Ton Smits Huis

Ton Smits (1921-1981)

On the 18th of February 1921 the Dutch artist and cartoonist Ton Smits was born at the village of Veghel in the province of North Brabant in the South of the Netherlands . At the age of four using bootpolish on white cardboard he already drew noteworthy caricatures of people. In 1934, when he was thirteen, a drawing of his made its first appearance in a Dutch magazine.

At his grammar school in the town of Eindhoven , where he has lived and worked since 1935, his drawings were considered insufficient. Nevertheless he was admitted to the Academy of Plastic Arts at 's-Hertogenbosch , capital of North Brabant province.

He gave up his early dream of becoming a circus clown, but a trait of clownery is always to be found in the products of his artist's career.

In the last year of the Second World War (1944) his neighbours and relatives were upset by his having a drawing table loaded with anti-Nazi pictures, ridiculing Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Goering. These cartoons were hidden for fear of reprisals, but immediately after the war they were sold as postcards in a circulation of many hundreds of thousands of copies throughout several European countries.

About that time he was given a copy of Look magazine by an American soldier. Struck by its cartoons he got the idea to try and work as a cartoonist for American magazines.

For some years he weekly sent many cartoons to John Bailey, humour editor of the Saturday Evening Post. His first cartoon was published in America in 1949. Eighteen years later John Baileys judgement was 'Ton Smits draws with a dear and precious innocence, and his fairy-tale cartoons are primitive and naive, as if done by a very intelligent child endowed with a superior ability to organize, plan and draw.'

After the first cartoon in 1949 hundreds followed and were published in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look, and This Week Magazine.

Invited by The New Yorker Ton Smits visited The States for some months in 1955 and 1956. At that time he was the first cartoonist of the European Continent to have his cartoons printed in The New Yorker. With the money he earned in the first few years, he had a magnificent house and studio built at Eindhoven for his elderly mother and himself. For a long time he was a confirmed bachelor. Three years after his mother's death in 1970 - she lived to be 88 - he made up his mind to get married.

In 1964 Ton Smits was awarded the Golden Palm of the Salone Internazionale dell'Umorismo at Bordighera in Italy . He was thus honoured for his by then world-famous cartoon on the very young chicken wriggling out of its egg, peeping into the world for just a moment and hastily withdrawing into the egg again for its safe protection. This award brought him the official recognition that he belonged to the greatest in the field of pictured humour: Saul Steinberg, James Thurber, Tom Henderson, Raymond Peynet, Jules Feiffer and Virgil Partch.

Besides being famous as a cartoonist Ton Smits has also .shown to be a gifted painter: Wonderful fairy-tale scenes of human fairies, animals and flowers displaying affinity with the world of naive and surrealistic art. His paintings speak of a world not based on science, technology and industry. In this surrealistic comedy the protagonist is the artist, the cheerful dreamer visioning his faith in a better world in a strictly personal imagination and by means of a style equally personal and stylised. Is today's worldly existence - complicated and still a matter of discussion - to be met without an overdose of unhealthy as well as destructive distrust a trait of a child's mind is needed and of its possession Ton Smits's surrealistic and naive comedy gives evidence in a spontaneous, open-minded and undeniable way. More than once Ton Smits has worded his thoughts on art, humour, cartoons and his paintings.

On art: Art cannot be explained. He, whose emotions are in harmony with those of the artist, that created the painting, will by nature respond congenially to the artist's achievement. It may cost a great effort to learn how to understand and accept a work of art starting from the object itself. But it is the only way of art appreciation that is really worthwhile.

On humour: There are too many kinds of humour and humorists to find a definition that covers them all. There are as many kinds of humour as there are humorists and the same joke impresses each person in a different way.

On cartoons: I draw, what I think; never what I see. I n order to make clear the train of thought in a cartoon I only need that, which cannot be missed. I n fact I draw in symbols and that is, what - according to others - made me a 'shorthand writer of humour'.

On his paintings: I make colours and shapes play together. Some colours fall in love with each other. They are allowed to stay. It sometimes takes years and years, before a painting has reached its balance and perfection.

Exhibitions of Ton Smits's paintings were organized in New York ( U.S.A. ) 1956, Hasselt ( Belgium ) 1964, Paris ( France ) 1965, Montevideo ( Uruguay ) 1970, Quito ( Ecuador ) 1975, Turnhout ( Belgium ) 1975, Luxembourg 1976 and in his native country The Netherlands, where a dozen exhibitions were dedicated to his work.

A quotation revealing Ton Smits's outlook upon life to conclude with `Life is full of ups and downs, but it is my experience, that in an artist's life sooner or later a miracle occurs. At times, though, he should not be too lazy to work one himself'.

Translation : Francy S. Kist-Tissot van Patot