The first thing to get over on your visit to Centraal Museum, Utrecht, is the old familiar complaint: Why is everything so much better in Europe? And it is great here, a lovely airy space on the Nicolaaskerkhof built around the cloisters of the former Agnes Convent, which dates back to 1420. First among the highlights for me was the brilliant collection of furniture and drawings by Gerrit Rietveld, the largest in the world, setting right any preconceptions about the odd primacy of the ubiquitous Red Blue Chair (1918/23).
Heading towards the exit I nearly missed a sign pointing down a flight of steps to “The Ship.” This turns out to be a large wooden cargo boat, used on local canals and rivers, excavated locally near the Van Hoornekade in 1930. I had to look twice at the date on the label: AD 997 to 1030. A one thousand year old ship, a rugged working boat, very different from the ornate, imperious style of the longships dating from a century or so earlier, and found in similar circumstances, that I had seen at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. When it had been raised and dried, the Utrecht boat had been conserved using the best available means at the time: creosote and linseed oil. It has since received a more scientific treatment, but the heavy condensed odour of the tar and oil hangs in the basement, working with the low lighting and the close brick arches to give a sense that the ship is still laden, has just washed up from a millennium ago on a lanterned quay with its history intact.
As I leave I’m reminded that my ticket includes entry to the nearby Dick Bruna Huis. Really? An infant rabbit cartoon museum, with a target audience of two to six year olds? But I’m going that way, so might as well take a look round the door. And I find myself captivated, not so much by Bruna’s most famous creation, Miffy, as by his attitude, his wit and his way of working.
Dick Bruna (23 August 1927 – 16 February 2017) was born into a leading Netherlands publishing and bookselling family, A.W. Bruna & Zoon being established by his grandfather. He studied art with hopes to becoming a painter, but was drawn into the family business as a designer, going on to draft more than 2,000 cover designs, notably for the Zwarte Beertjes (“little black bears”) series, including James Bond, Maigret and The Saint titles. And this is where we can see the influences coming in, of Leger and Matisse in particular, De Stijl and Rietveld too, of simplified forms, block colours, black outlines, a flat perspective. Common motifs, often silhouettes, identify particular series at a glance: pipes or halos, trilbys or revolvers. He would read the book first, then work on suggesting more of the atmosphere than character or plot, using collage of coloured paper cutouts.
About this time, in the early 1950s, A.W. Bruna & Zoon began to replicate the strategy of W.H. Smith in the UK by setting up bookstalls at all train stations in the Netherlands. Bruna’s paperback covers, modern and eye-catching, began to get noticed by commuters leading to increased sales. Not just commuters: Rietveld and Picasso both complimented him, while Georges Simenon wrote: “I see that you are trying to make your covers still simpler and simpler. You are doing the same in designing as I try to do in writing”.
But what Dick Bruna is best loved for now is his children’s book character Miffy. This began, in the best tradition, with drawings Bruna made to illustrate a story about a rabbit for his son in 1955. The rabbit became a female (Bruna preferred the simpler form of a dress to trousers), an infant, and by 1963 evolved into the familiar stylized form: flat, subtly simplified. Miffy’s head for example suggests perfect roundness but is actually contoured, her currant-bun eyes and sticking-plaster cross for a mouth capable of much variety of expression. Bruna relates how when he draws Miffy crying, “I very often start with three or four tears. I take away one, and the next day I take away another one, and at the end I have one tear, and that’s very, very sad”. Hand in hand with the condensed composition is a reduced palette, Bruna using principally black outline, with white, red, yellow blue and green, and auxiliary colours orange and brown.
A key influence is artist, typographer and printer H.N. Werkman, whose range of techniques include stencilling cut-out figures in one or two colours. The spontaneity of Werkman is married to Bruna’s own perfectionism. It might take him a day to complete a single illustration, with anything up to 100 sketches. “If I have to draw an elephant, I go to the zoo and sketch an elephant, then I begin to strip away all the unnecessary stuff, to be left with the essence of elephant. It’s like an alphabet or graphic language, an international symbol of the subject”. His aim is to leave plenty of space for the reader’s imagination. “That is the strength of simplicity: the art of omission”.
Bruna became head of a multi-million Miffy empire, but retained a down-to-earth simplicity in his own life, and in his methods of working. The Miffy stories were typed out on a manual typewriter; he drew his outlines by hand using a brush and ink to achieve “lines with a heartbeat”. Even the final stage before handing over to the printer was done by hand: the cutting out of acetates for each colour separation, so that the printing plates could be done direct from the original artwork.