96) and Annie M.G. Schmidt (see The Low Countries 1994-95: 18-24), not to mention a stack of children's books. He turns down commissions to illustrate works by writers with whom he feels no affinity.
The question remains whether his uncommissioned work, his snowy owls, marabous, frogs, crickets and all the other creatures, does not attain a greater intensity. Drawing from nature, free from any literary purpose, must spring from a deep-seated need. If the motto of Amsterdam Zoo, ‘Artis Natura Magistra’ (‘nature is art's mistress’), ever meant anything, it does here. And in fact many of Vos' drawings were done at the Zoo.
But his uncommissioned work does not stop there. His phantasmagorias, metamorphoses, harlequinades and masks are to my mind the most compelling of all his brain-children. They spring from a mind alive to the classics, to fairy tales and to many other cultural legacies. The images that well up out of that inner treasury are often unutterably melancholy. Whereas as an illustrator Vos is usually light-hearted or amusingly licentious, his unsolicited work is peopled with lost souls, blind-drunk boozers, pitched forward over tables in cheerless premises. They seem to want no truck with life. Their faces are swathed in cloth as though from shame. In pen and ink drawings like Yorick's Cares Forgotten (1985) or Bender (1988) the human comedy has reached rock bottom. I strongly suspect that such masquerades are closer to home than one realises at first sight.
Peter Vos' work is sometimes written about in an apologetic if admiring manner. What, some critics have asked, is its place in an era of abstract expressionism, computer art, innovative installations and the like? Is a traditionally schooled draughtsman not a shade from the past? And one who renounced the art of painting, into the bargain. The handful of paintings he has done are not to be found.
In the debate about what may or may not be done in contemporary art, about the tasks and responsibilities of the modern artist, Peter Vos' voice is seldom heard. His time is probably too valuable to him. A random remark is just about all that has ever been noted. That there was rather a lot of tomfoolery going on these days, or words to that effect. From a man who has such a supreme command of his métier such a comment is to be expected.
A Dutch newspaper editor recently proposed that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam should open a Peter Vos room, where his work would be permanently on show. It probably will not happen in this century. Hopefully there will be centuries to come. It is not unthinkable that future museum policy makers will one day realise that it would not be such a bad idea to give this twentieth-century maverick a room of his own.
ed leeflang
Translated by Elizabeth Mollison.
