Johan van Hell (1889-1952), `De maaier`, oil on canvas, 150x140 cm, Exhibited:-Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, `Johan van Hell, Christiaan Schaaf, Sarah de Vries, Pau Wijnman`, 1924, no. 43.-Arnhem, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, `Van de Straat. Het sociaal engagement van Johan van Hell (1889-1952)`, 12 November 2005-12 February 2006. Literature:-`Johan van Hell`, in Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 14 September 1924.-Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd, Tineke Reijnders a.o., `Van de Straat. Het sociaal engagement van Johan van Hell (1889-1952)`, Warnsveld 2005, p. 22, ill. no. 27, inv. no. S52.-Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd, Tineke Reijnders a.o., `Johan van Hell 1889-1952`, Houten 2016, p. 22, ill. no. 33, inv. no. S52. Provenance:-Auction, Van Zadelhoff, Hilversum, February 2005.-Private collection, the Netherlands., signed and dated `Johan van Hell./1921` (lower left), Socialist first The multi-talented artist Johan van Hell was a graphic artist, painter, watercolourist, draftsman, lithographer, muralist, designer of book bindings and a professional musician. After WWII he became an almost forgotten artist, until the large exhibition of 1976 his work, organized in ‘t Coopmanshûs in Franeker (Friesland), put Johan van Hell back on the map and gave him a well-deserved place among the pre-war Dutch avant-garde artists. Further exhibitions in principal museums would follow and with every new exhibition, newly found works would be added: paintings, lithographs, posters and ex-libris designs. His esteem as a significant modern artist of the interbellum has grown ever since, along with an increasing interest in his powerful paintings. After having finished his artistic education at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, we find Van Hell still searching for his own visual vocabulary and style. In the 1910s he is experimenting with colour and topics and with various styles, but he only seems to find his true artistic bearings in the 1920s. His best - and best-known - work from the 1920s and 1930s shows topics that instantly reveal his social engagement and social-political views as being the chief impulse for his work. It conveys an abundance of hard-working people, like for example a fishmonger, a petrol man, street musicians, marching young socialists, market merchants, a window cleaner, in short, daily life in a typical working-class Amsterdam neighbourhood. These people are all depicted in a direct, almost monumental style with sharply delineated geometrical forms; sometimes these segments are filled in with subdued grey tones but often with hard undiluted colours. Van Hell was evenly committed to his two great passions: music and the visual arts. He could not live from either one, and he did not want to solely commit to only one passion, as giving up one obsession for the other would have been devasting for his artistic being. He worked like a mad man to earn his daily bread by teaching music, giving drawing lessons and by playing the clarinet as an interim at the Concertgebouw orchestra. But having a job at all, and especially one in your own field of interest, was already a privilege at the time. We are talking about the 1930s, with a looming economic crisis and numerous unemployed people, an unsteady period that did not allow for spending time on non-lucrative activities. Johan van Hell’s work would be part of many joint exhibitions during the interbellum; sometimes as part of the Amsterdam The Brug group, or as a member of the so-called ‘Positionists’, a group of young idealistic artists that would aim to make ‘understandable’ art for all people, as opposed to those artists who would make either unrelatable art (too bourgeois) or incomprehensible art (too modern). The art reviews of the 1920s and 1930s often mention Van Hell together with his contemporaries, like Bart van der Leck and Peter Alma. His work, whether it concerns his posters for the socialist party, his murals or his paintings, does indeed show similarities to that of his avant garde art colleagues, both in subject choice and in style, but Van Hell’s work is always recognizable as being the product of the socialist first, and then that of the artist. The first exhibition he participated in was held in Rotterdam in 1921 at the Rotterdamse Kunstkring. His contribution was small, with the majority of his paintings depicting farmers’ life in Brabant as the direct result of the 20 months he spent in Brabant during the mobilisation of 1917-1918. The reviewer of the show praises him sky-high for his emphatic portrayal of the Brabant farmers whom Van Hell – according to the art critic – paints in such a way that also their spiritual inner life, is well represented. More interestingly, this same critic relates how, in Brabant, Van Hell once came across a group of communist farmers: “Daar zag hij de toekomstboer en ook deze wil hij eenmaal op doek brengen” (“There he saw the farmer of the future, and he wants to put this farmer on canvas as well one day”). It is likely that the present lot proves he actually did just that! The painting was not yet part of his first exhibition, but appears on the 1924 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Here again the reviews are flattering and art critics especially praise his brilliant use of colour. The painting on hand is in all aspects impressive indeed: We see a sturdy looking farmer harvesting wheat with the use of a sickle. The dominating colours are the yellows of the wheat and the exuberant blues of the sky that looms over the farmer as a dome. Some poppies, rendered in big red dots, peep out of the wheat in the foreground to break the almost monotonous yellow strokes. The few blue cornflowers work in the same way, with the same blue used for the sky. Also the sickle itself mirrors the same hues of the sky. But all seems to be just a décor for the star of the show, the rugged farmer in the right-hand side in the foreground. With his luxuriant mop of orange hair and beard, his sturdy features and his open collared white shirt, he is the epitome of labour, honest real manual labour that is. In fact, the whole painting might be considered a direct and distinctive ode to the labourer, with the sickle as an obvious reference to proletarian solidarity. With the surroundings of Brabant, farmers’ life and the use of strong colours in mind, it is an easy step to Van Gogh and he was initially, a great example to Van Hell indeed. Even the orange hair seems to be a nod to his predecessor, although self-portraits of the young Van Hell also display the same distinctive orange hair and beard. More importantly, with this very painting of 1921 Van Hell shows to have found not only his own distinctive style, but also the subject matter for which he would become known best, that of the working man, be it the labourer in the field at the beginning of his career, or the hard-working man in the streets of Amsterdam, later on. Sources:-Tineke Reijnders a.o., ‘Johan van Hell: 1889-1952’, Arnhem 2005.-Vera Illés, ‘De herontdekking van Johan van Hell’, in: NRC Handelsblad, 16 January 1976.-‘Stedelijk Museum, Johan van Hell’, in: Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 14 September 1924.