Mister Delta
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Cobra
Hans Sonnenberg was twenty years old in 1948 when Cobra shook up Holland’s sleepy art world. He was interested in German Expressionism and discovered that contemporary artists were keeping expressive painting alive. The Cobra artists’ drive to escape society’s straightjacket through explosions of colour appealed to Sonnenberg. From 1962 he regularly exhibited the work of Appel, Constant, Anton Rooskens, Eugène Brands and Asger Jorn at Delta.
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Informal Art
From 1954 Sonnenberg occasionally bought paintings and befriended artists such as Jaap Wagemaker, Jan Schoonhoven and Kees van Bohemen. For them, the act of creating – the behaviour of the material, the traces of movement, the emergence of unconscious symbolism – was more important than a predetermined form or idea. Their art came to be known as Informal (formless) art and had a strong affinity with Art Informel in France and Abstract Expressionism in America. Sonnenberg brought the Informal artists together in the Zero group. He organised exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad and showed their work at Internationale galerij Orez in The Hague (1960-1961) and at Delta from 1962.
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Zero
On 31 July 1958 Sonnenberg met the then unknown Italian artist Piero Manzoni through friends at the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring. He organised an exhibition of Manzoni’s Achromes at the Kring and founded an artists’ group called Zero. Sonnenberg was unaware that, a few months earlier in Germany, the artists Otto Piene and Heinz Mack had launched a magazine entitled Zero, which criticised exactly the kind of Informal art made by the Dutch Zero group. Jan Schoonhoven initially created Informal works, and was a member of Zero. But in 1960, together with Jan Henderikse and others, he established the Dutch Nul group (nul is Dutch for zero) and joined his German colleagues in their quest to simplify the work of art. The confusion Zero-Nul-Zero was complete.
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Pop Art
‘We now have a new reality – the reality of the hard landscape with the unyielding lines of the concrete motorway and the crash barrier, the reality of television and advertising. [Hans Sonnenberg, October 1965] Sonnenberg saw Pop art for the first time at the Paris Biennale in 1963 and was immediately enthusiastic. In the same year he exhibited paintings by the Rotterdam-based artist Woody van Amen, who had been influenced by Pop art while living in America. In 1965 he organised the exhibition Wonderkinderen (Miracle Children), with four Dutch Pop artists, and the young artist Jacob Zekveld made his debut with expressive cartoon paintings. Pop art was hot and the prices rose quickly. Nonetheless, from 1965 Sonnenberg regularly exhibited the works of British and American Pop artists.
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Neo Expressionism
In the spring of 1982 Sonnenberg saw the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York. He was so enthusiastic that he returned a few months later to buy five paintings and in the same year he was the first in the Netherlands to show the work of this ‘king of the graffiti scene’. In Europe there was also a reaction to the cool Minimalist and Conceptual art with a wave of expressive, figurative painting. Delta showed the artists of the Italian Transavanguardia – who still retained a hint of conceptualism – and championed the work of the German artists of the Neue Wilden, such as Bernd Koberling and Rainer Fetting, who made narrative paintings full of symbolism.
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