Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman

Dutch artist (1882-1945)

Hendrik Werkman (29 April 1882 - 10 April 1945) was an experimental Dutch typographer and printer, partly as commercial profession, partly as a free artist. He set up a clandestine printing-house during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (1940–45) and was shot by the Gestapo in the last days of the German occupation.

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Alternative Names: H. N. Werkman • Hendrik Werkman • H.N. Werkman

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There the telephone is ringing again - the engine, the machines [of the printing company] that call you with their sounds - those people who honor and tease [you] with their orders and admonitions - the chiefs who ask - the bills that have to be paid - the interest that force you to work.

GRONINGEN, BERLIN, MOSCOW, PARIS 1923
Start of the violet season
Reader
As we are convinced that it is not too LATE, we will speak.
Time is running, honestly.. ..it has become necessary now to do something, before it is too late
There must be witnessing and speaking..
..Art is everywhere. She is thrown us people on our jackets by the birds. In every infant with weak intestines, the latent seed is laid for an artist..
Our first publication will soon be published. We urgently invite you to become a fellow reader [of the upcoming art-magazine 'The Next Call'].. .. We count on your DEEDS in the white season with the black shadows..

the art-critic has provided the products of my lab with a (new) label: 'abracadabra'.. ..[but] one can not speak about abracadabra-ism, and that is its advantage on all –isms: it doesn't know time and limits and especially not the 'periods of time' [but] only seasons.. ..all -isms are dead, blown away, sprayed in the air, gone (here imagery does not fit, imagery is always wrong) - only for the 'abracadabra' is the future wall, the coming wall in the next house - how much the 'peinture' of other fabrics is curving and folding itself, polished or blown-up, it's all for nothing.. .We are not addressing those offspring but only the artists in this world..

I never have to search for subjects, they come to offer themselves - the right form is not always there immediately and that is why it is good to draw those small sketches beforehand. Otherwise it will become too wild, the work demands great calmness and if I am bound to time - for example when Greet [his wife] thinks that I should come home earlier - [then] it starts thundering, because peace has disappeared.

As paint I use lightfast printing ink, usually pure, but also mixed. Mixing is not difficult at all, it but can happen in very different ways. Secret means are not applied, but I can not work on them, except in solitude (at sunshine). No one works in this way. I believe that no one else can obtain the same color effects, except after a lot of practice and experience. Sometimes one print goes up to 50 times under the printing-press. [I make] Never more than one piece per day.