Charley Toorop and the Arbeidersvrouw – Icons of the Dutch Resistance

By the time that the German Occupation of The Netherlands was underway in May of 1940, the Dutch figurative painter and resistance figure Charley Toorop had established a prospering career and a network of buyers that would support her through the war’s end. As a modern figurative painter and Communist sympathizer Toorop’s clandestine production from 1940 until 1945 invoked dark and pointedly critical themes that directly addressed the material conditions of the period. This paper takes as its focus Toorop’s outspoken resistance to the newly-imposed Nazi art policy by examining the paintings that she produced during the Occupation. Particular attention will be given to the canvas Arbeidersvrouw (Worker Woman) from 1943, which depicts Toorop’s housecleaner Johanna “Jansje” Punt, as she sits before the rubble of a recently-bombarded Rotterdam. Later readings of this painting declared the sitter a symbol of the fallen proletariat. In this presentation I argue that this and other wartime portraits and still lifes represented for Toorop a new preoccupation with materialism, evinced in her “realist” technique and indebtedness to Soviet typage. These details attest to Toorop’s strengthened commitment to the Communist Party, which she would officially join after the war, while also performing a broader symbolic function. When Worker Woman appeared in an exhibition held in September of 1945, months after the German surrender, a reviewer proclaimed the sitter an emblem of the resistance, one “who knows how to hold her own in a time of war and revolution.”