Pierre Kemp

30.05.10 – 29.08.10

Opening Sunday 30 May 4 - 6 pm

'Long before Pierre Kemp made his name in Dutch literature in a rather unique way', writes Kemp researcher Fred van Leeuwen, 'he was a painter. He then became a writing painter. And then a painting writer. And finally, a writer who didn't even want to paint any more'. 

Kemp's most distinctive work was created in the period between 1929 and 1935. Inspired by symbolism, Kemp used bright colours and an imaginative, naïve visual language, which were not really in keeping with the work of his contemporaries. In 1935, Kemp put a definitive stop to his painting. 

The collection in the Bonnefantenmuseum covers the larger part of Kemp's visual oeuvre. On 30 May, for the occasion of the presentation in Centre Ceramique of the biography 'Pierre Kemp. Een leven', written by poet and literature professor Wiel Kusters, a retrospective of works by Pierre Kemp the visual artist will open on the third floor of the Bonnefantenmuseum.

In 1959, Pierre Kemp (1886-1967) received the P.C. Hooft Award, a major Dutch literary oeuvre award, and was thus canonised as one of the great Dutch poets of the twentieth century. Kemp lived most of his life in Maastricht, apart from a brief sojourn in Amsterdam of less than a year when he was an apprentice journalist with the magazine De Tijd (1915) and, of course, apart from the many hours he spent working in Eygelshoven as a wage clerk at the Laura coal mine (1916-1945).