De reus van Rotterdam

Stadsgeheimen

76

The University of Arkansas Medical Center requests the pleasure of your company at the opening of a one man show of paintings by Van Golden.

4301 West Markhaw - Little Rock, Ark. 8 to 10 P.M. - June 1, 1961

Translated from Dutch. Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager - well known author and ‘angry young man’ of Dutch literary circles, wrote this Text With No Explanation, for Daniël van Golden, on the occasion of the painter's latest exposition in the Netherlands, March 1961, Rotterdam.

VAN GOLDEN FICTION

Who is this Daniël van Golden, who has the alias ‘les mains sales’? At whose terribly beautiful gouaches and paintings have you, coming from all starting points, arrived?

Attentive, chauvinistic gallery trotters know this obscure figure - black cap and eye-patch - who helped to endanger many openings of friend and enemy.

Why did van Golden venture a succesful landing on the east coast of the U.S.A.?

Why has he probed his way deeper into the U.S., to Little Rock, where his colours white/black so poignantly harmonize? Only to exhibit and to design ballet sets as he told reporters in

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Rotterdam?

His friends know the better reason: also to visit William de Kooning and above all to make out with Marilyn Monroe:

‘Dimaggio could care less.’

He had no idea, when he was still playing with paint and fire in front of the Windows of the Acropolis in the Delistreet, Katendrecht (infamous hide-out of women and whisky in Rotterdam, so well known to seamen of all nationalities). When he merely knew the smell of ouzo (Greek gin) and saw Nordic men fight. When he himself was still learning the rules of the game in a wrestling club.

That only started to dawn on him, when he was attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, trimmed store windows, and, heaven forbid, sweet etchings.

That took definitive form in black and white, the time he roamed around the continent on his life-endangering motor-scooter and mailed puzzling collages from the Casbah.

The time he soiled lillies at Flower Show in Rotterdam, where he painted a mural. The time his first Monroe pinups were target to his pitch-black splotches.

The same incurable dirty hand, which you will innocently shake on this opening, blew on the thunderstorms which overtake you at this moment and which you, aloof as you may be, will find hard to escape.

The same black hand, which always plays black, when the roulette wheel turns in his swampy studio in Schiedam, which now, still drenched with the smell of gin, has six months to dry and to recuperate from the black art cultivated there.

But eventually it will look black with paint and people again. Then they, undignified, will step over the threshold again, van Goldens consonants in Rotterdam, and they are not amazed to hear their fashionable Spanish heels suck to the floor.

Highly amazed, though, are the birdwatchers of journalism. With stained lapel they flee down the stairs, full of disgust, and in their morningpapers appears their cry of agony:

‘That is beautiful? Is that necessary? Is not a capable young man prostituting himself for a whim?’

And when van Golden throws his rosy little etchings under their

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snotty noses:

‘Beautiful drawings, technically very polished, pure, strong of line. Etchings of cranes, in the harbor of Rotterdam, of houses, of a cemetery, and now this!

I would rather loathe his paintings, I believe. But there is something which compels and holds my attention. I don't know why, but it's there.’ (Kursivering Vaandrager)

Yes, it's there. The black hand has struck, strikes, and will strike again with poignantly harsh strokes.

Why this unexplained lecture? Because I believe Daniël van Golden to be the white bird in the drab swarm of circling sparrows which, with the regularity of the seasons, settles on the walls of the Dutch galleries.

Have your wine, then, which van Golden himself dislikes. For his ‘Black and White’ he will begrudge you.

Voorheen: ‘Ik wist niet dat je zo goed kon schrijven.’

Thans: ‘Ik wil niet zeggen dat je een viezerik ben...’

Tolle lege/gymnasium erasmianum 1962/studie II
Schilder/voor Daan van Golden (‘les mains sales’)

Hij werkte. Dekor: muziek, exotisch, een zolder, koud winters dagverblijf, reuk: terpentine, Boeken, tijdschriften, fotoos, door gore vitrage bedekt (voor de spetters). Hij werkte, bestond uit ritmische gebaren, boetseerde materie uit grote tubes gulpend, mengde, manipuleerde, manifesteerde zich, tastte met groezelige handen de verf af en bouwde een oorlogzuchtig landschap. Snel strooide hij zand, dook driftig weg en besprong weer tot de tanden gewapend (kwasten, messen, beitels, planken) zijn uitdager en vocht voor een overwinning (zonder genade). Regelmatig kwamen zijn handen uit de brij los, hij omklemde de fles, goot een straal whiskey achter zijn kiezen, en hervatte de strijd, razender nu, beschoot met verf zijn omgeving: stoel, tafel, bed, gore vitrage. Dan, toch merkbaar de kou, de honger, eenzaamheid, hij dooft als voltooiende daad zijn sigaret in het schilderij. Rustig nu, loopt naar het raam, beslagen door winter, en met aarzelende vinger streelt hij een poppetje op het glas; heel gewoon, misschien wat onhandig. Hij kijkt door de dunne

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lijntjes naar buiten; een school gaat uit, een agent kuiert voorbij. (Echter; kondenserende waterdamp nam de lijntjes heel gauw weer weg, zodat hij nog niets zag.)

jop.