RKD STUDIES

Frans Pannekoek had probably sold very little of his work before Gerard van het Reve, a very well-known writer at the time, promoted his book Veertien etsen van Frans Pannekoek voor arbeiders verklaard in a TV programme in early December 1967 by urging the viewers to go out and buy Pannekoek’s prints.¹ Much of his early output had already gone up in flames in late 1962 in a fire at his farmhouse at Pingjum in the province of Friesland ² and then, in the summer of 1967, Reve himself had rescued some of the prints that had been sold at the office of the publisher Thomas Rap (on 9 December 1967) from the water that had flooded the artist’s Friesland studio while he was away in Spain.³ In the years that followed Pannekoek sold some of his work at sales exhibitions. He occasionally had solo shows, but often his prints were exhibited together with the work of other young artists, as was done in 1979 jointly with the etchings of his good friend and fellow graphic artist Charles Donker.

By far the majority of Pannekoek’s prints were acquired by a select group of collectors from the 1970s onwards. The editions of drypoint prints were generally small. In addition, Pannekoek never decides on the size of an edition in advance but works towards the supreme impression. In his later prints, in particular, he regularly makes various states of a plate, and then selects just a few impressions of each one before winnowing the selection down even further. It is usually only when he pulls the tenth sheet that he is satisfied with the result, and then, just a few impressions later, the quality starts to fall off as the plate gets worn. He always gives his long-time collectors, such as Van Hasselt and Schatborn, the right of first refusal among the limited editions of new prints as a token of his gratitude for their support.

Galleries and sales exhibitions
The work that first made Pannekoek known to a wider public came at the end of 1967, when 14 of his etchings were reproduced in a short story by Reve titled Veertien etsen van Frans Lodewijk Pannekoek voor arbeiders verklaard (1967). A one-day sales exhibition that Reve organised soon afterwards in the Amsterdam office of the publisher Thomas Rap was the first sale of the artist’s work, and even then it was held without his permission. It drew 250 curious visitors, among them two major buyers who left the sale with prints costing 1,100 and 800 guilders respectively. There were others, though, who paid more modest sums. The sale raised over 4,000 guilders⁴, and got a lot of publicity, which opened up the potential for new shows. The next one, which was inaugurated by Reve, was held very soon afterwards at the Pribaut gallery in Amsterdam.⁵ The gallerist was Debbie Wolf, who went on the exhibit Pannekoek’s work several times in the years that followed, first in 1969 at Pribaut, and after that in her Galerie Balans, also in Amsterdam. Artists like Peter Vos and Charles Donker regularly exhibited at Balans, and in 1971 new prints by Pannekoek were shown there along with watercolours by Joost Roelofsz (b. 1943).⁶ The prices for the prints were around 150 guilders each.

Frans Pannekoek
Dead mole
Paris, Fondation Custodia - Collection Frits Lugt, inv./cat.nr. 1994-P.293
(FP 67-13)

In February 1970 Pannekoek held his first sales exhibition at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris,⁷ with 32 of his etchings. It was so successful that he was offered a second show in December 1971, this time supplemented with his drawings.⁸ In May 1975 an exhibition was organised in Jerez de la Frontera in Spain, in the house of the collector Antonio de la Herran Matorras, where according to Pannekoek his prints made a deep impression among a small circle of art lovers and collectors, although nothing was sold. A year later, in April 1976, with the support of Carlos van Hasselt, a selection of his drypoint prints went on display in the London gallery of print dealer Christopher Mendez at prices ranging from £40 to £100 (220 to 500 guilders). In 1979 there was another sales exhibition at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris, this time in conjunction with etchings by Charles Donker and concurrently with seventeenth-century prints by Wenceslaus Hollar from the Fondation Custodia. The modern prints were priced at between 100 and 500 guilders.⁹ At the same time as the Paris show Pannekoek’s work was on view at the Lieve Hemel gallery in Amsterdam in a joint show with other artists.

Pannekoek also had several exhibitions in the Netherlands in the decade 1980-90, but in the late 1980s they were mainly of drawings and watercolours because of his relatively low graphic output at the time. His prints went on display in the Nanky de Vreeze gallery in Amsterdam in 1984. On the occasion of a Spanish exhibition of his work in 1986 in Cadiz a list was compiled of his entire graphic oeuvre at the time, which must have run to around 200 prints, the earliest from 1961 and the later ones from 1985.¹⁰

In 1988 Pannekoek made his debut at the Galerie Petit, whose artists at the time included members of the De Luis group from Utrecht.¹¹ This was followed by two exhibitions at Petit in 1990 and 1991. Thanks to the intermediacy of the gallerists Dobs and Ton van Dijk, a drawing by Pannekoek was also part of a group show in the Singer Museum in Laren in 1990 marking the gallery’s 20th anniversary. This show of contemporary figuration with dozens of participants was titled Petit Parade, and was held partly in the Amsterdam gallery.

In 1993 Pannekoek had his first exhibition in Amsterdam’s Galerie Imago, mainly of watercolours, augmented with a number of etchings and at least one oil painting (View of Paris, 1991), which was apparently sold for 13,000 guilders. Encouraged by that sale and a short trip to Venice, Pannekoek then concentrated mainly on painting¹², producing 20 pictures that were put up for sale in Galerie Imago in September 1995 for between 5,0000 and 20,000 guilders. It was not a success, with just one painting changing hands for 5,000 and a few prints for 450 guilders.¹³ Pannekoek therefore decided that from then on he would not rely on galleries but would only sell directly to interested buyers. Instead he took his new work to the Fondation Custodia in Paris and travelled to Amsterdam with a suitcase from which to show sheets directly to possible clients.

Collectors
Not many contemporary graphic artists have managed to live solely from the sale of their prints. Those in the Netherlands between 1956 and 1972 who got close to doing so could rely temporarily on the government’s Artist Subsidy Programme (the BKR) to get them through the lean times, or made more saleable works, such as illustrations, alongside more experimental graphics. In addition, some also had regular jobs, teaching art, for example.

For a long time Pannekoek has regarded printmaking as something that he does on the side. It is part of his life, but no more than that. He doesn’t want to be tied down or work for someone else, so he did not look in that direction, which is what most of his graphic artist colleagues did. Yet down the years he has managed to survive on what he earns from his prints. Because although the group of collectors of his prints is small, they are truly passionate collectors. It is also due to their efforts that his etchings are to be found in the collections of several leading museums at home and abroad.

The first buyers of Pannekoek’s work came from the circles around Gerard Reve. Robert Polak, for instance, brother of the publisher Johan Polak (1928-1992), who collaborated with Reve for years, bought prints at the Thomas Rap exhibition in 1967 for 1,100 guilders, but unfortunately it is not known which ones.¹⁴

Pannekoek also gave prints with dedications to Reve and his partners Willem and Hendrik van Albada (nicknamed Teigetje and Woelrat)¹⁵, as well as to Fritzi Harmsen van Beek and friends in the Jagtlust coterie like Hein Siedenburg.¹⁶

The earliest collectors of his work must also have included his stepfather J.E.C. Schook (1914-1993), who collected seventeenth-century landscape prints too. Pannekoek inherited a part of this collection that was distributed among the siblings after Schook’s death. In this way he recovered several of his early drypoints. He kept some of the seventeenth-century sheets, but sold most of them to the antiquarian bookseller Van der Steur, who also collected his work at the time.¹⁷

Later collectors came from the art historian friends and acquaintances of Carlos van Hasselt and Peter Schatborn, both of whom put together quite large collections of Pannekoek’s prints. Van Hasselt (1929-2009), curator of the Fondation Custodia at the time, and its director from 1971 to 1994, first saw Pannekoek’s etchings at the Institut Néerlandais in 1970, and immediately bought several of them. He decided to pay him a monthly allowance personally, in return for which he regularly had first choice of new work. Fifteen years later he had accumulated more than 300 of Pannekoek’s prints and drawings. The large collection that Van Hasselt put together between 1970 and 1994 is a representative overview of Pannekoek’s graphic oeuvre up to the latter year. Nevertheless, there are a few groups that are not included. For example, Van Hasselt did not buy any prints from the group of early abstract landscapes, which he supposedly told the artist would not fit into the Fondation’s storage boxes. In addition, he only bought the best impressions of an edition and did not want the rest. On his retirement in 1994 Van Hasselt donated his entire Pannekoek collection to the Fondation Custodia, on condition that it would continue paying the monthly allowance and carry on collecting his work, provided it maintained the same high standard. His successor, Mària van Berge-Gerbaud, who as curator had been involved in the selection of Pannekoek’s work since 1971, made an excellent inventory of the donation, and supplemented it with new, representative work.¹⁸ Just before her departure in 2010 she prepared the exhibition of a choice of Pannekoek’s prints and drawings belonging to the Fondation that was held in the Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam in that year, before travelling on to Paris in 2011, for which Peter Schatborn wrote the catalogue in consultation with her.¹⁹ Ger Luijten, Van Berge’s successor, did not continue the allowance, but in 2011, 2016 and 2017 he bought missing earlier prints as well as a large selection of new ones.

Peter Schatborn (b. 1936), the former head of the Rijksmuseum printroom, started collecting Pannekoek’s prints after seeing the Institut Néerlandais exhibition in 1979.²⁰ Because his appointment to the printroom in 1968 was to collect Old Master art on paper up to the end of the nineteenth century, he restricted his private collecting activities to contemporary prints and drawings so as to avoid intruding on the Rijksmuseum’s collecting area.²¹ In addition, almost the only works he collected were by artists who depicted reality. For a while Schatborn also gave Pannekoek a modest monthly allowance.²² In 1989, he selected five Pannekoek prints from his collection of 22 sheets for inclusion in an exhibition drawn from the private collections of 17 members that he was organising for the Amsterdamse Prentkring (Amsterdam Print Society) in the Rembrandthuis.²³ Although, viewed in retrospect, his own collection of Pannekoek prints presented a good view of the oeuvre as a whole, that was not his main intention. He had never visited the artist in France or Spain, so had to rely entirely on what he brought to Amsterdam to show him. They corresponded regularly, and Pannekoek occasionally sent him a small print with a postcard.²⁴ Schatborn was able to fill a few gaps in his collection in 2011 after paying a visit to the artist’s sister Tita in Warffum, where there was a sizable stock of his prints. On that occasion Ger Luijten was also able to buy several sheets that Custodia did not yet have. Soon afterwards, in March 2011, six months before Pannekoek’s hang gliding accident, Schatborn bought more prints directly from the artist. In 2017 he donated his entire Pannekoek collection to the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam.

Apart from the above, not very much is known about private collections of Pannekoek’s work. He himself says that he sold many prints to the late Haarlem antiquarian bookseller Ab van der Steur (1938-2012), but unfortunately it has not so far been possible to trace that collection through his heirs. Van der Steur and Pannekoek got to know each other in the late 1980s through the latter’s stepfather J.E.C. Schook, who was a client of the bookshop and began collecting Pannekoek’s early work. In October 1991 Van der Steur gave a talk at a monthly meeting of the Genootschap voor Tegennatuurlijke Letteren (Society for Unnatural Literature) that was attended by Pannekoek, and showed his print collection to the other members.²⁵ Their contacts petered out after 1999 because the artist rarely came to the Netherlands and Van der Steur was no longer collecting his later work, although he did occasionally buy early prints at auction. In 2009 Van der Steur wrote a long article about Pannekoek and his etchings for the liber amicorum compiled for the 60th birthday of Nop Maas.²⁶

It emerges from that article that work by Pannekoek surfaced in the sidelines of two auctions among the circle of Reve’s admirers and collectors of his manuscripts in Groningen. In October 1997 the G. Postma auction house held a book sale at which the main attractions included Reve manuscripts from the collection of his admirer Hans Evers (1956-2015)²⁷, as well as eighteen etchings (mostly early ones) and three paintings by Pannekoek.²⁸ Although the paintings, which included Frisian winter and summer landscapes, remained unsold and were returned to their owner, the next auction of Reve manuscripts in November 1998 contained more than 45 Pannekoek prints. They came not only from the collection of the owner of the Reve items, Jürgen Hillner (1937), but also from Pannekoek’s girlfriend Marja van der Veen and his sister Tita (1932-2019).²⁹ Both auctions contained copies of the deluxe numbered edition of Reve’s Veertien Etsen with an original print, both of which fetched the highest prices.³⁰ It is only thanks to Van der Steur’s article that we get some idea of a few of the rarities in his collection, such as an unknown portrait of Gerard Reve of 1981 (FP 81-13) and a tiny dummy with a set of 7 prints measuring roughly 2 x 3 cm and a small book (4.5 x 6.5 cm), Cambio de Vida en el Signo xx por Frans Lodewijk Pannekoek, ediciones Thomas Rap Amsterdam, 50 exemplaren gedrukt door Piet Clement te Amsterdam (FP 69-9).³¹

Christopher Mendez, the London dealer in Old Master prints and drawings, also put together a modest collection of Pannekoek prints down the years. He received some of them from Pannekoek himself in return for beautiful sheets of old paper, ‘with chain lines’, which Pannekoek always wanted for printing his etchings, with another packet of 23 sheets following in 1999.

There is also the collection of Sjoerd Wartena (1939), who lives in the south of France and succeeded his father Ruurd Wartena (1908-2001) as corresponding member of the Amsterdam Print Society, who added considerably to his father’s collection, including work by Pannekoek.³²

Finally, there is Pannekoek’s ‘brother in art’ Charles Donker, whose work Pannekoek had first seen in the early 1970s at an exhibition in Galerie Balans.³³ He was full of admiration for it and wrote him a letter, which led to their first meeting in Donker’s home city of Utrecht. They struck up an artistic friendship that continues to this day and resulted in exchanges of each other’s work.³⁴ Jan Piet Filedt Kok described the artistic interaction between them in 2010 in the article ‘Out of Admiration for the Crab in a Box’, in which their mutual admiration and inspiration was illustrated with several prints by the two of them.³⁵

Prints by Pannekoek in Public Collections
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The focus in the exhibition and acquisition policy of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the second half of the twentieth century was on new, often abstract avant-garde art, and that also applied to contemporary graphic works. Figurative graphics, like those by Jan Mensinga, were only purchased as municipal acquisitions or under the Artist Subsidy Programme (BKR). That is why the museum now owns only two abstract drawings by Pannekoek bought in 1960 and a single small print of a dead mole (FP 67-13 I).³⁶

Kunstmuseum Den Haag
The Kunstmuseum (formerly the Hague Gemeentemuseum) has a collection of more than 50,000 prints and drawings spanning the period 1850 to the present day. Around 1970, under Hans Locher as the curator, with separate galleries for art on paper, it was extremely active, both in its acquisitions and presentation of contemporary Dutch art on paper. In 1973 it bought seven prints directly from Pannekoek.³⁷

Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Unlike most of the twentieth-century Dutch artists in the Dutch national collection, most of whom are represented in the Rijksmuseum with dozens of prints, there is only one by Pannekoek.³⁸ Within the current, more restrictive policy of the museum’s Printroom, the donation from Peter Schatborn announced in 2010 of a considerable portion of Pannekoek’s printed oeuvre, amounting to 95 impressions and 7 drawings, did arrive in 2011-12 and 2017.³⁹ Because Carlos van Hasselt had already donated his large collection of Pannekoek prints to the Fondation Custodia in Paris in 1994, Schatborn decided on his retirement from the museum in 2001 to give his collection of Pannekoek’s prints to the Rijksprentenkabinet.

Public collections abroad
At the 1970 Pannekoek exhibition in Paris, where Van Hasselt bought his first prints, there were two impressions of the artist’s View of the Earth with Three Strip Cartoon Images of the Moon Landing of 1969 (FP 69-5). They were bought by the heads of the printrooms in Brussels, Herman Liebaers, and Paris, Jean Adhémar. That print is the only one by Pannekoek in the printroom of the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels.⁴⁰

It is likely that the Metropolitan Museum in New York then became one of the first foreign institutions to buy a Pannekoek print on Carlos van Hasselt’s recommendation in 1976 from Mendez in London (FP-75-7). It was also due to Van Hasselt that a small group of Pannekoek’s works entered the printroom in Cambridge after consultation with the artist. In April 1976 Van Hasselt donated two further prints to the print department of the Fitzwilliam Museum. He was a good friend of the curator there, David E. Scrase, and two years later he added a book and print. Later donations of three sheets in 2012 and 2015 from the artist himself ensured that there are now seven of his prints in Cambridge.⁴¹

There are also a number of prints of his in the British Museum. The first ones were donated in 2011, together with sheets by Willem van Leusden and Charles Donker, accompanied by an article on the influence of Hercules Segers on twentieth-century graphic art in Print Quarterly dedicated to Anthony Griffiths, Head of the Prints and Drawings, on his retirement.⁴² An Van Camp, the curator of Dutch prints at the time, who is now Head of European Art in Oxford, exhibited several of them as examples of Segers’s influence in a small exhibition of their holdings of Segers in 2012.⁴³