Jan Cremer

Jan Cremer was born on 20 April 1940 in Enschede, the son of a Hungarian mother and a Dutch travel writer and photographer. After a hard wartime childhood he became a ward of the state and was sent to work in a factory at fourteen; he found his way out through art, studying at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Arnhem and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

In 1964 his autobiographical novel ‘Ik, Jan Cremer’ scandalised the Netherlands with its frankness and became one of the best-selling Dutch books of the century; a sequel followed in 1966. The writer never displaced the painter: Cremer exhibited more than a hundred times in museums and galleries, and in his later decades concentrated on printmaking.

His pictures are built from flat, saturated fields of colour and a deliberately blunt drawing that sits between Pop Art and the gestural painting of his youth. The Dutch landscape with its cows, tulip fields and wide water is his best-known subject, treated with a provocation that is half homage and half parody of the national tradition.

His work is held by Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, among others. Jan Cremer died on 19 June 2024, aged 84.