Bram Bogart vase

Bram Bogart occupies an idiosyncratic position in European painting after WWII, although he was unmistakably a child of that time. His artistry developed in the period in which modernism had established itself in all levels of the artistic world and new art movements followed each other in rapid succession. Bogart's enormous paintings, in which paint was often smeared as thick as a fist, were often classified by critics of the time as material art, to which Antoni Tapiès, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier and Alberto Burri belonged. However, Bogart always resisted such a limited categorization. He felt "primarily and above all a painter, and painting - and painting alone - was his métier." Bogart's work also had little to do with CoBrA, with which his early abstract expressionist work was associated, according to himself: CoBrA had "no insight into the formal structure and the writing of paintings."