Hello Everyone,

I admire a lot of people. I have heroes who inspire me. Heroes are people who refuse to be victims. Heroes are often lonely and unpredictable. One of my heroes, Jan Grosfeld, has died. A dear friend and, as one of the Board of Directors behind the scenes at Needcompany, a keen and valuable interlocutor. Whenever, yet again, I doubted the usefulness of art, he explained in detail why I should stop moaning and work even harder to make sure that we at Needcompany would most certainly not achieve our aims. The following is the eulogy I gave in Amsterdam.


He did not know what art should be, but did know very well what it should not be. A man with a profound belief in contemporary art. Who did not agree with Duchamp when he said that God had been replaced by art although God was a better idea. In his view, the uselessness of art was the fertiliser for a civilisation. Big words, perhaps, but essential. He was a principled man who kept to his word in his art. I’ll now tell you something about his time in Brussels.

In the early 1990s he wanted to get away from the Calvinist Netherlands. His destination was the Burgundian and Catholic Brussels. He set up a McCarthyesque camp bed in my studio and stayed there for a year. A studio without daylight in a city where everyone spoke French. A language he did not speak. This solitude resulted in his best work. Most of it was destroyed: too sensitive. Those Catholics know a thing or two about suffering and death. One of his works has hung on our chimney for 25 years. It’s called ‘hypocritical and bad’. It is a portrait of Mil Seghers. A phenomenal actor, friend and hopeless case. While Jan was living in my studio, Mil, who was also staying somewhere in the building, tried to drink himself to death. Jan and I found him on his shabby sofa surrounded by 44 empty gin bottles. Jan was able to view the image pitilessly. Jan liked living and lived intensively, but he understood that others found it difficult and recognised the beauty of that fact. He withdrew into my studio and painted that portrait in gouache.

His work was always very directly linked to his own reality and the things that happened to him. He himself sometimes called it monomaniacal and therapeutic. He used words like images and loathed concepts. He wrote, or, rather, painted sentences that presented possibilities. Never solutions. Here’s a quote from an interview he gave in the 1990s, when he returned to the Netherlands because he had almost lost all his money to crooked Brussels building contractors.

"If, in her despair, Gretel asks, for example: 'Where are you going, Hans' (Gretel is international), Hans is already pressing against the ogling witch’s warm body. In his turn, Hans has two choices. He can either go inside and see that the witch is a whore, or he can decide to walk on and choose a different destination in the wide world."

This quote is typical Jan. Because you immediately wonder what happens to Gretel. Jan wasn’t bothered about that. He couldn’t deal with Gretel’s despair. Despair is a waste of time.

And all that in gouache. He painted using what I call ‘impossible paints’. Oil paint didn’t suit him: you can make endless corrections. With gouache, there’s no room for any fear of failure. No errors can be covered up. He coloured inside the lines, but it was he who decided where the lines had to be. Each brushstroke had to be right. Every spot a study. He could fret for days about which tape would damage the handmade paper the least. He was obsessed with the acidity of the adhesive. That was his life: it had to be right, and right in his way. And in that sense, in his quest for what was right, he had no pity. And no self-pity at all. He compensated for this with a radical form of humour. Humour to make life on the edge of thought bearable. But never cynical. He was too principled for that.

Sometimes he studied too much. Knew too much. Identified too much with the art he locked in his heart. He admired lots of other artists. He then became those artists and could explain to them what they had made. He became Julian Schnabel and started breaking plates too, until he understood and made a better Schnabel than the original… only to destroy the work.

Jan’s work ethic can best be compared to that of the Japanese lacquer artists. Applying forty-four coats of lacquer with incredible patience. And then making a slight scratch at the last moment because it should not be perfect. Perfection is for God. No small task for an agnostic like Jan.

This stubborn contradiction made him what he was: an artist against his better judgement, but with great expertise. Without this art he found it hard to understand life. Life: it had to be under control. But that accursed art; there, every spot, every curse, every stroke and colour had to signify freedom.

When he realised that he could not achieve that freedom he stopped, quite remorselessly. At least, he stopped the activity that drew art out of its virtuality. But he always remained an artist. Perhaps he wanted to follow Duchamp, who, not having worked for twenty-five years, then confused the world with his Etant donné. I like that idea: that, somewhere in that blood-flooded brain of his, an artwork lay waiting that would explain everything. That would say clearly why art can only exist thanks to its failure.

Jetske, Jan, Grace and I were walking through a Brussels park this summer. He said to Grace, briefly his muse, his lover for life: "Just imagine that it worked". She looked at him and asked what he meant. "All that art, that it worked".

"Dramaqueen", replied Grace and kissed him playfully on the mouth.

Thank you, Jan.

JL