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1945: Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman

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On this date in 1945, during the last weeks of World War II, Dutch print artist Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman was shot by the Gestapo in the forest near Bakkeveen for his resistance activities.

Werkman’s 1938 self-portrait (source)

Werkman English Wikipedia entry | Dutch) grew up and worked in the city of Groningen and participated in an artists’ collective there called De Ploeg (The Plough) but he was

Werkman ran printing and publishing shops in Groningen that commanded most of his attention; he traveled abroad only once, in 1929. Nevertheless, he experimented through the 1920s and 1930s with creative use, largely self-taught, of typography and printing (he tried his hand at verse, too).

For a time he circulated his own English-titled magazine The Next Call, which he exchanged for work by other artists and designers to keep abreast of the era’s artistic ferment. He was noted for his druksels — “a word impossible to translate, a suffix joined to the word for typographic impression which adds to it a sense of modesty as well as affectionate irony. Perhaps it can best be rendered by ‘printlet’ rather than by ‘booklet’,” in the words of this British Library explainer.

These druksels could be quite independent of any text, or they could complement and enrich words to which they related. The technique used to make them — by means of letter types or other pieces from the type case stamped on to the paper by hand, of impressions of colour from stencils or their addition with the ink-roller held evenly or at varying angles — needed much time in preliminary design work, in proof impressions, and finally in the most careful and laborious execution. The most complex druksels might have needed up to fifty different handlings in and out of the press and allowed no more than one or at the most two or three copies to be made … they are considered works of art in their own right and have become very expensive collectors’ items.

With the German occupation, his became work and art in resistance. He rolled the presses for an underground publishing house called De Blauwe Schuit, but got arrested in a sweep of suspected subversives on March 13, 1945. Four weeks later, he was one of ten prisoners shot just three days ahead of Groningen’s liberation; “there had not even been a semblance of charges or trial,” continues the British Library bio, and “the pretence for his arrest had been the incomprehensible, decadent nature, as his captors saw it, of his art, his obvious Jewish sympathies and the suspected unauthorized use of paper.”


From left to right: Composition with letters ‘X’, Paul Robeson Sings, and one of his wartime renderings of various Hasidic Legends. Behold more works by Mr. Werkman at Wikimedia or Artnet. The best place to see his output in the flesh is surely Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which acquired an ample Werkman collection in the late 1930s thanks to the fortuitous notice of its curator.

On this day..