From nearly its inception, as Philips Phonographische Industrie (PPI) in June 1950, Philips Records recognized the importance and potential of cover art, drawing to its roster a remarkable array of talent – Wim Bijmoer, Rien Poortvliet, Kees van Roemburg, Cornelius van Velsen, Max Velthuys, Ger Vink, Emmerich Weninger, et al. Among this brilliant early crop was 28-year-old Max Keuris.
Painter, draftsman, filmmaker, watercolorist, craftsman, illustrator, photographer, and album artist. A supremely talented man, there seems to have been little that Max Keuris could not do. A bohemian, iconoclastic, and finally self-destructive personality, his 56 years were the stuff of success and failure, hope and disappointment. In 2019, forty years after his death, the Museum Flehite in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, mounted a special exhibition in the artist’s memory with a rich sampling of work showcasing his extraordinary versatility over a wide range of mediums.
The museum was able to enlist the cooperation of Keuris’ son Friso (a noted photographer in his own right) and author Wichard Maassen (author of the recent biography Max Keuris Meesterverteller, or Max Keuris Master Storyteller), who served as guest curator of the exhibition.
Friso has described his father as a “medieval soul”, a man with an abiding fascination for the Middle Ages, though his interest was not that of a dry aesthete. On the contrary, he threw himself body and soul into this and other passions. He attended medieval fairs in period dress, perhaps with his own handmade crossbow or a Brueghelian musical instrument planed on the lid of the harpsichord he had built himself. Scattered about would be miscellaneous wind instruments, at which he was fairly adept, tape records and a transistor radio tuned to classical music.
Indeed, whether in his album covers, book covers, film work, drawings or paintings, it is clear that music was not only essential to his existence, but a love that found recurring expression in his work. He greatly admired the turn-of-the-century Flemish expressionists,
as well as the Dutch 16th and 17th century masters such as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughel the Elder and Jan Havickszoon Steen. Their sometimes phantasmagorical imagery and macabre humor resonated with Keuris, whose own work is imbued with the keen eye and sly humor of the caricaturist. Fairy tale worlds, peasant life, exotic adventures – all threaded with a bard’s lyricism – can be found in Keuris’ wide-ranging output.
Beginnings
Martinus “Max” Keuris was born on 7 February 1923 in Scheveningen (The Hague), the son of a baker and a housewife. When the young couple divorced in 1930, his maternal grandmother in Amersfoort took 7-year-old Max and his mother in. Max’s nascent artistic yearnings could find little expression in conventional schooling, and so in his teens he was switched to what proved the more stimulating environs of a trade school, where he learned something of painting and decorating.