Biography

Discussion

Jan van der Pant was interested in art, poetry, and classical music from an early age. He was spiritually inclined, interested in religion, and sought to find the essence of artistic expression as well as the connections between the various disciplines. He enjoyed sharing and exchanging his findings with others. For this reason, he organised exhibitions of artists and photography gatherings at his gallery in New Westminster, where music was performed and poems were recited. In addition, Van der Pant also gave lectures and classes. In Europe, his ideas and photos became known through the articles featured in photography magazines and his participation in exhibitions. In the Netherlands, he achieved notoriety primarily through Adriaan Boer, the editor of the magazine Focus, who praised Van der Pant for being an exemplary amateur photographer as well as an adherent of pictorialist photography.

Van der Pant was a professional photographer who was able to convincingly show that photography concerned an artistic perspective and that technique and design played no more than a supporting role. In 1926, Boer devoted an article to Van der Pant and his photography in Focus. He described him as being original, fresh, and poetic, with a sense of humour and a big love of atmosphere in the photographic image. In his article, Boer relies on quotations directly taken from Van der Pant’s previous article in Focus (1925), in order to clarify the distinction between photography and artistic photography. Boer showed ample admiration for ‘the cultivated artist’s eye, which characterises the work of this eminent fellow countryman in faraway Canada.’ A degree of national pride may perhaps partially explain why Boer liked to give lectures on the topic of Van der Pant’s photos submitted to exhibitions in the Netherlands. But it was Van der Pant’s (for the Netherlands) innovative ideas that were given the highest priority, more than any national sentiment.

Jan van der Pant grew up in Alkmaar, where he attended primary, and several years later, secondary school. The plan was that he would eventually work in his father’s tobacco store, but this he endured only for a brief time. Van der Pant’s interests were broad. He decided to study at Leiden University, in the Faculteit der Letteren (‘Faculty of Literature’). There is no mention in the university’s enrolment books as to which particular study discipline he had initially chosen. At a later point, in 1935, Van der Pant wrote in a letter to Eric Brown, the first director of the National Gallery of Canada, that he had studied literature and various languages (in a way comparable to the present day ‘language sciences’). Back in those days, he presumably earned his living with short-term jobs, chiefly in business. He also did some administrative work for Willem Rooyaards’ theatrical company for the duration of one season. Van der Pant did not complete his university studies.

Already during his academic studies, Van der Plant worked as a journalist and wrote poems and stories. He sometimes illustrated these written pieces with photos he had taken himself. Van der Pant did this for several years on behalf of the monthly magazine Op de Hoogte (loosely translated ‘Up to Date’), and as a freelance writer for De Oprechte Haarlemsche Courant (‘The Honest Haarlem Courant’) and De Amsterdammer. Weekblad voor Nederland (‘The Amsterdammer. Weekly for the Netherlands’). He also contributed poems to Onze Eeuw (‘Our Century’) and De Nieuwe Gids (‘The New Guide’). His investigative nature brought him to both southern Europe and Canada. Van der Pant’s articles in Op de Hoogte demonstrate his ability to devise accurate characterisations of the different countries and inhabitants. Following his emigration to Canada in 1911, Van der Pant wrote articles on behalf of the Canadian government for a period of two years that were published in Dutch newspapers to stimulate emigration. He also presented lectures in the Netherlands using glass lantern plates. In late 1912, Van der Pant established himself as a photographer in Okotoks, Alberta, where he managed to make his living by doing portrait work. As a photographer, he was an autodidact. His knowledge of the medium had been chiefly attained during his time working as a photojournalist for Op de Hoogte. After four years, the family moved to Fort Macleod, where Van der Pant opened a studio once again. He kept the studio in Okotoks as well and opened a third studio in the town of Pincher Creek. The exhausting trip by horse and wagon, traveling back and forth between the three studios and the isolated location of the prairie all proved to be a bit too much for Van der Pant, especially during the yearly barren winters. In 1919, he therefore undertook plans to move with his family to Hawaii, in order to live and work in more comfortable surroundings. On the way to the boat in Victoria, Van der Pant and his family lodged for one night in Vancouver. Charmed by this part of the country, he decided to stay and set himself up as a photographer in New Westminster, British Columbia. With the exception of several years in Vancouver, Van der Pant would end up spending the rest of his life in New Westminster.

After having established himself in New Westminster in 1919, Van der Pant underwent a shift from being a realistic journalistic photographer to a pictorialist photographer. Pictorialism in photography had cleared the way for artistic expression, utilising various technical methods, such as the soft-focus lens, brushing technique on negative, and printing on texturised paper. In Europe and the East Coast of the United States, the movement had already surpassed its peak by the time Van der Pant finally came into contact with this approach in the somewhat provincial western part of Canada via the photographer Harry Upperton Knight. Van der Pant’s perception of pictorial photography is expressed clearly in an article published in Focus in 1925: ‘(…) the major, principle difference between photography and Pictorial photography: the first is: photographic technical copying, the representation of facts and events; the latter is: writing poetry in lines, composing in a game of sun and shadow, and having to convey, not the technical picture of the incident or landscape that is photographed, but the feeling, the emotion, awoken in the maker by the incident or landscape. (…) Pictorial photography is photographically expressing one’s own personality, own thinking, own feeling.’ Although Van der Pant’s use of the Dutch language was no longer perfect, Boer, as chief editor of the magazine, nevertheless decided to print the article in its original characteristic writing style. Van der Pant described pictorial photography as if it was a collection of sonnets. He saw the photo as the expression of a personal feeling—in its depiction every bit as compressed and abstracted as a poem.

As an example for comparison, the first couplet of Van der Pant’s sonnet Vijver (‘Pond’) should suffice:

‘In the ashen stirring of the moonlight, the fir trees stood silently upright, deep-black the slender bodies and at their feet, smoothly shining, lay the oval pond, dark-blue – I saw there dream-lights floating.’

In bleek beroeren van het manelicht, stonden de sparren zwijgend opgericht diep-zwart de slanke lijven en aan hun voeten, rimploos-glanzend, lag d ‘ovale vijver, donker-blauw – ik zag er droome-lichten drijven.”

(J. van der Pant, ‘Vijver’, in Onze eeuw, Maandschrift voor staatkunde, letteren en kunst, 1907, p. 292)

In British Columbia, Van der Pant came into contact with the pictorialist Harry Knight along with numerous other photographers and artists. At a gathering of local photographers in Vancouver, he also met Johan Helders, like himself a Dutchman who had emigrated to Canada and an amateur photographer of merit. The two families became friends. Van der Pant taught Helders a lot about photography. It is likely to have been at the New Westminster Salon of Pictorial Photography that Van der Pant came into contact with Harold Mortimer-Lamb (1872-1970). Starting in 1900, this photographer, amateur art critic, and mining engineer was a major promoter of pictorial photography. Mortimer-Lamp had previously exhibited his photos at the Salons held in London on a regular basis. After World War I, he had settled in Vancouver.

Van der Pant and Mortimer-Lamb were both talented photographers and excellent ambassadors for art and photography. It was for this reason that, in 1926, the two men decided to start up the ‘Vanderpant Galleries’, a photography studio as well as an art and antique gallery. The gallery bore Van der Pant’s name, likely because by this time he had built a reputation as a photographer and promoter of the arts in Vancouver and its environs. Due to mutual displeasure, the collaboration lasted only a year. Van der Pant subsequently went on to run the studio and gallery on his own. He no longer concentrated on the antique, but only on contemporary photography and art, and especially the relationship between the two. According to Van der Pant’s biographer Sheryl Salloum, the theosophical view that Frederick Varley had drawn to his attention was an important starting point: ‘Only that which is spiritual can be beautiful’, and “the artist is the priest of “beauty”‘. Van der Pant shared his spiritual interests with the artists Varley, Jock Macdonald and Emily Carr, with the photographer Harry Knight, and Ernest Fewster, the chairman and a co-founder of the Vancouver Poetry Society.

Based on his belief that all forms of art possess shared elements and can inspire each other, Van der Pant organised not only photography exhibitions in his gallery, but also exhibitions of young and often controversial artists, such as the ‘Group of Seven’. He also held musical performances at his gallery, evenings with poetry read aloud, and discussion nights on the topic of religion, especially Christian Science, and on the philosophy of the arts. In 1931 and ’32, the Vanderpant Galleries was the meeting place of the Poetry Society, where the annual poetry galas were held. The gallery’s music room had enough space to accommodate approximately one hundred guests.

Through his memberships in associations, the organisation of evening programmes and exhibitions at the Van der Pant Galleries, and his contacts with those in Varley’s circle, Van der Pant got to know a great number of students, artists, and photographers. He was also in a position to meet prominent figures, when giving his lectures and through his involvement in exhibitions across Canada and Europe. On occasion, these people would sit to have their portrait taken.

In 1922, Van der Pant took part for the first time in an exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society in London. In commentaries written about the exhibition, Van der Pant’s work was dismissed based on the observation that his work showed no national character. In response to this criticism, he shifted his focus to characteristics of the Canadian landscape: the immense proportions, the strong contrasts and patterns, the rhythm of lines and colour, the simplicity of composition, the dramatic fall of light during the day, and the seasons. His ideas were completely in agreement with those of the ‘Group of Seven’—by Canadian standards an extremely modern, innovative group of artists to which Varley also belonged. In 1927, Van der Pant wrote about the aim of this group: ‘[they] felt that the immensity of Canada could not be truly painted with European brush (…) so they (…) went for the soul of the land in the ruggedness of form, the rhythm of line and colour, by simplicity and directness of stroke and elimination detracting detail, using freedom to emphasize either in form or colour, what was personally most striking to interpret (…)”. (Salloum, p. 22) By translating the robust character of their immense country into rhythmic lines and colours, simple forms, as well adding their own personal, colourful touch, these artists did their best to remain true to their nature.

Van der Pant tried to merge with this nature in his own photography. Grain elevators were for him the symbol of Canada. Their visual idiom fascinated him throughout his lifetime and he depicted them in all their monumental beauty. For Van der Pant, Grain silos were geometric patterns, the fundamental structures of the essential things in life. He made it is task to discover these basic structures and to show the qualities they possess.

In this way, Van der Pant’s immediate environment became his primary source of inspiration. He reduced the essence of ordinary things down to a play of lines, surfaces, light and shadow. He bestowed a monumental, internal beauty on the day-to-day. According to a description of his work formulated by Adriaan Boer in 1926, Van der Pant’s shots were not made with any special kind of lens. In fact, he achieved the distinctive soft-focus effect by enlarging the image with a small ‘Verito’ lens. This gave his photos a soft, shrouded character, which tended to suppress the details. Van der Pant continued working with soft-focus effects until 1932. Thereafter, his photos became increasingly sharp, but were nonetheless never to obtain the sharpness and directness that his contemporaries and fellow photographers in the United States—particularly in the group f/64—found to be so essential.

Van der Pant was of the opinion that the artist’s vision was dependent upon the eye and not on manipulations. For this reason, he made minimum use of retouching. The only manipulation involved was the printing out portions of shots, sometimes enlarged but not always, on somewhat tinted matte gelatin silver paper, Kodak P.M.C. nos. 8 and 12. When he photographed outdoors, he used a simple Zeiss roll film camera (6.5×9 cm) with an f/63 Ansco anastigmatic lens. The notion that the essence of a subject was expressed in the rhythm—large forms reduced to light and shadow, line and surface—was also evident in his portrait photography. He was not concerned with the outer appearance, but with depicting the intrinsic nature of the person in question. He worked with standard studio and darkroom equipment available in the late 1920s and ’30s: lighting via an artificial light source, no distracting background, crops of heads in profile—three-quarters or frontal, depending on the most characteristic traits of the subject—and the use of Purol (a salve) or comparable substances to make the skin shine. In Canada, Van der Pant was considered to be the best portrait photographer of the 1920s and ’30s.

Van der Pant’s most characteristic work was produced in the years 1929 to 1937. In 1929, he began abstracting his subjects with greater frequency, by working with large surfaces and showing little detail. He toyed with the effects of light, which he referred to as ‘ideas in light’, particularly in his nature studies. (Salloum, p. 30) Starting in 1934-’35, he allowed light and shadow to merge with the basic structures of his subjects in radical abstractions brought about by daring crops. He experimented with alternative vantage points, such as the bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views. He also isolated forms, so that at first glance patterns seemed to emerge from the light and the dark, and the straight and curved lines, without having any relation to the original object. He became better and better at finding his ‘essences in basic structures’, as he had described it back in the early 1920s. For his experiments, he turned to forms in architecture and nature, such as tulips, chrysanthemums, and sliced cabbage. The photos dating from this period serve to sum up his ideas about photography, philosophy, creativity, and about life itself. His portraits, as well as his architecture and nature shots, provide the most complete image of Van der Pant’s efforts in this respect.

Van der Pant’s ideas and his approach to subjects in art and photography were shared by numerous artists in Europe and the United States during the 1920s and ’30s in the quest for abstraction. Van der Pant’s photos were published and discussed in esteemed magazines such as Focus, Bedrijfsfotografie (‘Corporate Photography’), Photograms of the Year, and American Photography. From the moment that he participated in international exhibitions and competitions, he received both recognition and awards, as well in Europe.

In 1926, Adriaan Boer cited four American photographers who were important for Van der Pant’s development: Clarence White, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, and Pirie MacDonald (1867-1942), a photographer who was little known in Europe. There is no doubt that parallels exist between Van der Pant and these photographers in terms of work and vision. These photographers as well started out their careers in Pictorialism and shifted in the direction of ‘straight’ photography. In his choice of subject matter, in his style of abstraction, and in his experimentation with crops and camera vantage points, Van der Pant was not that different from the usual developments as they occurred in the US. Through his participation in publications and exhibitions, he was very much up to date on what was current at the time. He knew the prominent American photographers Edward Weston and Immogen Cunningham on a personal basis. For these two members of f/64, a group established in 1930, Van der Pant organised an exhibition showing approximately fifty photos of each at his Vanderpant Galleries in the summer of 1931. With regards to the fact that a close-up of a cabbage cut open appears in the oeuvres of both Van der Pant and Weston, the latter wrote in a letter dated 8 May 1931 addressed to Van der Pant: ‘Strange coincidence. We both showed cabbages halved [at the Fourteenth Annual International Salon of Pictorial Photography in Los Angeles] but mine was cut the other way.’ (Hill, p. 23).

Pirie MacDonald, whose name Van der Pant had mentioned, was an accomplished portrait photographer in his own day, who restricted himself to portraying men. Clearly, Van der Pant shared a number of ideas with him when it came to portraits, e.g. crops, varying from head and shoulder to close-up; poses, turned three-quarter or frontally; lens adjustments, from sharp to soft-focus; and the use of substances to make the skin shine. While such notions were indeed modern, at the same time they were widespread across Europe and the United States.

Van der Pant is not to be classified among the American ‘straight photographers’. Only to a degree can he even be placed under the heading of ‘the New Objectivity’ or the ‘New Photography’. Van der Pant had even thought up his own term, the ‘modern purist’, defined as ‘(…) those who (…) feel the need for mood, emotion, imagination as well as for the technical characteristics of the camera.” (Hill, p. 24) This was not a generally accepted term to which accompanying forms of expression were connected, but this came closest to describing what he was trying to accomplish. Especially in his later work, from 1929 to 1937, he was able to express what he had been searching for during all those years.

Van der Pant’s work did not convey any social message. He tried to reduce the reality of the subject down to its essence in highly contrasting, simple forms and patterns according to a modern concept. He did not photograph the appearance of form in itself, but showed what the object or subject affected him—i.e. the conflict and the contact with his spirit. Van der Pant also referred to it as: representations of thoughts in relation to reality. He attempted to transform the physical reality into perception.

This same principle was for Van der Pant as well the basis for selecting photos to be shown at an exhibition. In an article concerning the photo salon in New Westminster appearing in Focus in 1924, he put it as follows: ‘(…) in the assessment, one should not first look at the manner of finishing, but indeed the maker’s intention, his feeling, the fervour of his concept.’

The 1930s were economically difficult years for Van der Pant, even though he had achieved some photographic successes, including his first traveling solo exhibition in the Netherlands in 1931. His last solo exhibition during his lifetime was in 1937 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The economic depression brought both problems and changes. In 1934, he was obliged to make the difficult decision of selling the house that had been specially built for his family. Around 1936, most of the artists, often personal friends, left town to seek work elsewhere. Their incomes derived from their affiliation with the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts had diminished. Jock Macdonald and Fred Varley had started up their own school: the British Columbia College of Arts. Due to a lack of financial funds, this school was as well forced to close its doors in 1935. With them, the innovative artistic climate centred on Vancouver vanished. Van der Pant gave numerous lectures in the years 1934 to 1937, such as at the Canadian International Salon of Photographic Art in Fort William, Ontario (1935), and later in Alberta (March 1937). In 1937, Van der Pant also hosted a weekly radio broadcast featuring classical music.

Jan van der Pant stood with one foot in the photography world of Europe—particularly in the Netherlands—with the other foot in Canada. In the Netherlands, he was considered a Dutch photographer. Outside the Netherlands, however, he was a Canadian photographer and by no means an American. Berssenbrugge failed to make that distinction when he asked Van der Pant to submit American work for an exhibition at Pulchri Studio in The Hague. Van der Pant responded in a letter dated 24 July 1930, sharply drawing Berssenbrugge’s attention to the fact that there was a difference between the US and Canada. He cited differences in culture and accordingly development. It was indeed true, however, that there was more communication between photographers and artists on the west coast of Canada with their counterparts on the American west coast, compared to the situation on the east coast, let alone Europe.

No matter how far away he lived from the world in which changes first occurred, Van der Pant adopted them and developed himself further within the possibilities and according to the modern thinking of his era. His works holds a full-fledged, albeit not overly remarkable place in modern European and North American photography of the 1920s and ’30s. The attention that this successful trans-Atlantic, native Dutchman received in the Netherlands is chiefly to be understood in terms of the relative dearth of modern pictorial photographers in the Netherlands, with Henri Berssenbrugge and Bernard Eilers being the only photographers able to convincingly withstand a comparison on an international level.

Documentation