groep Scorpio
Posted by wilfried van den elshout on
Groep Scorpio.
Every art scene has its gatekeepers. In the early 1960s, a group of Amsterdam-based artists decided they’d had enough of them.
Groep Scorpio was a Dutch group of artists who, in the early sixties, rebelled against how artists were given the chance to exhibit in the Netherlands, particularly in Amsterdam’s art centre. The group was active from 1962 to 1966 and put forward “revolutionary” ideas about art politics.
So this was about more than a shared style. It was about who gets seen, and on whose terms.
Scorpio started in Amsterdam in 1962 with nine Amsterdammers and one artist from The Hague: four painters, four sculptors and two graphic artists, with an average age of 35. That makes them mid-career artists with something to prove, rather than students rebelling for the sake of it.
The founders were Leo de Vries, Jan Sierhuis, John Grosman, Ad Molendijk, Karl Pelgrom, Pierre van Soest and Aat Verhoog. Frans de Boo, Roger Chailloux and Guillaume Lo-A-Njoe joined later, and the group was led by Professor H. Jaffé.
The name fits the mood. It was explained as a scorpion that feels attacked and hits back. The founders saw themselves as “angry young men”, and their work is said to have been aggressive and provocative.
Postwar Dutch art was often framed as a choice between abstraction and figuration. Scorpio worked right on the fault line between the two, though at the time they were filed under the “moderns”. The group may also have been modelled on Groep A’dam.
That in-between position may be part of why the group is easy to overlook. Art history likes neat categories, and Scorpio didn’t fit one.
Groep Scorpio only lasted four years, but its questions haven’t gone away. Who controls access to exhibition spaces? What do artists do when the system doesn’t make room for them? Their answer was to organise, make noise, and sting.
www.ftn-books.com has the first publiction on this artist group now available.