Betty van Garrel
This year the RKD received the archive of Betty van Garrel (1939-2020), a leading art critic and journalist during the second half of the twentieth century. When she began her career in the early 1960s, Van Garrel was a remarkable apparition in the male-dominated journalistic scene. This episode in the series on colourful people from artistic and cultural life, highlights the whirlwind Van Garrel blew through the Dutch art world.
Art as refuge
Betty van Garrel, born and raised in Amsterdam, did not have an easy upbringing. Her younger years were marked by the early death of her father when she was 12 years old, and her mother's subsequent mood swings. Her love of art developed during this period of her life. Van Garrel often fled her parental home to visit museums, where she found solace in the strange and unfamiliar world of abstract art.
In order to broaden her knowledge, she took classes in art history and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in the late 1950s. In 1963 she was hired as an editor at Haagse Post, a weekly newsmagazine, where she wrote about visual art, politics, literature and the media. In 1975, Van Garrel helped found the cultural journal Hollands Diep, which ceased publication only two years later. After that, until 2003, she published mainly in the cultural supplement of the newspaper NRC Handelsblad, where she wrote hundreds of articles on the visual arts. She also published several artist monographs and participated in art programs on television, such as De Ivoren Toren (1973-1974) and Atlantis (1988-1992).
Throughout her eventful career, Van Garrel's interests would remain anchored in the visual art that had been a refuge during her teenage years: art that disrupts and conveys a certain absurdity. This interest is reflected in the subjects she wrote about, the artworks she collected, and in her contacts in the Dutch art world. For example, she had a great fascination for the Nul-group, with whose members (Armando, Jan Schoonhoven, Henk Peeters en Jan Henderikse) she maintained both professional and personal contact. Conceptual artists such as Wim T. Schippers, Ger van Elk, Bas Jan Ader, Stanley Brouwn and Oey Tjeng Sit also attracted her attention, as did the artistic “loners” Willem den Ouden and Henri Plaat.
Opposing the 'pedantic old gentlemen' of art criticism
Van Garrel's knack for storytelling, combined with her down-to-earth and open-minded writing style, allowed her to make these, often hard to fathom, art forms accessible to the average newspaper reader. She was concerned with the creator's intentions and backgrounds, which she tried to uncover in interviews in which she asked questions not only about the art, but also about the artist's life. As a result, her pieces were not analytical or theoretical in nature, but relied on anecdotes that aimed to outline the mindset of the artist from which the art is created.
This approach was partly due to the journalistic climate at Haagse Post, where she began her career under the guidance of Armando, then chief art editor. He taught her the tricks of the trade, with his main rule being that journalism had to be objective in nature and appeal to a wide audience. He advised Van Garrel to observe as if she had just fallen off the moon, and to write it down in the same way. Opinions and jargon were declared taboo, and Van Garrel's artist interviews went against the grain of art criticism as it was commonly practiced at the time. In 1968, she wrote: “A little more information could be provided instead of all these private opinions. Most Dutch art critics are pedantic old gentlemen.’’
Entanglement of desires
Van Garrel's archive, which was recently transferred to the RKD, reveals the intertwining of her private life and her professional contacts in the art world. For example, she had relationships with several artists, including Armando and Jan Cremer. She seems to have attempted to remove her relationship with Armando from the archive, but a few pieces, such as an absurdist story addressed to “the very dearest Armando” from 1960, still offer a glimpse of their connection. His name has been crossed out, but it is still clearly recognizable to whom Van Garrel wrote this declaration of love. As for Cremer, the archive contains more explicit documentation describing the relationship between the two, mainly in the form of postcards Cremer sent to Van Garrel between 1964 and 1984. Here, entirely in Cremer's style, there is no mincing of words regarding the nature of their relationship. In addition to these two relationships, the archive paints a picture of a turbulent and complicated love life. However, when she marries art historian Jan van Geest in 1982, Van Garrel seems to find peace with a man of gentle character. She remains with him until he dies in 2006.
The archive reflects Van Garrel's unique character: she was an energetic, robust woman who made her mark in a discipline where, until recently, only men ruled the roost. Through her artist interviews, she sparked new approaches in art criticism and her style displayed a certain bravado. Van Garrel had the guts to go against the establishment, and not to be deterred by the status quo. Her archive offers insight not only into her career, but also into the woman behind the critical pen: a driven, yet complex personality who did not let conventions constrain her.
