Finally, in the summer of 2026, I stood face to face with Jan Cremer’s masterpiece ‘La Guerre Japonaise.’
Cremer painted the work, a five-panel piece, in 1959.
When compiling the magazine ‘HIJ JAN CREMER’ in 2023, the canvas was stored in the depot.
Now is the moment for a confrontation!
In the museum’s spacious hall, there is ample opportunity to take in the impression of the explosive painting.
Cremer in Context – The Early Years is the first retrospective exhibition following his passing in 2024.
The exhibited works—over fifty by Cremer and approximately thirty by contemporaries—come from Cremer’s estate, the collection of Museum de Fundatie, and various museum and private collections.
‘I throw paint on a canvas, I drip, splatter, chop, kick, fight with paint, sometimes I win.’
With these words, Jan Cremer (Enschede, 1940 – Amsterdam, 2024) positioned himself as an artist in 1959. Cremer set the selling price for the canvas at 1 million guilders back in 1960. A sum of money that was exorbitantly high and insane for those years, certainly in the Netherlands, according to the newspaper headlines. Approximately €10 million, converted to 2026.
In 1959, Jan Cremer was already a media marketing master unlike anything seen before.
Cremer was 20 years old at the time and had already taken a clear stance in both his art and his personal life as a “one-man guerrilla”.
The work came into being following conversations with survivors of the Japanese internment camps and his own experiences as a war child during the German occupation in his birthplace, Enschede. (read: I, JAN CREMER 1964)
What his birthplace, Enschede, failed to achieve with the ‘Jan Cremer Museum,’ the beautiful and acclaimed De Fundatie museum in Zwolle has succeeded in doing.
Over the past years, the De Fundatie museum has acquired an impressive collection of Jan Cremer paintings, with ‘La Guerre Japonaise’ in 2015 as the highlight.
This exhibition, featuring paintings from the permanent collection and canvases on loan, also includes a photo series depicting various moments from his life starting in 1958.
Jan Cremer Photo Collection
The photos show Cremer during his raw development in the 1950s with ‘Peinture Barbarisme’ – an energetic art style featuring brightly painted canvases with thick layers of paint, often mixed with sand, plaster, and jute. Photos from his Ibiza period and the early days in New York following the publication in the years of his debut ‘IK JAN CREMER’