, where he nearly died, marked his work. In 1951, after a voluntary stay in a mental hospital, he decided to devote himself to a life as an artist. After 1961 Heyboer lived in an isolated community in a barn at Den Ilp, north of Amsterdam, which he shared with three women. His images from the early 1950s, almost exclusively etchings, show ships in Ijmuiden port and his shabby living dwellings. The first etchings reflecting his mental condition also date from this period. In Awareness of the Wound (1954; The Hague, Gemeentemus.) he depicted himself as a simplified Man of Sorrows, wearing a crown of thorns and displaying his stigma, a bleeding heart. In the same year Heyboer recorded crucial moments of his life in works such as Defence of Immature Things , which consists of a large number of sheets of paper bearing definitions of ‘being’, ‘conscience’, ‘suffering’, ‘innocence’ and related concepts. Heyboer’s source of reference was Christian symbolism. To express the relationship with his fellow men he used the cross as the symbol of suffering. In 1957 he introduced this motif to his etchings, in such works as The System with Two Figures (1957; The Hague, Gemeentemus.). The highly stylized, mummy-like figures of early works were incorporated in a network of lines; where these lines intersected a number was added to refer to a particular emotion or experience. Apart from these coded line patterns, the visual elements of the Heyboer system include text fragments and colour, which the artist added by hand. His ritualistic system altered only when something new happened to Heyboer, such as the arrival of a third woman in his community (1974), which led him to take up painting. The complex system that Heyboer developed through his etchings was continued in the paintings, with the additional variations of the larger scale and greater freedom of technique available in paint. The deliberately esoteric nature of his images prevents them from being easily intelligible (e.g. The Creative Man , gouache, 1984; priv. col., see Slegers, p. 96), but his concerns with sexuality, creativity and mortality address universal themes. He regarded the trinity symbolized by his three women (referred to as his ‘brides’ by the media) as his most important creation.

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