Willem de Looper

Biography of the Artist

Willem de Looper was born in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1932. He was raised in an environment that encouraged his enthusiasm for everything American, especially jazz. He came to the United States in his teens and studied art at American University. After two years in the U.S. Army, de Looper joined the Phillips Collection staff, initially as a guard, in 1959 and finally retiring as Chief Curator in 1987. De Looper passed away in January 2009.

De Looper’s paintings evolved over a forty year career, from lyrical abstraction in the 1960s to more geometrically structured work in the 1990s. An overriding concern with color and texture remained consistent throughout his work. Amorphous stain paintings gave way to compositions of horizontal color bands in earthy colors during the 1970s, followed by window-shaped compositions in the 1980s when he began producing large, dynamic canvases in bold colors and design. In addition to his paintings on canvas and paper, de Looper is also known for his intimate, unique works in sketchbooks.

Chronology

1932-1945
Willem de Looper was born October 30, 1932, in The Hague, the Netherlands. He was the third child of Wilhelmina Johanna and banker Henri Bastiaan de Looper. As a young child, Willem attended a Montessori school, which placed equal emphasis on imaginative and cognitive development, and by the time he was seven years old, Germany had invaded Poland and World War II had begun. Soon thereafter, the Netherlands came under German occupation. During this period, the family lived for a while with a friend and client of de Looper’s father who was an excellent pianist. Movement was severely restricted, and cultural life had all but disappeared. In this constricted environment, music provided solace and stimulation, and de Looper attributes his lifelong passion for music—which profoundly affected his creative life—to this experience.

1945-1949
De Looper’s interest in drawing became increasingly serious as World War II ended and American publications became available again in the Netherlands. It was from the pages of the New Yorker that de Looper began, as he said, to build my dreams of a life in the U.S., and of involvement in the music and art world so colorfully depicted in the New Yorker’s pages.¹ He was also strongly influenced by the vivid colors and striking graphics, layouts, photography, art, and advertising of the Saturday Evening Post and Life Magazine. The impact of these American publications and others are evident in de Looper’s early drawings and watercolors.

1950-1956
In 1950 at age 17, de Looper joined his 28-year-old brother Hans in Washington, DC, where he had just begun to work for the International Monetary Fund. By 1953 the family had decided Willem should go to college in the U.S. He enrolled at American University and began his first formal study of art with faculty artists Robert Gates, Sarah Baker, and Ben (“Joe”) Summerford who, de Looper said: was my primary mentor.² He simultaneously majored in economics, a field more acceptable to his family. De Looper soon changed his major to Fine Arts.

While pursuing his undergraduate studies, de Looper organized student shows, served as the art editor of the University’s literary journal, and was selected for several local exhibitions featuring outstanding student artists. He returned frequently to The Hague to be with his mother who had separated from his father and was living opposite the museum that held the largest collection of Piet Mondrian’s works. He avidly visited as many newly opened Dutch art museums as he could during these visits.

1957-1958
In 1957 after graduating from American University with a BFA, de Looper began a two-year tour with the U.S. Army in Europe, where he was stationed at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. During this period, he began to collect and study major art magazines and journals, and to travel extensively throughout Europe to see the great masterpieces of Western art in major museums. In 1958 the young artist was exposed for the first time to Abstract Expressionist canvases, which he saw at the American Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair. Throughout his Army tour, de Looper drew and painted in notebooks he carried with him and at the Army base’s craft shop.

1959-1965
Upon returning to Washington in 1959, de Looper was hired as a guard at The Phillips Gallery. He continued to be particularly fascinated with the works of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and those of several artists involved in what would soon be known as the Washington Color School. Their strong emphasis on color and abstraction held a strong appeal as well as thinned down paint like that employed by Morris Louis (I loved the idea of the paint ‘disappearing’ into the canvas, he said³).

During the early 1960s, de Looper experimented with Color School painting processes: spraying, rolling, pouring, and sponging. Color replaced line in the artist’s attempts to convey a sense of spaciousness and volume.⁴ In 1964 he began to work in Magna (a type of acrylic paint), and later with water-based, acrylic emulsions that allowed him to create the veiled effects of staining that characterized the works in his first major group show at the 1965 Washington Area Exhibition sponsored by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He received an honorable mention in painting at this exhibition for his work titled October Sheath.

1966-1970
De Looper’s first solo exhibition was in 1966 at the Jefferson Place Gallery, where he exhibited paintings described in reviews as “large blossom designs.”⁵ The Gallery continued giving him solo exhibitions almost every year through 1974. Also in 1966, his work was included in the Washington Watercolor Society Exhibition, the Hope College (Holland, Michigan) Fine Arts Festival, the UNESCO and Brandeis University’s Art Exhibit, and Auction at the World Bank. In addition, the Office of Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State featured several of his paintings in its program for the first time in 1966. The following year, de Looper was selected for the second time for the Corcoran’s biennial Washington Area Show.

Another consequential exhibition featuring de Looper’s work was The Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s 1968 Group Seven, organized by curator Renato Danese. Throughout the mid to late sixties, he participated in shows outside the Washington, DC, including Baltimore Museum of Art’s Washington: Twenty Years. In a review of the WGMA Seven show, de Looper’s work was characterized by critic Benjamin Forgey as an “…almost complete disintegration of form so that the principal formal confinement available is the rectangular edge of the painting.”⁶

In 1968 de Looper and his future wife, Frauke Weber, joined Sam and Dorothy Gilliam on a trip to Europe which included a stop in London to see the Kenneth Noland exhibition at the Kasmin Gallery. Afterwards, they went on to the Netherlands and Germany to visit family.

In 1969 the couple married and moved into the St. Regis building on California Street, in Northwest Washington. There, de Looper had his first relatively big studio, and he dates the onset of large canvases to this move. He maintained his residence and studio at this Washington location until his death.

1971-1973
In 1971 Willem and Frauke, who was working at the German Embassy in Washington, drove a car across the United States, a trip that proved influential in many ways. It shows up in his reference to landscape and the color of the west, and to Native American artifacts in subsequent paintings. A number of his canvases have Native American names. Frauke was very influential, too, as she specialized in the Native cultures of North America in graduate school. After their initial trip, the de Loopers travelled to Taos several times, and also to Santa Fe to visit their friend and Washington gallery owner Manfred Baumgartner, who was responsible for introducing them to Santa Fe’s cultural life.

In 1971, de Looper’s work was shown at several venues, including at The Phillips Collection and at the Kingpitcher Gallery in Pittsburgh.

By 1972 the former museum guard had taken advantage of the many opportunities offered by The Phillips Collection, becoming Assistant Curator and in 1975, Associate Curator. During the early seventies several of de Looper’s works, including Spring, Toujours, Stretto, Syrinx, and two untitled canvases, went on tour as part of the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. These works were exhibited in ambassadorial residences throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and South America.⁷

1974-1976
1974 was an important year in de Looper’s career. He was included in the Washington Invitational sponsored by the Adams­Davidson Gallery and planned to coincide with the opening of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In the catalogue for the show, the director asserted that an... atmosphere of freedom was palpable in Washington… and that it developed as a direct result of the innovations of the Washington Color School of the 1950s.⁸

Also in 1974 de Looper was one of the artists involved in exhibitions and performances that were part of Art Now ‘74 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. For this event he designed Sky Forms, a work of circular and spiral forms of varicolored smoke “painted” in the sky over the Kennedy Center building by a small skywriter plane. This ephemeral project was his first and only venture into conceptual art.⁹

After Jefferson Place closed in 1974, he chose Max Protetch to represent him, a gallery known for its roster of minimalist artists. De Looper found the association... very stimulating, since, at the time, Max was representing people from all over. Joel Shapiro, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Vito Acconci, Pat Steir, and Ellsworth Kelly were in Max’s stable then. I was heavily influenced by Kelly for a number of years, especially by his sculpture. During this period, I was the only Washington artist Max represented.¹⁰

De Looper also noted that in the late seventies, minimalism was “rubbing off,” and that the “spareness” of works by Brice Marden and Robert Mangold, also represented by Protetch became increasingly influential.¹¹

1977-1978
In early 1977, concurrent exhibitions ran at Fraser’s Stable Gallery and Max Protetch featuring large canvases and smaller works on paper. He was also represented by a 77” x 101” acrylic on canvas from 1975, donated by the Protetch Gallery, in the Hirshhorn’s new acquisitions show, the first exhibition of purchased and donated art since the museum opened two and a half years earlier.¹² Also in 1977, at the urging of friends, Willem and Frauke joined a Smithsonian travel group for a Trans-Siberian Railroad trip across the Soviet Union. They traveled via Tokyo, (de Looper’s first encounter with Japan), and took a side trip to Samarkand and Taskent. This trip into the heart of the former Soviet Islamic republics was highly influential on subsequent work. As de Looper explained: The blues and turquoises I began to use, and especially the modification of my ‘window’ shapes were direct results of exposure to the color and complexity of the indigenous Islamic culture of Samarkand and Taskent.¹³

1979-1983
There were two exhibitions in Washington in 1980: a solo at the McIntosh/Drysdale Gallery, and another at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Also in 1980, the artist made a trip to Florida where he placed ten paintings at the Medici-Berenson Gallery in Miami and three at the Hodgell-Hartigan Gallery in Sarasota. The de Loopers began annual visits to Florida in 1981 and continued these trips through 1994.

In August of 1982 de Looper was appointed Curator of The Phillips Collection. He had served briefly as acting curator following the death of his predecessor, James McLaughlin, who had been Curator since 1974. In this new position, de Looper accompanied the Master Paintings of The Phillips exhibition to Japan and then to Europe in 1993, representing The Phillips Collection at openings, and usually giving slide lectures as well. The three-week stay in Japan included time in Tokyo and Nara, the two venues for the exhibition, as well as Kyoto and Nikko, and was highly influential for de Looper. He traces his use of metallic paints and foils and his diptych and triptych “screen” formats to this visit.

1984-1990
From 1982, when de Looper assumed chief curatorial responsibilities at The Phillips, through 1987, he led the first effort to inventory the entire collection and publish a summary catalogue. During this period, he and the staff organized several small exhibitions from the permanent collection, which successfully traveled to many regional museums for a fee, one of several strategies devised by de Looper to raise funds for the renovation of the original building.

De Looper was in The Washington Show in 1985 organized by Clarie List at the Corcoran, and Kornblatt Gallery, which now represented him, gave him solo exhibitions in 1985 and 1987. The latter exhibition, Willem de Looper: Paintings from the Seventies, featured works from 1973 through 1976. Ray Kass noted in an accompanying brochure essay: The works of the late seventies embody a truly non-objective sense of content, as if they were windows in which there is no specific view... infer[ing] a further level of abstraction [where] his subtle color achieves a heightened versatility, transcendently light-filled, or a veritable ‘picture’ of light.¹⁴

In 1987 de Looper resigned as Curator of The Phillips Collection but continued to work on several shows as Consulting Curator.

*In 1989 the former Jones Troyer Fitzpatrick Lassman Gallery in Washington exhibited small paintings on paper by de Looper. These had been created initially as pages in sketchbooks, which he conceived as single works that could ultimately be removed and framed individually. When the Kornblatt Gallery closed in 1992, de Looper moved to Troyer Fitzpatrick Lassman.¹⁵

1991-1996
De Looper began making prints in 1991 with Smith Andersen Editions of Palo Alto, California, a printing studio and publisher that had worked with most well-known artists on the West Coast, such as Sam Francis and Richard Diebenkorn, as well as with Sam Gilliam from Washington.

In 1994 de Looper completed a suite of works in pulp painting and water-based monoprinting on paper during an artist residency at Pyramid Atlantic, in Riverdale, Maryland, a center for custom papermaking, printmaking, and the art of the book. He returned for two more residencies during 1995 and 1996. It was during the 1996 residency that two commemorative prints were produced in conjunction with the retrospective at The University of Maryland.

De Looper’s alma mater, American University, presented solo exhibition of his work at their Watkins Gallery in 1994, and the Corcoran included one of his paintings in their New Acquisitions show in 1995.

In late 1995 and early 1996, The Phillips Collection sponsored Willem de Looper: Sketchbooks and Small Paintings on Paper. This exhibition inaugurated the Museum’s new series of single-gallery exhibitions devoted to contemporary art. The museum’s calendar publication noted: Over the course of the last twenty years, [de Looper] has filled dozens of books with private and introspective works [which] are not preliminary studies... but finished paintings in themselves... he often turns the cover of the book into a painting...[and the small format] invites closer study of his subtle technique, strong use of color, and carefully balanced compositions.¹⁶
— Terry Gips, Director and Curator, Art Gallery, UMD, 1996

1. Interview with the artist by Mary Jo Aagerstoun, May 8, 1996.

2. Ibid. 

3. Ibid.                 

4. Ray Kass, essay in exhibition flyer, BR Kornblatt Gallery, Washington, DC: “Willem de Looper: Paintings from the Seventies,” October 24 to December 2, 1987.

5. Pamela Howard, “A New Year-A New Look,” The Washington Daily News, Friday, January 14, 1966, 25 (includes black and white photo of Crimson Joy).

6. Benjamin Forgey, “The Question is ...To Paint, or Not...” The Sunday Star, September 15, 1968, L3.

7. Registration-location-condition-receipt record copies, numbers 3869, 2058, and 2042; and letter from Willem de Looper to Mrs. Llewellyn Thompson, Director of the Art in Embassies Program, U.S. Department of State, September 16, 1976, archives of the artist.

8. Dale Kline Birkel, “Introduction,” Washington Invitational 1974 (ExhibitionCatalogue). Washington, D.C.: Adams-Davidson Gallery, November 1 to December 7, 1974. Countering Birkel’s claim that the artists included in the show were “followers” of the Color School, Benjamin Forgey of the Washington Star-News noted that “several of the artists were set in their ways before Louis and Noland developed their striking innovations in color,” and that, instead, the show had “something of the atmosphere of an American University reunion. Three of the artists, Robert Gates, William Calfee, and Ben Summerford—were early stalwarts in the studio art department there and [are] still leading members of its faculty... [while] four others—Leon Berkowitz, Willem de Looper, Jennie Lea Knight, and William Woodward had at least some association with the department either as students or teachers... [This left] only two artists, Joseph Shannon, the independent realist and James Twitty, the flashy abstract painter who is largely self-taught [who] had no direct connections to this university.. the Washington Star-News, Friday, November 1, 1974, Gl-2.

9. De Looper noted ruefully that the piece was “even more of a conceptual piece, because the pilot didn’t show up on the day he was supposed to and when he did, he couldn’t do the colored smoke I had specified. But it was fun and gave me a new respect for artists like Christo, since there were so many logistics including getting permission from the Air Force to fly in that air space! But it was a good example of the kind of atmosphere among the artists at Protetch and a tribute to Max. There were lots of other Washington art movers and shakers involved with the Kennedy Center events including Walter Hopps, Jocelyn Kress, and Mary Swift.” Interview with the artist, May 8, 1996.

10. Interview with the artist, May 8, 1996.

11. Ibid.

12. Local press coverage of the exhibition praised “the intelligent gap-filling” evident in the acquisition of paintings by Stuart Davis, sculpture by David Smith, and works created since the museum opened in “the fields of abstract painting and sculpture (Jack Bush, Anthony Caro, Friedel Dzubas, Alan Shields, Willem de Looper, Gene Davis, Jacob Kainen, Joan Mitchell, Michael Todd...and Alma Thomas).” Benjamin Forgey, “Hirshhorn is Acquiring a New Look,” The Washington Star, Sunday, April 3, 1977, G24.

13. Interview with the artist, May 8, 1996.

14. Ray Kass, “The Paintings of Willem de Looper, 1973-1976.” from the BR Kornblatt Gallery exhibition brochure, Willem de Looper: Paintings from the Seventies, October 24, 1989 through December 2, 1990, archives of the artist.

15. Howard Risatti, “Washington D.C.: Willem de Looper: Jones Troyer Fitzpatrick Gallery; BR Kornblatt Gallery,” Artforum, summer 1989.

16. Phillips Collection, News and Events: January-February 1996, 5.

See full chronology.

Addendum
During his career, de Looper compiled a remarkable record of exhibitions, with more than thirty solo shows in Washington, DC, New York City, Florida and St. Louis, Missouri, as well as in Germany and France.

De Looper’s final retrospective was held at the Katzen Center at American University in the spring of 2008. The catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition contains an interview in which the Katzen’s Director and Curator, Jack Rasmussen, asks the artist about his influences. In response, de Looper mentions the significance of color, form and feeling in his work and stresses the playfulness in his smallest pieces, inspired by the collection he deeply loved at the Phillips.

Due in large part to the efforts of his wife, de Looper’s impact continued after his death in 2009. His paintings were included in exhibitions at American University, the Morris Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City. Paintings were also acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Kreeger Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Phillips Collection. Until Franke’s death nine years later, de Looper continued to be represented by Atrium Gallery in St. Louis and locally by Hemphill Fine Arts. In 2018, the Foundation was formed to continue her dedication to his legacy by preserving, exhibiting and expanding the appreciation of de Looper’s distinctive works of abstract art.