Jan Meyer

Jan Meyer, whose name is uniformly spelled Jan Meijer, is a Dutch painter, lithographer and carborundum engraver (a technique he taught at universities in the United States) who was born on December 6, 1927 in Assen. Belonging to the current of lyrical abstraction, he lived from 1960 in Dieudonné (Oise) where he died on March 21, 1995. After being interned in the Westerbock camp, in the north of Holland, Jan Meyer received his first training by working with the typographer Hendrik Werkman (en) who is the printer of the artist group De Ploeg (en) and who will be arrested and summarily shot by the Gestapo a few days before the end of the Second World War. It was after the war that Jan Meyer became friends with the poet Evert Rinsema (nl), who was close to the De Stijl movement and friend of Theo van Doesburg, to whom he owes passionate revelations ranging from the minimalism of Piet Mondrian to the expressionism of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, but also his introduction into the Dada movement. He attended for a time the courses of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam while participating from 1947 in the exhibitions of the De Ploeg group to which he remained attached, having his first personal exhibition in 1982. The 1950s was that of his first trips to France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and especially from 1953 in Italy where he rubbed shoulders with Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Antonio Saura, Karel Appel and Corneille and where he exhibited from 1959. C ' Like Raoul Ubac and Pierre Dmitrienko, who would become his friends, he moved to Dieudonné in 1960 where, “in his studio on the hillside, he unleashed the tubes of paint with great knives, crushing on the canvas the homogeneous superimposed pastes ”at the same time as he becomes a first art collector. In 1976 and 1977, Jan Meyer taught the technique of carborundum engraving at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in Madison (New Jersey) and at Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts). During this same period, he stayed in Jamaica, Haiti and Martinique, in Canada where he approached Inuit art, in New York where he frequented the painters of the contemporary New York school.