Water lilies, 1983

Jean-Paul Vroom is one of the first artists, who worked in the combination of lithography and screen printing.

Johannes (Jean) Paul Vroom was born in The Hague in 1922 and died in Amsterdam in 2006. He studied painting at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague from 1938 to 1939, but left for Paris at a young age. Here he attended the École Estienne from 1944 to 1946, where he specialised in graphic techniques. In 1955, he returned to the Netherlands. He started teaching at George Lampe’s Free Academy in The Hague.

Partly influenced by Rein Draaier, he often chose the landscape as his subject: fields, plants, leaves, but also the urban landscape in the US, for example.Through his collaboration with Hans van Manen for the Netherlands Dance Theatre and the National Ballet, dancers also became an important subject.

In 1976, he started collaborating with Hans Jansen, who had started his screen-printing studio in Amsterdam in 1972. While screen-printing at that time was mainly known as a modern graphic technique that allowed you to print large areas of colour (à là Warhol, Lichtenstein, Stella et al.), they developed a screen-print with engraving-like characteristics, creating a layered image with halftones.