Bram van Velde

Abraham "Bram" Gerardus van Velde (19 October 1895 – 28 December 1981) was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction.

Bram van Velde was born in Zoeterwoude, near Leiden, into an intensely poor family, and this would mark him profoundly for life.

After going bankrupt, the father abandoned the family; the mother and children moved repeatedly over the next years, from Leyden to Lisse, and finally to The Hague.

In 1907, the young Bram entered into service as an apprentice in the painting and interior decorating company of Schaijk & Kramers in The Hague.

Because of his status as bread-winner for his family, Bram van Velde was exempted from service in the First World War, and he was able to continue his work as a painter and decorator, and to enroll in the Mauritshuis of The Hague, where he was able to copy masterworks in the collection.

On 6 October 1928, van Velde married the German painter Lilly (Sophie Caroline) Klöker (1896–1936), whom he had been seeing since perhaps his stay at Worpswede.

It is here that van Velde used the early painting of Matisse as his inspiration and he made a series of still-lives in which his later abstraction started to show itself.

When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, Lilly died in a hospital and Bram van Velde fled back to Marseille with several of his canvases made on Majorca.

Stopped on the street by the police in 1938 because he was speaking German with Marthe, van Velde was briefly imprisoned (his papers were not in order), and brief incarcerations would occur several times in the coming years.

In 1947, van Velde signed a contract with the Galerie Maeght in Paris, and in 1948 he showed his work in the Kootz gallery in New York, but this was also a commercial failure, despite a good review by Willem de Kooning.

After 1970, van Velde travelled to visit his own expositions in Poland, Iceland, Italy and Norway, Brussels, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Rome.