The nude, and more specific the female nude was, especially during the second part of his career, a constantly important, almost dominating subject in the oeuvre of Jan Sluijters. Unlike his contemporaries in the 1930s, he did not pay a lot of attention to the deeper meaning of the themes in his compositions. Instead he was more and more occupied with the questions and problems of painting itself. Morale, allegory and symbolism hardly found a place in his canvases. Following the examples of contemporary schools like the 'Bergense school' and the 'magisch realisten', his colours sobered down slightly in the 1930s, becoming somewhat greyer. Even his nudes could become technical accessories, almost attributes within a composition.
Huib Luns considers the period 1927-1941 in his Jan Sluijters Palet monography from 1941, as the era in which the artist would finally come to ultimate Beauty. A last conquest was necessary though: simplicity. After 1926 the storms in Sluijter's studio calmed down, he was more and more able to keep his emotions and his usual restlessness under control. A what is called by Luns 'classical restraint' has now become his best quality, allowing all new trendy opportunities to pass. Sluijters, as the author states, examined nature much calmer and deeper. 'He who has fought passionately with complications for years and years, is finally on his way to simplicity. Never giving up the whole spectrum, all genres are growing towards simplicity and nature. No more whirlwinds in his still lives, the fireworks have died down, his spinning caleidoscope stopped grabbing the overwhelmed beholder. The flowers, composed in a natural way now, retain their festive power of light but live more on their own than before'. And referring to the present lot he continues: 'There is a comfortable silence around the beautiful objects and when such an aristocratic nude joins the scene, a profound simplicity will take over the deep attention of the beholder. These nudes, stripped of any possible 'ism', are rendered in noble majesty, all violence has been banished, a tender humanity often flows through the mild forms. Some of his later nudes are to the early ones as Maillol is to Rodin.
He does not loose his confronting emotion, but it is not this direct encounter alone that is sporting a style, supported by the Mediterrenean school. Baroque movement was exchanged for classical restfulness, the dynamical yields to the statical, the explicit and the emphatic give way to Beauty.
The elements of everlasting beauty in the human body have remained unchanged in art history from day one, and the development to the stylish "nudes" of the later Sluijters can be found in the liberation of the eternal in relation to the temporary, because of a growing frankness, with which beauty is faced in the model.' (H. Luns, 'Jan Sluijters', in: Palet Serie, Amsterdam 1941, pp. 45-49)
More recent authors have slightly re-adjusted the latter opinion concerning the nude in Jan Sluijters later work. Unlike Luns, Jan de Vries for instance considers this work as an explicit occasion for the artist to 'as he was used to, experiment with space, colour, composition. It is interesting to see how for example the nude in 'Staand naakt met stilleven', compositionally finds its pendant in the uncompromising still life next to her. De Vries is a strong supporter of a revaluation of the later work compared to the 'modernist' period: '[It is] revealing how he at the same time captures the atmosphere of those days in an uncomplicated way and without mercy. This is very clear in his portraits, but also his nudes and still lives with their accidental attributes, radiate that indefinable pre-war feeling, as down-to-earth as it is melancholic'. (Jan de Vries, 'De schilder en zijn werk' in: Exh.cat. Laren, Singer Museum, Jan Sluijters, schilder met verve, 1999, pp. 23-61).
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