Pastel and watercolor on paper by Christine Boumeester – Titled: Composition, 1952

Original artwork by Christine Boumeester – Composition dated 1952

Pastel and watercolor on paper signed and dated on lower right.

Dimensions: 56 x 45 cm

Reference: Similar artworks for monography in preparation by Frédéric Nocera, Italy

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Christine BOUMEESTER (1904 – 1971)

Annie Christine Boumeester aka Christine Boumeester, who often signs her works with only first name ‘’Christine’’, was born in Batavia, today Djakarta, Indonesia in 1904. Her family, originally from Holland had lived in the colonies for five generations. After her family lived a few years in Sumatra, they definitively moved to The Hague, Holland in 1921.

From an early age on as a child, Christine had a passion for drawing and from 1922 to 1924, she studied at the The Hague’s Academy of fine arts where she learnt how to engrave and got here drawing professor diploma but she never taught. She spent a few months in the south of France, primly in Nice in 1925 after witch she then opened an atelier in Amsterdam where she worked under Reuter’s direction.

From 1935 she travels and discovered several countries, she settled down in Texel island, stayed in Germany, and organized her first personal exhibition in Amsterdam at the Gallery Santee Landweer. That same year 1935, Christine Boumeester settled down in Paris where she met, married and shared her lifelong with Henri Goetz. She exhibited in several Parisian galleries and her first one was organized in 1937.

After a short surreal and fantastic art periode, she began making abstract compositions, probably under the influenced of Hans Hartung. She was a discreet person but an attracting character, and she struck up friendship with many artists: Hartung, Kandinsky, Schneider, Gonzalez, Vieira da Silva and Szenès, Breton, Eluard, Ubac, De Staël, Picabia, Picasso, Lam and Arp were friends. From 1939, Christine Boumeester was represented by the Gallery Jeanne Bucher.

During the war, she left with her husband for Carcassonne where they joined up the Belgian surrealist group, Ubac, Magritte, and poet Scutenaire. The couple evolved in secret and worked for Resistance. They made fake identities papers for Jews to help them escape. They created, with Ubac and Dotremont, the review “La Main à Plume” clandestinely. Betrayed to the Germans as resistant’s, Goetz and Christine leave for Nice living under fake names, thus joining De Staël, Picabia, Arp and Magnelli. Christine Boumeester encouraged De Staël to create abstract paintings.

In the post-war time to her death, she was exhibited forty times especially in Parisians Salons. The artist illustrated many works, carried out tapestries and mural decorations, She translated in French from German in 1962 “Point; Ligne et Surface” from Kandinsky.

Christine was naturalized French in 1949 and she died in 1971. Her art distinguished by its delicate ranges of color and major blacks, all in suggestion and modulation, collected before the significant atmosphere of perceived realities.

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