Abstract composition, 1998

Jan Montyn (1924-2015) was a well-known Dutch painter, draftsman, graphic artist and poet with an extraordinary life. It is said of him that his eyes have seen more than a person can bear. His adventurous and spectacular life brought him to many hellish – but also paradisiacal – places, resulting in an oeuvre of beautiful etchings, paintings and poems.

Montyn is especially known for his color etchings. Visiting an exhibition of Anton Heyboer, he became inspired by the artist which led to contact between the two. Heyboer gave Montyn his etching press. For Montyn, drawing on a zinc or copper plate is just like writing. Like Heyboer, he ‘wrote’ on small zinc plates with a nail or screwdriver and made no more than four to seven prints on paper. He treated the sheet with undiluted hydrochloric acid, which allowed the work to erode and a very spontaneous image appeared.

Montyn’s style is recognizable by its landscape elements, endered as the projection of human emotion. His connection with the landscape and the earth is evident from, amoing other things, his preference for the colour umber (earth tones), which for him symbolises the earth and everything connected to it.

Despair and happiness, peace and four wars, Montyn experienced them all and lived a life of extremes. The impressions he gained, his personal processing of them and his view of things afterwards – all this was recorded in his art. Montyn likes to quote a saying of Buddha: ‘On dirt and dung grows the most beautiful flower in the world: the lotus.’

Montyn enjoys great international fame. His work can be found in many museum collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Dirk Ayelt Kooiman recorded the turbulent life story of Jan Montyn in the epic biographical novel ‘Montyn’.