Point of view of the gallery on the artist and his work. At first glance,getting into his work is almost a challenge!It is necessary to take time and very quickly our eye finds its reward,our mind,curiosity,awakening ans satisfaction.In our opinion,the art of Bram van Velde is the expression of life and its meanders and also of man facing his uncertainties.His oils,his gouaches are back and forth oscillating between curved forms,those of wandering,angular ones,freeze frames,alternating bright and violent colors,expression of an inner fight,finally the tones, more nuanced,washed out,the drips ,the milky whites(sighs of partition), moment of ineffable fullness, of appeasement. This is our feeling and the testimony of our special attachment to this artist,brutal and soothing,dark and bright,rigid and voluptuous.
Bram van Velde was born in 1895 in the Netherlands, from a family of four children of which he was the second; he is the brother of Geer, his youngest son who also became a painter. Their childhood was marked by misery and the abandonment of the home by their father after going bankrupt. Bram will still have a certain affection for him. From the age of twelve, he left to work and paint furniture, apartments with talent and taste. Bram reads a lot, visits the Museums, enriches his existence with intellectual food, a real counterweight to the difficulties of his life. Joined by his brother Geer, Bram moved to Paris in 1924. He was protected and supported by Kramers (his employer and Dutch patron) who will stop sending subsidies in 1930. In 1936, in the middle of the Spanish war, where he lived, Bram lost his young wife. He returned to his brother Geer’s in Paris to share years of misery there until 1945, years during which he gave up painting, despite the friendship and the unwavering support of Samuel Beckett, real light in his dark years. In 1947, the Galerie Maeght signed him a contract and began to exhibit his works. Bram van Velde struggled to meet success. Aimé Maeght organized an exhibition in New York at the Kootz Gallery in 1948 which ended in failure, leaving Bram in doubt and a desperate loneliness. Much later, Willem de Kooning, also of Dutch origin, will remind him in joyful & complimentary terms of the New York exhibition. In 1952, Bram and Maeght separated on a new commercial failure from the exhibition held at the Galerie Maeght. He met Jacques Putman there; this meeting was a major and positive event in his life. Therefore, Jacques Putman shows interest and admiration for the artist’s work, esteem and affection for man. At the age of 70, the artist Bram van Velde, thanks to Putman’s accomplice and protective support finds recognition and success .Until his death at the Putmans’ home in 1981, the man will remain the solitary imperturbable in the permanence of doubt, constantly walking in the silence of meditation, « I paint the impossibility of painting » BvV
