From March 1 to April 9, 2017, the Jan van der Togt Museum exhibited work by Jan Snoeck and Oskar Lens under the title "Two Artists from The Hague."
Jan Snoeck studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, graduating in 1949. In 1953, he spent a year working in Ossip Zadkine's studio in Paris.
Jan Snoeck (1927) initially worked with materials such as stone, wood, and bronze, but later focused primarily on ceramics. He uses cheerful, primary colors, and people are usually central to his subjects. Snoeck's often monumental work can be found both in the Netherlands and abroad. This exhibition shows works that Snoeck has created over the past ten years.
Snoeck recently created collages reminiscent of masks; he called them 'masks and dreams'. "When I'm in Provence in France, I walk a lot and find the most wonderful things. That's how my masks came about." In addition to these masks, Snoeck exhibited large monumental sculptures reminiscent of Egyptian blue statues, as well as a series of glass sculptures he created in collaboration with glassblowers in Murano, Italy.
Snoeck's work can be found in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, and Keramiekmuseum Princessehof in Leeuwarden, among others.
Oskar Lens was born in Hilversum and grew up in the Gooi region. After completing his education at the Nieuwe Lyceum, he studied law in Utrecht, after which he worked as a lawyer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. Even then, he was already thinking about painting, first as a hobby and later seriously as a profession.
On the advice of painters such as Jaap Nanninga and Theo Bitter, Lens (1930) attended the Free Academy in the evenings. At the age of 33, he decided to quit his job to devote himself entirely to painting. Initially, he painted abstract works with ink and paint on paper, using very little color.
He chose people, mostly women, in bizarre situations such as fashion shows, museums, cooking in the kitchen or watching a spectacle as his subject matter. Lens is known for his portrait of actress Ida Wasserman (1901–1977) in her last starring role in Edward Albee's play All Over. Reviewer Peter Berger wrote about it: "If you take the beautiful portrait that Lens painted of Mrs. Wasserman, it is a portrait in every sense of the word. It seems accurate and refined."
A separate book has been published about each artist to mark the exhibition.