1900 and Yesterday nr3

Once again this is a very unusual painting. With the exception of the triptyches, it is his largestpainting to date. It appears to be a tribute or testament to himself. The painting captures the life of the artist with very finely painted absurddetails. From out of the sky, Ine Veen looks into

the world of the artist just as she did years earlier on Spades no. 9 . Her face appears no less than thirteen times in the painting. The artist explains some details: “In the lower left hand corner is a dislodged sign with the text: Die Grosse Freiheit no. 7.This was the title of a movie starring Hans Albers that was shown in cinemas in 1945. My future parents watched it while ‘kissin’ in the back row”! 

The woman with the baby in her arms, also in the bottom left, is to do with a memory from Thomassen’s very early youth. As a child he witnessed how the fire brigade and the police broke into the house of Malie Cohen, a Jewish woman who survived the war but for whom there was no mental help in those days. Out of desperation she gassed herself in 1954. Behind her we see the interior of a gas chamber. Thomassen describes every detail of this painting in his autobiography. This is why it is known that the youngster in the black leather jacket in the centre of the painting is a selfportrait of when he was 13 years old. The three ‘kids’ on the right are known from a series of photos of Jews on their way to the gas chambers. Thomassen was intrigued by the little boy who walks hand in hand with his brother, while in his other hand he carefully carries his toy car. The strange building in the lower centre right looks like Thomassen’s bedroom in Koningin Emmakade 98 with the oak writing desk that belonged to his father, and on which he used to do his homework. In the soap-bubble in the room is a self-portrait from 1969. Nailed on the wall outside is the well known painting, Girl with a Pearl Earringby Vermeer. It was one of the paintings that Thomassen admired in the Mauritshuis way back in 1959. Here it is painted in masterly style, so accurately that it could almost be a photo of the original painting that has been glued in place. Thomassen says: “That small thing took me three days work. It is very difficult to paint something so small that must look identical to the original”. In the same building there are three rooms next to each other, and in the window of the one on the right is the face of Thomassen’s mother from 1944. The small house in the bottom right hand corner reminds us of Thomassen’s present home. Houses are often shown in his paintings in a bizarre form, recapturing memories. Ine Veen is seen in her prime, packed into a sardine tin with the word Hartenvrouw. This was the title of a stage play that was seen on Dutch TV in 1974. Every detail has a story. Just below the centre of the painting is Ine Veen as a ballerina dancing theBlack Swanin around 1958 in the mouth of an enormous fish, the tail of which ends in the very small room at the lower left. This was Thomassen’s former bedroom in those days. It was no more than 180 x 200 cm in size, and only had a very small window. It was a bit like a prison cell in which he had dreams about his future and becoming an artist. In the landscape is a female sphinx wearing a red bra that appears to be looking across the water at a sardine tin in which the artists face is squashed inside. The tin is inscribed with: ‘Got you on my mind, feeling kind of sad and low, got you on my mind wondering why you had to go …’ These are the phrases from a well-known song by Jerry Lee Lewis. Below this text is the face of Ine Veen. Perhaps they reflect the biggest fear in Thomassen’s life – the day when he has to part from his beloved Ine. It will be a day that is inevitable, the thought of which fills him with dread and nightmares. In the attic of the large house on the right we may see the result. Although only his legs are showing, the artist has hanged himself in front of a painting of his beloved Ine. As with most of Thomassen's paintings, this one is full of small details and words of special significance. On the wooden planks boarding up one of the windows are words that, for Thomassen, often recall horrible stories from the past. On the wooden planks that are used for boarding up one of the windows are words that can be typed and searched for on the Internet on computers or phones that often recall horrible stories. The colour pencils on the roof of the house in the bottom right of the painting are a flashback to the time when Thomassen was in hospital as a little six year old child when he spent several months suffering from an almost terminal disease. He was given a small box of colour pencils by his grandmother. In his autobiography, Thomassen comments that he even remembered the smell of the cederwood and was surprised by the colour of the pencils. On the left hand side of the painting is a damaged poster of the rockstar Vince Taylor below a window in which a lot of strange people stand. Thomassen is looking outside and thinking. He is surrounded by Ine Veen, his father, singer Esquerita, Sinterklaas (the earlier Dutch version of Santa Claus), an idiot ape disguised as Napoleon, and a creepy sissy that looks like Hitler with a pink triangle on the lapel of his jacket.