Oral History Interview with Willem De Looper, 1992 January 26-February 29
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Oral history interview with Willem De Looper, 1992 January 26-February 29 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Willem de Looper on January 26 and February 29, 1992. The interview took place in Washington, D.C, and was conducted by Benjamin Forgey for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Willem de Lopper has reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview BENJAMIN FORGEY: Okay, we’re in the – what’s today’s date, Willem? WILLEM DE LOOPER: I think it’s the – MR. FORGEY: 26th or – MR. DE LOOPER: Of January. Super Bowl day. MR. FORGEY: Super Bowl day. MR. DE LOOPER: 1992. MR. FORGEY: We’re in de Looper’s studio in the St. Regis Apartment on California Street in Washington, DC. Willem, how long have you been here in the St. Regis? MR. DE LOOPER: Well, we’ve been in this building almost 25 years – I think 24. This has been my first big studio. When I had one before, it was a little place. MR. FORGEY: I’m jumping ahead actually. Let’s start at the beginning – MR. DE LOOPER: Well, all right. MR. FORGEY: Let’s go back up. MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah. MR. FORGEY: Where were you born and what date? MR. DE LOOPER: Well, I was born in the Netherlands in October ’32 – October 30, 1932. I came to this country in October of 1950, so I’ve been here what? Well, 41 years now. I guess you want me to talk a little bit about how I lived in Holland and – MR. FORGEY: Yeah, describe – like describe – yeah, because we want – MR. DE LOOPER: Having been born in the Netherlands in ’32 means that I was a young boy when the Second World War started. I guess I was six years old in 1940 when, you know, Holland was invaded by the Germans. And so I spent my early years in Holland during the war, which meant a rather restricted way of living obviously. And after the war I went to high school. I went to several high schools, because during the war we moved a lot. MR. FORGEY: All within The Hague? MR. DE LOOPER: Well, all within The Hague, yes. I lived in The Hague. I was born there. And – MR. FORGEY: Describe your house. MR. DE LOOPER: Okay. MR. FORGEY: I mean, did you live in the same place for the first few years of your life or were you always – MR. DE LOOPER: No. Interestingly enough, no. I was born in a section of The Hague that I don’t even really remember anymore. I have an older brother and an older sister. My sister is 7 years older than I, and my brother is 11 years older. MR. FORGEY: What is your sister’s name? MR. DE LOOPER: Her name is Annika. And my brother is Hans. And they now both live in Switzerland, and they’re retired. The reason I mention this is that, to a large extent, my brother and sister, being so much older than I was or were, brought me up, you see, for a great many years, and my brother, in fact, played a very important role in my life in that he was almost like a substitute father. That had to do both with the war and with the years right after that, because he caused me, in fact, to come to the United States. He gave me the opportunity to come to the United States. MR. FORGEY: Describe your family, I mean your parents. MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, right, okay. My father was a banker. We lived, in fact, during the years that I’m conscious – from about six years old when the war started – we lived in what you might describe as the northwest section of The Hague, and we lived upstairs from a small bank of which my father was director. And he had a co-director who did not live in the house obviously, but I lived there with my mother and my brother and sister. And this was very unusual in the sense that we were occupied by the Germans and the whole city was occupied. And we lived, in fact, in a section of the city that was where the Germans had their headquarters. So you had to have a visa to go in and out of the section, which obviously didn’t have much to do with me because I was so young, but certainly my parents and my brother and sister if they had to go to another part of the city or something like this. I don’t think there was any question of traveling to other parts of the country, although I don’t remember that so particularly. But we lived there surrounded, in other words, by German troops, which is kind of interesting. Certainly as a kid I both hated that but I mostly loved it to be quite frank, because, you know, soldiers are very interesting to young boys, and there was a lot of activity always with troops marching and tanks and all that sort of thing. That goes along with having lots of military people there. MR. FORGEY: The Hague wasn’t destroyed in any way, was it? It was – MR. DE LOOPER: It was destroyed at one point when, interestingly enough – we had a fairly severe bombardment, but, interestingly enough, it was by the British and it was done by mistake. It was one of those things – MR. FORGEY: Was this during the – MR. DE LOOPER: This was during the early years of the war. They had – the Germans had bombed Rotterdam very severely, and Holland being so small, you could, in fact, in The Hague see the clouds of smoke. You see, it was one of those kinds of things. The Hague itself was not bombed, except later on in the war in that there were some – I think they were B-2s or B-1s. I always forget. The ones that look like rockets that now go, you know, to the moon and things. They would be sent up by the Germans, and they were meant to go to England and often they would sort of fall back into the territories where they got started. So there were some fairly severe things like that that happened in The Hague. But on the whole it was not a real strife-storn city. MR. FORGEY: You were, at that point then, during – while The Hague was occupied, you were going to going to school every day? MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, right. I mean – MR. FORGEY: Pretty normal. MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, it was fairly normal. I think early on I went to the Montessori school, and I still have a picture of myself, strangely enough, which I guess the school took at that time, and I’m drawing in fact. I must have been five or six years old. And in the Montessori school you draw with these geometric sort of shapes, so it wasn’t freehand drawing or anything like that, but it’s kind of fun to look at now. MR. FORGEY: Yeah? MR. DE LOOPER: And, yes, that was fairly normal. And then my sister would take me to grade school, and it was one of those grade schools where they also had an upper – like a junior high, and she was going to that, so she would bring me and bring me back every day. So I think that was all fairly normal, and it was all done by walking the way I remember it. And – because it was not until I was a teenager or so that I had a bicycle. And, of course, Dutch people are pretty good with bicycles, as you know. So that was pretty normal. It came less normal as the war went on, because eventually we had to move, and I don’t know exactly what year that was, but even out of that sort of protected section. And the reason, of course, that we were allowed to live was that we – because of my father’s bank – we did business also with, you know, the Germans that were there and everybody else. So it was kind of an essential service that they – MR. FORGEY: Right. MR. DE LOOPER: – felt should be there, that should be allowed to be there, you see? But, yes, life was fairly normal for all of us. Towards the end it became a little hairy in the sense that obviously everything dried up, including food and so forth and we started feeling that quite a lot. And during the last year we had very severe hunger in the Netherlands. And we suffered – MR. FORGEY: The winter of ’44-’45 – MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And we suffered from that ourselves. The only other thing that we had was – of course that – and that involved my brother actually. My brother was of student age, you see? Of college student age. And so he, like so many other people in Holland, was, in fact, taken to Germany to do forced labor in a factory.