Nul=0
Introduction
“For the first time in the history of art, the artist is not commenting on reality. He is not interpreting it. He is accepting reality.”
With these words Armando, one of the four artists that constitutes the Dutch Nul movement, concludes his essay “Over het lijk van de Renaissance” (“Over the dead body of the Renaissance”) that appears in 1963 in the Flemish-Dutch avant-garde magazine Gard Sivik. And with this statement he gets to the heart of the principles of this movement in the visual arts, which emerges under the name of NUL in the Netherlands between 1960 and 1965.
The group has four members: Jan Schoonhoven (1914-1994), Henk Peeters (1925), Armando (1929) and Jan Henderikse (1937). Artists who want to define and validate reality in the most fundamental way in and with their work. A new and unconditional viewing and acceptance of modern reality has to be reached. Reality itself raised to the level of art. By isolating random parts of reality and displaying them without any form of moral observations, the resulting works should coincide with the world of modern man, the industrialised, technological world of the western welfare state. ‘The aim is to establish, in an impersonal way, reality as art’, writes Jan Schoonhoven in 1965 in his article ‘Zero’ . The boundary between art and life would finally be demolished.
Objectivity is the motto. For as far as possible personal style is banished and ultimately every artistic tradition is disposed of: representation, composed form, gesture and references to meaning. In the manifestos Manifest tegen niets (Manifesto against nothing) and Einde (End) that the Nul group publish in 1961, there is even a proposal to do away with art all together.
To a certain degree the beliefs of the Dutch Nul movement are in keeping with the general trend in the artistic world of the western avant-garde of the sixties: to find ways to integrate social reality and the most fundamental sensory perceptions into art. The exponents of English and American Pop Art, French Nouveau Réalisme, Op Art and Kinetic Art and last but certainly not least, the Nul movement’s close German relative, the Zero movement, are also all searching in their own particular way for connection to the world of daily experience.
NUL in relation to the international art world.
The choice of the name Nul makes it clear that a close affinity was felt with the German Zero movement, which had already been active since 1958. The exponents of this group, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Guenther Uecker, represent a totally new art that can emerge from tranquillity and enter into a relationship with the absolute reality of light, space, movement and material. The colour white that can best capture the infinity of space, and light and shadow, is a characteristic of many Zero artists. The artists who preceded them in this and also set great examples for them were Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein.
In 1946 the Argentinean Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), who lived in Italy, published his Manifesto Blanco, in which one of the points he argues is that the new artists “are starting to develop an art based on the oneness of time and space. (…) The material exists in the movement and nothing else. (…) We reject individual emotions. (…)’ Fontana also argues that colour and sound are the elemental forms of the new art, which can comprise space, time and movement. Fontana’s first Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept) was created in 1949 in which he literally opens up the surface of the painting by cutting holes or grooves in it; the picture is thus pierced and space can now pass through.
Yves Klein (1928-1962) is likewise searching for a greater sensitivity to the ‘Universe’, because, as he says, the viewer of the traditional painting is a prisoner of his five senses and is unable to feel the space of complete existence. Blue monochrome canvases form his solution, because these are able to form a continuum with the space outside in which the viewer exists. The canvas hereby forms part of the entirety of things, has become a thing in itself.
Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) also wants to free the surface as the carrier of the ballast of all kinds of meanings and simply allow it to be the surface, so that its unlimited possibilities will remain intact. He creates pure white works that he calls achromes. Manzoni relates his work to the infinite and states: ‘(…) a white surface that is simply a white surface and nothing else (a colourless surface that is just a colourless surface). Better than that: a surface that simply is: to be (to be complete and become pure).’
The ideas of Fontana, Klein and Manzoni find their way into various movements in Europe, and the German Zero can be seen as the clearing house. Düsseldorf is the place where different meetings and exhibitions take place, which are decisive for the dissemination of the ideas that are aimed at excluding anything personal in art and fully integrating reality with and into the work of art.
The first contacts between the German artists and Klein, Manzoni and Fontana take place during the second half of the fifties. In 1957 Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf opens with an exhibition by Yves Klein, where he exhibits his monochromes for the first time in Germany and further exposure of Mack and Piene follows. In that same year Klein’s work can be seen in Milan in an exhibition at Galleria Arte Nucleare, in which Manzoni also participates, who in this year creates his first white paintings. Contacts are forged and the mutual recognition of beliefs comes into being. The name Zero is born in 1958, not as a reference to nihilism, or a Dadaist joke, but as the naming of a zone of silence out of which new possibilities are able to open. ‘Zero’ is used to refer to the last number in a count-down before a rocket is launched. On April 24th of that year the 7th evening exhibition, entitled “Das Rote Bild” (The Red Picture), takes place in the studio of Mack and Piene and Mack, Piene, Uecker and Klein exhibit together for the first time.
The exchange of ideas with the Dutch art world now also gets going. Jan Henderikse moves to Düsseldorf in 1958, where he makes contact with the German Zero group. In July of this year Manzoni visits the Netherlands where he meets the Rotterdam gallery owner Hans Sonnenberg who organises exhibitions in the Rotterdamse Kunstkring. This meeting results the following year in a joint exhibition with artists that Sonneberg is launching, these include Germans, but not, however the Zero people from Düsseldorf. Confusion is caused however by this exhibition also being called ‘Zero’. Manzoni suddenly finds himself in strange company; however Jan Schoonhoven is also taking part in the exhibition and this reassures Manzoni.
The circle now closes around the artists who represent the new trends in the art world. Klein, Manzoni and the German Zero group come together in the Hessenhuis in Antwerp in the exhibition “Vision in Motion’ (1959), which is arranged by Tinguely. This Swiss artist, who concentrates mainly on movement and space within the work of art, clearly fits in conceptually with the new artistic body of ideas. In 1960 Lucio Fontana exhibits in Düsseldorf for the first time at Galerie Schmela, by now an important centre for the Zero movement. In March 1960 all the lines converge in the international exhibition “Monochrome Malerei” in Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen; the Dutch are missing from this. This exhibition forms the overture for the big international exhibition “Nove Tendencije” (New Trends) that is organised a year later for the first time in Zagreb (Former Yugoslavia) and where the relationship of the Zero movement with Kinetic Art and Op Art is clearly established. Henk Peeters is the Dutch artist represented at this exhibition.
The exhibition in Leverkusen is likewise the indirect cause for the formation of the Dutch Nul group in February 1961, after which the members Peeters and Schoonhoven exhibit together for the first time with Zero and Klein, Manzoni and Tinguely at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf in July of that year. Nul is now undoubtedly part of an international movement, which will show at various international exhibitions throughout Europe.
What went before
The new artistic order is at the same time both a logical consequence of and a reaction to the artistic attitudes of the preceding period. After the Second World War we see the emergence of a powerfully personally charged expressionism in the visual arts in Europe and the United States. In the United States abstract-expressionism, with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, had developed out of the automatic style of Surrealism into a highly personal style of painting that followed the subject as closely as possible in expression and style and in Europe we also see that the visual arts have an intensely subjective, expressionist-charged character. In Paris painters such as Bissière and Bazaine, and also émigré German artists such as Hans Hartung and Wols populate the artistic scene that develops a more and more intensely personal style in the first decade after the Second World War. In the Netherlands Karel Appel, Corneille and Constant form the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep (Dutch Experimental Group), which a little later will become the international Cobra movement. In all this artistic work there resounds a longing for personal expression, directed towards the sublimation of the pure I; the greatest universal ideologies from before the war appear not to have been able to prevent the collapse of western culture. It was now the job of art to start completely afresh and to develop a new graphic language.
From this subjectivity and basic fundamental attitude, the power of expression of this new art starts to converge more with the character of the artist; the power of the painter’s gesture, the tension within the composition, the autonomous expression of the colour surface take over from the painter. This process results in an art form, which starts to address the most fundamental aspects of the work of art: material, colour and line. In France the critic Michel Tapié speaks, among other things, of Art Informel, a ‘formless’ art. This pictorial adventure grows into material painting, an art form in which the material from which the painting is composed – and these can be both traditional and non- traditional art materials – define the expressive power of the work. Important exponents of this are the Frenchmen Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, the Italian Alberto Burri, the Spaniard Antoni Tàpies and Emil Schumacher from Germany.
The art world in the Netherlands also follows these developments. Bram Bogart and Jaap Wagemaker come by way of an expressionist ‘Cobra style’ to material painting; a work that because of its impasto painting technique and the integration of materials alien to the art of painting, has the characteristics of a relief rather than a flat, two-dimensional painting. The physical presence and the apparently natural creation process of the work of art allow the work to speak for itself, as it were, whereby in some ways its character becomes more anonymous; the hand of the artist becomes less obvious in the autonomous, characteristic effect of the painting. In this process the material becomes more important and the use of colour more restrained and relatively monochrome works are created more often.
The Dutch ‘Informele Groep’
From this development the Dutch ‘Informele Groep’ forms at the end of 1958 comprising a number of Dutch painters: Jan Schoonhoven, Henk Peeters, Jan Henderikse, Armando and Kees van Bohemen. On the one hand their views are positive in relation to the material painters, whose work can also to a certain degree be characterised as ‘informal’, but on the other hand they are developing further towards a more objective art, in which personal style is dispensed with as far as possible for the sake of the pure power of being of the material from which the work is composed. Within the context of these painters the term ‘informal’ signifies that they are against the formal and rational composing of the work of art and that they are striving for a total resolution of the recognisable form in the material, in the paint. They are aiming for painting without form. ‘The work of art should not be the bearer for the maker’s design, but it should be entirely objective’, states Jan Schoonhoven in 1959.
In this period Armando paints large, monochrome canvases, with seemingly random ferocious structures, with no human traces. These canvases are often black and/or red and highly textured and breathing, a charged, almost romantic atmosphere, despite their informal character.
During this time Jan Henderikse also makes monochrome material painting, which, however, he does not consider to be expressionist. He is on the way to totally expressionless and impersonal art.
Towards the end of the fifties Schoonhoven creates reliefs of papier maché and cardboard strips that he constructs into a whimsical but at the same time also geometric arrangement and then partially flattens and crushes using a stone. This takes place not so much as a form of personal expression, but rather in order to reinforce the lack of form in the work. After this he paints the relief in one colour: grey, brick red, gloss black and at the end white.
Henk Peeters likewise searches for the informal in big, more or less monochrome canvases, but it becomes more and more obvious that there must be a new intervention to enable the art to completely lose itself in the impersonal reality of life.
The Dutch Informele Groep is not long-lived, in February 1961 Kees van Bohemen leaves the group, which ceases to exist, and Armando, Henderikse, Peeters and Schoonhoven form the group Nul.
NUL; the work of the members of the group
Although the forming of a group could imply that there is a clear relationship in the work of the group members, it must be said that Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven each reveal their own outlook. The statements formulated in the various manifestos and pamphlets that the Nul group publishes during its existence, refer rather more to a common point of departure, to a common concept from which to work, than to common characteristics of image. Likewise, the affinity with the German Zero, with the Italians and with Yves Klein and the members of the Nouveau Réalisme – the name of the group of French artists around Yves Klein and their spokesman Pierre Restany, who also wanted to fix and designate reality in different ways – become clearly differentiated.
Jan Schoonhoven, who was already making reliefs in the informal period, goes further with this, but now avoids any colour. ‘Only white was left’, he says, whereby he declares his conversion from Informal to Nul. His reliefs are constructed from geometric, repeated patterns, on which the action of light and shadow tells the story. In order to retain objectivity and detachment, he places no significant points in the composition. It is precisely the repetition, the seriality that enable him to show the reality in the most intensive way. And, for Schoonhoven this reality is for structure. Yet a tension with the personal is still to be found with Schoonhoven: in the shaping of the reliefs, the painting of them and also in his line drawings, the hand of the artist is still present. He retains his own, unique statement. Literature about the artist speaks of Heureuses Néglicences, a term from Delacroix, which alludes to ‘happy divergences’, which make the work more personal, and in the case of Schoonhoven counteract lifeless automatism in the seriality. His almost Calvinistic purism in white, the strict geometry and the repetitions, link him to some degree with Piet Mondriaan; despite the fact that he was a great admirer of this Dutch painter, the work of Schoonhoven is still conceptually, essentially different. Mondriaan was searching for a universal balance in the graphic language in order to transcend the ordinary and the personal, while it was precisely the observations of everyday images that Schoonhoven allowed himself to be inspired by: the wooden blinds in his room, a row of cigarettes, shopping lists, the stripes of light through the curtain. And it is through the repetition that this information is stripped of the hierarchy in the graphic language.
Armando’s Nul works are characterised by the collection and orderly arrangement of industrial products and materials in one colour. The anonymity and cool detachment that this involves is enormous, but still Armando, who in the Informele period made his emotionally charged and almost aggressive impasto monochromes, does not entirely escape from the presence of a personal import in his work. In spite of the absence of a personal style, he betrays his preoccupation with violence in the choices that he makes for his materials. Cool, blue sheets of steel, assembled directly next to and underneath each other, works with iron bolts, barbed wire. Armando is saying that reality is unapproachable. The inspiration for his attitude of recording things also comes from his work as a journalist on a national daily newspaper; many of his texts are exact registrations from reality, by literally writing down snippets of dialogues. Armando goes so far in his detached attitude that he even allows an attendant at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to hang his car tyres on the wall for an exhibition. He did not attend this himself. His opposition to the artistic milieu is great and in 1965, when the Nul group ceases to exist, he even stops working as an artist completely for a number of years.
Jan Henderikse includes the most meticulous objects from day-to-day reality in his works; he isolates them and displays them without any further comment. In the selection of his objects, corks and crown caps, plastic bottles, litter, coins, spiral springs, he also chooses the most trivial facts from everyday life. In this he has the closest relationship with the artists of the Nouveau Réalisme; in some senses his work can be compared with that of the French artist Arman. And he seems to be the furthest removed from Schoonhoven, who evokes a great silence in his white reliefs. Yet Henderikse also chooses a certain structuring, he places the forms next to each other in a geometric regularity. He goes so far in the combination of art and life that he even signs shops and bridges, he turns daily life into ‘art’ as it were, by isolating aspects of it and stripping them of their normal function. Without moralising.
Henk Peeters is the most active member of the Nul group with regard to the organisation; he makes the international contacts, organises exhibitions and writes dissertations on the theory of art. He is also the one who first actively participates in exhibitions with Zero, and he has remained true to the fundamental concept of the Nul movement right up to the present. He wants to use his works of art to make the viewer conscious of his environment; he wants to bring about a sensitive consciousness-raising, as it were. The materials that he selects for his works frequently have a very tactile appeal, while he simultaneously creates a certain untouchability; thus he sticks candle tapers behind plastic foil, or he puts mesh in front of cotton wool. He also uses fire on the canvases, leaving behind traces of thick smoke, or he burns holes into plastic, the so-called ‘pyrographies’. With these – often white – works he is visually closely associated with the German Zero artists. But there is also a clear relationship with the Nouveau Réalisme; Peeters also uses ready mades, which he buys in inexpensive stores and isolates in the work of art, in this he has a preference for modern, industrial materials such as plastic and nylon. He once said: ‘With my work I have always wanted it to look just as fresh as if it was in the HEMA (a chain store). It must not be artified… I had no need for artistic cotton wool.’ He also works with natural processes such as light and water reflections and with rain, snow and mist projects. There is a photo from 1962 showing footprints in the snow.
Art and life should be joined together inextricably. In this way he once exhibited a freezer cabinet that he had borrowed from IGLO (a frozen food company) at an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam. He also became a work of art himself when Manzoni appointed him as one; he was signed by the Italian artist (with certificate!).
Positioning of the Nul movement
The members of the Nul movement each display in their own, specific way kinship with the international trends that in many different ways want to directly involve the visible and sensory experience of reality with the effect and the appearance of art. A clear link can be placed with the German Zero, with the Nouveau Réalisme, with the monochromes of Klein and Manzoni, with the spatial conceptions of Fontana and with aspects of the Kinetic Art of Tinguely and with Op Art. Yet there is also a general characterisation that can be given for the Dutch Nul movement. The fact that the Dutch artists do not literally adopt the name of Zero, typifies their self-willed attitude and their need to be able to operate independently. Peeters tells of the movement’s first exhibition (1962) in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam: ‘We called the exhibition Nul. We wanted to distinguish ourselves a bit from the German group, because they wanted to stick the Zero label onto everything they liked, and we would rather decide on that for ourselves. (…) They had thought of the name Zero and so that name could only be used with their permission. From that time on the Dutch have always used the name Nul.’
Besides this characteristic obstinacy it can be said that the Dutch group is, in general, more level-headed and less lyrical than the Germans. The cosmic and ecstatic spiritual declarations from the Germans in their theoretic dissertations are not, or are hardly, to be found with the Dutch; ‘We wanted contact with the here and now, not with the moon.’ says Peeters in an interview. The Nul movement also stays close to the concrete work of art; physics-related and technological effects in movement and light reflections are not, or hardly ever, used by the Dutch. In this sense the Nul movement is more closely connected to the French Nouveau Réalisme, where the work of art as a thing in its own right has a more tangible presence. Aside from the ready mades of Henderikse and Peeters, the reliefs of Schoonhoven, in which light and shadow effects play an important role, and the pyrographies of Peeters also remain within the domain of the traditional work of art.
The slightly ironic tone of Peeters and the attitude of Armando and Henderikse towards the official art world, often teasing and putting things into perspective, are also far distant from the heavyweight Germans, and also from the spiritual, emotional charge that Yves Klein often seems to give to his works of art. To some degree the Nul movement fits in well with Dada; Henk Peeters, in particular, is searching for a form of art that could better be labelled anti-art. When the Nul group has more success around 1965 and also becomes commercially interesting for the art trade, Peeters completely withdraws, and stops making art. The fact that the art dealers preferred a limited edition of a work because it was commercially more interesting was at odds with the principle that Peeters wanted: to put as big an edition as possible on the market. The works had to be as cheap and accessible as possible if he wanted to give humanity a new outlook on reality.
The kinship with the Dada movement is also made clear in the two manifestos that the Nul group published. In 1961 Manifest tegen Niets (Manifesto against nothing) appears; this is at the same time also the announcement of the exhibition ‘Niets’ (Nothing) at Galerie 207 in Amsterdam; the facetious and nihilistic tone of the text is revealed in the opening words: ´on the occasion of the international exhibition of Nothing in the first gallery in the world for the last art’; the ‘last art’ is then described with a random summary of all sorts of ‘isms’ from the history of culture, (from capitalism and communism to tachisme, and then follows, printed in bold, the statement:
A painting is worth just as much as no painting.
A sculpture is just as good as no sculpture.
A machine is just as beautiful as no machine.
Music is just as pleasant as no music.
No art trade is just as efficient as art trade.
Something is almost nothing (not something).
This text is a translation of the text the Swiss Carl Laszlo wrote for the Manifesto that appeared the year before in the Internationale Ausstellung von nichts in Hamburg in which Manzoni, Piene and Mack participated, among others.
The pamphlet ‘Einde’ (End) (1961), which includes the proposition that ‘art can be missed like toothache’ and that ‘they will take responsibility for the abolition of art societies and the closure of exhibition rooms’, also reveals a form of nihilism that reminds one of the Dada statements from a few decades before. In any case these ‘manifestos’ were also later put into perspective by Jan Schoonhoven in an interview.
Just like Zero in Germany with Zero and the Italians Manzoni and Castellani with Azimuth, the Nul movement also has a magazine published in which articles and theoretic dissertations by the Dutch exponents of the movement and by their international kindred spirits are published. The editorial staff is formed by Henk Peeters, Armando and herman de vries, an artist who is not a member of the group, but whose work is very much in keeping with the Nul group. The magazine, Nul=0, is published four times between 1961 and 1965, after which herman de vries carries on, after the disbandment of the Nul group, with Revue Intégration. Nul=0.
Reception and the end of the Nul movement
In the international artistic circuit the members of the Nul group regularly take part in exhibitions where new trends make their public appearance. The attention and appreciation is far greater abroad than in the Netherlands. While true that in their own country the Nul group receive press attention for the often provocative statements made in pamphlets and comments, it cannot be said that there is any actual, great appreciation for the work. In art reviews the work is received fairly half-heartedly and the consideration of it is facetious rather than serious. The exhibitions that are organised in the Stedelijk Museum (1962 and 1965) and in the Haags Gemeentemuseum (1964) are a result of the group’s own initiatives rather than approaches from the individual museum managements. After the Nul exhibition in 1962 the Nul group exclusively consists of Armando, Peeters and Schoonhoven.
Halfway through the sixties the different groups of the New Trends start to break up; the pioneers of the movement, Manzoni and Yves Klein, have died and the individual members of the Nul movement have presented themselves to such a degree that it is no longer expedient to act as a group. Jan Schoonhoven continues to go on with the further development of his reliefs and line drawings, Henderikse leaves for Curaçao and later to the United States and remains a true adherent of Nouveau Réalisme with assemblages and photo collages and Armando and Henk Peeters stop with the visual arts for a time. Once the public becomes more enthusiastic for the work, and this is more frequently included in the commercial art circuit, they draw their own conclusions. Armando stops his sculptural work in order to devote himself entirely to his literary activities for a number of years and Peeters, who feels that the inclusion of the work in the elitist art circuit is at odds with what he had wanted to achieve, takes the ultimate step and also decides to close the studio: ‘Reality no longer has to be made, it is already there.’
Conclusion
The Nul movement has meanwhile been given a valued place in the post war art history of the 20th century and they can be seen as a school that has its roots in the Dada movement, reacts to the personal expressionism from immediately after the Second World War and fits in with the longing for a democratic realism that is allied to western society such as Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art. In addition they have given important stimuli to movements such as Minimal Art, Conceptualism and post-war geometric abstract art.
The exponents of the Nul movement demonstrate in the differentiated view that their oeuvres reveal a definition that provides insight into a crucial period in the previous century.
Marike van der Knaap, MA
Art historian
Nul=0
Looking back
In order to be able to see more clearly, you sometimes have to take a couple of steps back. It is not so much the distance in metres, but that in time which is more significant. Because that is why you then see everything differently. Different every year.
It’s the same with art. And also the same with your own work.
As the Nul group we were three artists (with Armando and Schoonhoven, who hardly knew each other) for whom I was usually the one who gathered together the work for joint exhibitions. Sometimes the number was extended to include Jan Henderikse, hermandevries and in the earlier days Kees van Bohemen, for example. The exhibitions as Nul group cover the period from 1961 to 1965, the two Nul exhibitions in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
These gave us little joy, nothing sold and the criticism was very dismissive. For the artists, therefore, not a period to look back on with any pleasure. To this day Armando still sees it as an all-time low, in later work Schoonhoven moved in a different direction and this has also happened to me, although I, when looking around recently in Düsseldorf and Saint Étienne was still able to do so with some enjoyment.
Many of our international colleagues appear to have made their way to the top of the art of the twentieth century and greater appreciation of our work has now been created.
Why did we do something for which the expectation right from the start was that it would not be appreciated? First of all to clearly demonstrate that we were not dependent on the ‘art industry’. We could afford to do this because all of us were earning a living from something else, Armando as a journalist, Schoonhoven with a job at the Post Office and I was a teacher. I still consider it to be a condition for any serious contribution to art that you have to be independent. After all you are dealing with a system from which you should not expect any appreciation, quite the reverse. In our time that was the declining years of expressionism, here in our country – the Cobra group. We had all grown up with dialectic thinking and from those excessive paint splurges all we needed to do was turn everything around: no colour, no composition, no individual style, everything that could possibly be left out was what aroused our interest. What remained was the material, the reality as that could be seen in our immediate vicinity. No hidden meaning or message. None of that sort of thing.
What you are left with is then not much. You do not need to look at it for long.
But once you start to think…
Henk Peeters, Hall
May 2007