RKD BULLETIN

Fransje Kuyvenhoven
Author of Een monument voor de Beeldende Kunstenaarsregeling. De geschiedenis van een spraakmakende kunstenaarsregeling (1949-1987)

‘Nowadays, the abbreviation BKR generally refers to the Bureau Krediet Registratie [Credit Registration Office], but forty years ago every Dutch person knew that it stood for the Beeldende Kunst Regeling [Artist Subsidy Schem]. The Dutch BKR is unique in the world.’ This is how the VPRO-guide announced the two broadcasts in 2011 that the radio programme Onvoltooid verleden tijd devoted to the scheme.¹ Indeed, in the twentieth century, no country in the world had a comparable programme; there were no models and no imitators. In some Western countries, the government did provide art commissions and grants, and with some stretch of the imagination, the Federal Art Project, part of Roosevelt’s 1935-1943 New Deal, which gave artists money to decorate government buildings, could be seen as a kind of BKR. However, only the Netherlands had a labour regulation that allowed artists to develop freely, without feeling pressured by the tastes and trends of the free market to which they had to conform in order to sell their work, and guaranteed purchase of their work.² Worthy of a compliment, wrote the International Herald Tribune in 1978.³

What was the BKR?
The BKR (1949-1987) meant that, in exchange for an artistic quid pro quo (a free or site-specific work of art, whether or not commissioned, or a service such as organising an exhibition) artists lacking sufficient income from their profession received a financial provision for a certain time allowing them to continue working. It began in 1949 as the Regeling voor Sociale Bijstand aan Beeldende Kunstenaars [Regulation for Social Assistance to Visual Artists], popularly called ‘de Contraprestatie’ [quid pro quo service] or ‘de Contra,’ which changed in 1956 to the Regeling Sociale Opdrachten Beeldende Kunstenaars, abbreviated as BKR [Artist Subsidy Scheme] [1]. It would keep this name until its termination in 1987.

Over the years, the BKR changed 29 times (including its establishment in 1949, its disbandment in 1987 and its revocation in 1992); eight times radically, the rest with respect to details. The BKR was an open-ended scheme, with no fixed amount in the national budget. This had the advantage that anyone who met the eligibility criteria was admitted; however, the disadvantage was that costs could not be controlled. Because the BKR was a social provision, it was financed by the Ministry of Social Affairs, which drew up the regulatory framework. The municipalities implemented the scheme voluntarily, allowing them to make their own decisions within certain limits. They could claim 75 percent of the amount that an artist in the BKR cost them from Social Affairs and recoup 80 percent of the remaining 25 percent back from the Gemeentefonds [Municipal Fund] of the Ministry of the Interior through the Financiële-Verhoudingswet [Financial Ratio Act], so that they only had to pay 5 percent themselves. By comparison, a municipality contributed 10 percent to an artist’s welfare benefit.

1
The first work registered via the BKR was by Arend van de Pol (1886-1956): Retiro Madrid 1949
sepia ink on paper, 210 x 160 mm
Apeldoorn, Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE), inv. no. SZ1
Photo RCE

An artist was admitted – or not – to the scheme at his own request, following an admission procedure considering both his socio-economic situation and artistic achievements. Once or twice a year the artist could submit a work to a specially established municipal or regional BKR Committee, which determined whether it would be purchased and at what price [2]. A work that was not accepted could be resubmitted only once. One fifth of the ‘purchase price’ was paid to the artist as ‘money for materials’ in one go, the remainder per week: at first for a maximum of 26 weeks, later for a maximum of 52 weeks. From 1949 to 1974 the purchased works of art were distributed on a financial (not artistic) basis between the municipality and the state, after which the fixed division was abandoned. The State’s share ended up with the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed [Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands] and its predecessors, which were responsible for registration, photography and storage. The Cultural Heritage Agency resorted under the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) and had to pay for its staff and for depot space itself. The division of responsibility between the ministries of OCW and Social Affairs would increasingly lead to problems. The Cultural Heritage Agency stopped implementing the BKR in 1984; the municipalities followed suit in 1987, the year the BKR was decommissioned.

2
Theo van Houts
A BKR committee at work
reproduction in Panorama (1968) no. 5

The BKR in numbers
It turns out to be impossible to give exact figures on the number of artists who made use of the BKR and the amount of artworks produced within the framework of the scheme; exact numbers can only be determined in a few cases. What is certain is that after the BKR ended, the Netherlands was more than half a million works of art richer, approximately 221,000 of which were in the national collection. Between 1949 and 1987 at least 5,688 artists made use of the BKR at some point.⁴ In 1952 142 artists were in the scheme, in 1983 3,500 (of a total of 10,000 artists in the Netherlands) and in 1987 still 300. Their number increased strongly from 1969 because of the relaxed entrance requirements, but decreased from 1984 because an annual progressive income requirement of fl. 3,000, fl. 4,000, and fl. 6,000 was made compulsory. Not only ‘sitting’ users had to meet this requirement, newcomers did too. Especially art academy graduates were excluded, because they often did not yet have much earning capacity. On average (over the entire period) one in five applications was rejected; 40 percent based on formal criteria such as age, earnings or a partner earning a living, 60 percent because of insufficient artistic or technical quality. Self-taught artists and non-Dutch nationals (4 percent) were also admitted to the BKR. Between 1970 and 1980, 318 of the 774 municipalities fully implemented the BKR, 35 municipalities (generally with less than 50,000 inhabitants) offered one of the three facilities (purchasing artworks, commissioning or purchasing services), 151 had implemented the BKR in the past (before 1970), and 270 did not implement the BKR because no artists were living in the municipality or they did not apply for the scheme. Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Groningen, and Arnhem made up the top five largest users. Amsterdam had about 1,500 artists in the BKR in 1985, but there were also municipalities with only one artist, such as Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht.⁵

When the scheme ended in 1987, the Cultural Heritage Agency had 221,000 works of art, the municipalities 300,000. On the orders of the Minister of Welfare, Public Health and Culture, the state portion was split: 20,000 works were given museum status, the remaining 201,000 (90 percent) had to be disposed of in instalments. The Cultural Heritage Agency began doing this in 1989. The (government) institutions that were already borrowing non-museum works were allowed to keep them. The remaining part, still 93,000 works, was transferred to the Stichting Kunstwegen [Art Roads Foundation], established for that purpose in 1994, which began by donating the artworks to other institutions and subsequently returned them to the makers. The then remaining 48,000 works were sold for the symbolic amount of 1 guilder to the Stichting Beeldende Kunst [Visual Arts Foundation] in Amsterdam [3]. This art library marketed the works bit by bit in order not to harm the artists’ income position. Thus, the artworks returned to the public. As a rule, the municipalities began disposing of them later and are still doing so to this day.

Sources
Much has been written about the BKR. On Google and Delpher, thousands of hits can be found for the ‘quid pro quo’ and ‘visual artists’ scheme.’ The Boekman Stichting [Boekman Foundation] has over 400 publications, including the organ of the Beroepsvereniging van Beeldende Kunstenaars [Professional Association of Visual Artists], the BBK-krant (from 1967), and the Knipselkrant van de Raad voor de Kunst (from 1969). The archives of the Ministry of Social Affairs and of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work (both kept in the National Archives) contain meters of material on the BKR.⁶ The Cultural Heritage Agency has the complete paper and digital documentation of all artworks assigned to the State, a newspaper clipping archive (1949-2020), and part of the archive of the Stichting Kunstwegen [Art Roads Foundation] (1994-1998) with two amateur films [4]. The main part of the archive of this foundation, with the names of all the artists whose works from the national collection were donated to the foundation, is kept in the RKD - Netherlands Institute for Art History as part of the archive of the Federatie Kunstuitleen [Federation for Art Lending].⁷ The Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis [International Institute of Social History] holds the archive of the Professional Association of Visual Artists, with much (visual) material on the BKR, such as posters and a film of an ‘action’ meeting. The archive of the Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid [Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision] contains hundreds of news flashes, talk shows, newsreels and documentaries about full depots, protesting artists, occupied museums, Lower House discussions and give-away campaigns. An indispensable source are the annual reports of the Cultural Heritage Agency from 1949 to 2010 as well as the BKR’s first retrospective book from 1949-1981 by Roel Pots.⁸ The Instituut voor Sociaal-wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Institute for Social Scientific Research] in Tilburg conducted the most comprehensive research ever into the BKR and analysed the living conditions of artists, the implementation of the BKR, the free market for visual artists and the policy on which the BKR was based.⁹

3
Appeal by the Art Roads Foundation ‘to the artists who participated in the visual artist scheme’ in BK-Informatie, 17 (1995) 7

4
List of works of art allocated to the State by the Municipality of Arnhem in the period 1963-1965
Amersfoort, Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE)

The free market
The BKR’s roots date to around 1920 when the government first financially supported visual artists with commissions for art in the public space. On the one hand, this assistance led to the creation of government acquisitions (1932-1992), and on the other hand, to the establishment of the Voorzieningsfonds voor Kunstenaars [Artists’ Provision Fund] (1935), which provided financial support to artists without exacting a quid pro quo.¹⁰ During the Second World War, the German occupying forces pursued a cultural policy that paid a great deal of attention to the social conditions of the artist, provided he or she was a member of the Nederlandsche Kultuurkamer [Dutch Chamber of Culture]. After the war, a number of large cities came to the aid of their artists with support measures. In order to introduce more uniformity to this assistance, the Minister of Social Affairs announced the Beeldende Kunstenaarsregeling (BKR) [Artist Subsidy Scheme] in 1949.

As prosperity increased, so did the amount of the provision; however, the sales opportunities on the free market did not. Therefore, in 1955, the idealistic painter Pieter Kooistra (1922-1998) founded the Stichting Beeldende Kunst (SBK) [Visual Arts Foundation], a business enterprise where private individuals could become the owner of a work of art according to the hire-purchase model, although it could also be bought in a lump sum.¹¹ The artists received 10 percent of the value of their work for the period that the SBK had it on consignment, with a maximum of fl. 250 per work per year, and 70 percent of the price upon sale. Because they were allowed to keep a third of their income earned outside the BKR, Kooistra ensured that the rental income at the SBK remained below the amount of the allowed additional income, so that the artist could sell at both the SBK and the BKR. A third of the artists who supplied to an SBK also used the BKR. While the goal of the BKR in 1956 was to help the artist become ‘socially independent,’ in 1964 the artist had to obtain sufficient income ‘on the free market.’ The changes in the scheme were then increasingly aimed at transitioning the artists out of the BKR and into self-sufficiency through the sale of their art. The number of artists in the BKR rose steadily and the number of works of art submitted equally so. While these works were indeed lent out to (public) institutions, they more often ended up in a depot, to the displeasure of the artists, who after the sale did not know whether that was the municipal depot or that of the Cultural Heritage Agency in The Hague. The increase in the number of works of art also generated resentment among the depot owners who saw the limit of their capacity approaching [5].

5
Depot and registration area of the State Art Collections Service (forerunner of the Cultural Heritage Agency [RCE]) 1976
Reproduction inVerslag van de Rijksinspecteur over het jaar 1976, ‘s-Gravenhage 1978

In 1972, in order to relieve the burden on the full repositories and to give the artists more visibility, the Beroepsvereniging voor Beeldende Kunstenaars [Professional Association of Visual Artists] launched the Artotheekplan: a municipal art lending service where private individuals could borrow two works from the BKR for fl. 15 a year, for a minimum of three and a maximum of twelve months. The plan was not well received by gallery owners, the Visual Artists Foundation and some artists: if private individuals could rent art for virtually nothing, why would they buy it? The Lower House, however, embraced the plan and from 1977 art libraries received government subsidies.

In the meantime, the Cultural Heritage Agency and large municipalities could no longer accommodate the increasing numbers of artworks. To reduce the pressure on the depots, the BKR commissions tried to lower the influx. They did this by increasing the prices of the works of art, so that less had to be bought per artist, per time, to still reach the amount of the (semi-)annual provision. From the very beginning, artists did not receive a market price for their work, and with the escalating complaint about the lack of depot space, the purchase prices became even less realistic. On occasion they even paid three times more than on the free market: ‘We sometimes paid ten thousand guilders for a painting that a gallery would have given three thousand for. The proportions got out of hand,’ said Rik Lina (1942), artist member of the BKR Committee in Amsterdam.¹² This is how, at the end of the 1970s, the government was paying a high ‘price’ to the artists in the BKR and giving them additional facilities such as (among other things!) studio rent and compensation for materials. And yet at the same time, because of the BKR’s full depots, the government wanted them to move to the ‘free market,’ where, in addition to less money for their work, they also had pay up 30 to 50 percent of the commission after selling it, plus a contribution for promotion costs.¹³ The artists did not want to (and could not!) leave the BKR. One of them, Alphons Freymuth (1940) said: ‘Now that I am out of the quid pro quo, a bit of a lopsided situation has arisen: making money now takes more effort. For three paintings I sold to the BKR, I have to sell six on the free market to earn the same, because of all the gallery percentages and other expenses involved.’¹⁴

Against the backdrop of major budget cuts in the early 1980s, the Minister of Social Affairs thought the BKR was much too expensive and his colleague at the Ministry of Welfare, Public Health and Culture (WVC) believed the BKR did not provide enough ‘first-rate art’ [6]. Both ministries wanted to abolish the BKR and transfer the money from Social Affairs to WVC. Artists’ policy had to become art policy. The government agreed with both ministers and put the BKR out of action on 1 January 1987. In 1992 the BKR was actually abolished. Only in 1999 did a new provision emerge, the Wet Inkomensvoorziening Kunstenaars (WIK) [Income Provision of Artists Act], which changed in 2005 to the Wet Werk en Inkomen Kunstenaars (WWIK) [Work and Income Artists Act], but that too ceased to exist, in 2012. Artists who could not make a living from their art had to fall back on, for example, the Algemene Bijstandswet [General Benefit Act] or find other work.

The artists’ resistance
When the dismantling of the BKR was set in motion in 1983, various authors devoted attention to its right to exist and its origins, which were said to lie in the Second World War. 'After 1 July [1987] there will be a definitive end to this unique system, which arose from the artists’ resistance during the Second World War,' de Volkskrant wrote. The BKR was established because ‘people felt they owned a debt of honour to the many artists who had been active in the resistance during the war.’¹⁵ Officials, artists and foreign journalists also made the direct connection between the BKR and the artists’ resistance.¹⁶ No document was found in the archives of the Ministry of Social Affairs to indicate this, and 216 of the 331 artists whose work the Cultural Heritage Agency acquired through the ‘quid pro quo’ in 1949 and 1950 were registered with the Dutch Chamber of Culture.¹⁷ If about two-thirds of the artists in the early years of the ‘quid pro quo’ were registered with the Chamber of Culture, it may be concluded that the scheme did not come about as straightforward compensation for artists’ resistance during the war.

6
Opland
The psychopath. First the welfare mother and now art
in de Volkskrant on 24 June 1986, the day on which it was announced that the BKR would be dismantled on 1 January 1987
Amsterdam, Persmuseum, inv. no. AB21995
Photo Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE)

In his standard work Kunst in crisis en bezetting [Art in Crisis and Occupation], Hans Mulder argued that it was not so much ‘the’ artists’ resistance as it was the ‘resistance of artists.’ He also included the intellectuals and thought it would be better to speak of a more general ‘cultural resistance.’¹⁸ These resistance fighters, for example Leo Braat (1908-1982), Frits van Hall (1899-1945), Willem Sandberg (1897-1984) and Gerrit van der Veen (1902-1944), made plans during the war for an artists’ association, which after the liberation led to the Beroepsvereniging van Beeldende Kunstenaars (BBK) [Professional Association of Visual Artists] and the Nederlandse Federatie van Beroepsverenigingen van Kunstenaars [The Dutch Federation of Artists’ Associations]. These associations collectively negotiated with the government for better socio-economic conditions for artists and were thus partly the impetus for the establishment of the BKR. However, the desire for uniformity of the various municipal regulations, the great pressure on the Artists’ Provision Fund, and the interest that the occupying forces had for the social position of artists, also formed the basis for the BKR.

Negative image
Over time, the BKR gained an increasingly poor reputation and was subject to mounting criticism, which was stirred up considerably in the media, both at home and abroad. When American tourists stood before the closed doors of the Amsterdam museums in December 1983 – the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum were occupied by artists protesting the abolition of the BKR, the Van Gogh Museum was closed as a precaution – this prompted the North American television network CBS to make a caricatural broadcast about the Dutch welfare state with the BKR as its ‘pinnacle.’¹⁹ It was the third time these museums were occupied; the same happened in 1969 and 1979 [7].

For years, stories circulated about artists who deliberately handed in worthless, quickly executed works of art because they would receive their benefits anyway; about minor artists who would never have become artists if the BKR had not existed; about just messing around and still being able to afford a second house in France; about ‘handing in still wet work’ and getting paid handsomely for it; about an immense mountain of art stored in draughty attics and damp cellars and that was offered for free to institutions and sold for peanuts at Internet auctions to private individuals after the scheme had expired; and about foreign artists who settled in the Netherlands especially because of this ‘luxury scheme.’ And all at the taxpayers’ expense.

Some artists also looked down on the scheme. They considered it ‘being on the dole’ turned their noses up at it or denied participating in it. Karel Appel (1921-2006) said in an interview that he had never taken part in the ‘quid pro quo,’ but five of his works in the Dutch National Collection were acquired through the scheme. Peter Klashorst (1957) confided to interviewer Adriaan van Dis that the BKR could be dissolved but failed to mention that he had immediately used the scheme after his academy days.²⁰ Artists, it was generally thought, would produce their best work for a gallery or art library and hand in their ‘studio rubbish’ to the BKR.²¹ A claim many denied, arguing that their work was going to be in public buildings and had to serve as advertising, therefore submitting mediocre work would be counterproductive. The negative tone persisted after the BKR’s demise. In 1991, De Telegraaf spoke of ‘works of art of zero value that the government bought in the 1980s to support unsuccessful artists (BKR Scheme) in bulging government and municipal warehouses.’²² In 2007, the first Internet auction of artworks from the BKR was reviewed by the NRC Handelsblad as the ‘legacy of the BKR in which artists had to hand over works to the government in exchange for benefits’ involving ‘thousands of paintings’ stored ‘in basements and museum depots. Forgotten, tarnished. No museum wants them anymore.’²³ And as recently as 2019, interim director of the Stedelijk Museum Jan Willem Sieburg said that he could not determine the value of the 25 works of art that had disappeared in the bankrupt Slotervaart Hospital because they were by ‘so-called BKR artists.’²⁴ The BKR’s negative image was perhaps due mostly to the poor management of the artworks. The depot problem was especially dire in the big cities and for the Cultural Heritage Agency, a detail that became more widely publicly known from the end of the 1960s. The fact that they had no money for the management and preservation of the artworks was not the result of ill will, but rather impotence.

7
Koen Suyk/Anefo
Artists who occupied the Rijksmuseum using a basket to convey goods at the back of the museum
25 June 1979
The Hague, National Archives

Messing around
A persistent story is that artists in the BKR were just messing around. Contemporary writer-artists such as Jan Cremer (1940), Jan Montyn (1924-2015), Frank Lodeizen (1931-2013), Jan Wolkers (1925-2007) and Joost Zwagerman (1963-2015) perpetuated this image in their books.²⁵ Ernst Bakker, Amsterdam alderman for culture, said long after the abolition of the BKR: 'You know what I’m talking about, the guys in the pub who said: I need to get away for an hour to paint a canvas for the municipality.’²⁶ However, it is not true that everyone who used the scheme was lax and lazy. The Tilburg investigation of the BKR demonstrated that the artistic ability and commitment of 20 percent of the artists were indeed questionable – they would have been rejected if the BKR standards had been applied more stringently – but 80 percent worked seriously and professionally and did not submit hack work.²⁷ That the public might get the idea that the artist was simply ‘messing around’ could be deduced from the sign ‘forbidden to hand in wet work’ that hung at the collection point in Amsterdam, but that was a joke. Speaking to Het Vrije Volk, the director of the Cultural Heritage Agency ironically noted that all the ‘artists of the Netherlands’ had received a letter from him with the request: ‘Gentlemen, kindly allow your works to dry before loading them in the truck!’²⁸ Inquiries revealed that he had never sent such a letter. Messing around meant that the work was rejected, no provision was paid out and the artist received a visit from the BKR Committee which came to ascertain whether the artist could remain in the scheme: no purchase meant no money, it meant being on the dole. Bennie Jolink (1946), a visual artist before his life as a singer, said that when he delivered his work he also saw what others handed in: ‘Large linen canvases on which a dog had crapped, and which had been cycled over a few times, and those guys got two to three thousand guilders for it.’²⁹ However, that story made the rounds, each time with a different setting and so can be considered fictitious – like many tales about scheming artists.

The art education system
Art schools have been blamed more than once for the large influx of artists into the BKR.³⁰ If they had stricter admission requirements, more frequent selections during the course, and paid more attention to the meaning of the ‘profession’ of artist, there would be fewer artists – and the inflow into the BKR smaller. Indeed, the number of students at the art academies rose sharply between 1949 and 1987: from 2,000 to 12,000.³¹ Most opted for expressive painting, sculpture and graphic work. The many academy graduates resulted in a surge of artists in the BKR; young people who had received little or no preparation for professional practice during their training. ‘Apart from an appalling ignorance regarding the professional practice, there are often strange ideas among students about the possibilities that the BKR offers: after graduation you can immediately “enter the BKR” and you are also immediately assigned a studio,' the Dutch Federation of Artists’ Associations observed.

To reduce the influx of graduates to the BKR, several measures were proposed. According to Toon Verhoef (1946) (painter and teacher at Ateliers ‘63 in Haarlem), the academies had to set stricter requirements and Wim Beeren (1928-2000) even thought that the number of academies should be reduced.³² Yet it was not only the art academies that were ‘to blame’ for the large number of artists in the BKR. The post-war baby boom, the cultural shift in the 1960s with greater attention to individual expression and development, the liberalisation of higher education (on 1 August 1968, the Mammoetwet, or Secondary Education Act, was introduced), the new (post-academic) art courses, and the greatly relaxed balloting for the Professional Association of Visual Artists (BBK) contributed to this.

The BKR had merit
In addition to being unique, the BKR also had merit. Not only was the Netherlands more than half a million works of art richer when the BKR ended in 1987 – a large part of which is displayed today in museums, ministries, embassies, hospitals, schools, libraries and other (state) institutions – more than half of the municipalities were also able to offer their artists a good social welfare scheme. Nearly 6,000 artists had an income at some point during the 38 years of the BKR’s existence that allowed them to launch their careers, develop, experiment, or simply weather financial storms. However, the BKR was a social measure and therefore not part of the arts policy. There is therefore no question of a ‘BKR collection’; the acquisition of the works was not based on a policy of collection building. Nor were there any ‘BKR artists.’ While some artists made use of the scheme throughout their entire career, most did so only for a certain period of time. Whether the BKR was the reason that foreign artists settled here is doubtful. Some had come to the Netherlands (temporarily or otherwise) fleeing political turmoil in their countries, others for love or the liberal spirit in 1960s Holland.

Indeed, the storage of the works of art was far from ideal. However, this was not a deliberate act; with time, the influx became so great that the Cultural Heritage Agency and some large municipalities could no longer cope with managing the sheer volume. The State and the municipalities were able to enrich themselves enormously with free artworks and works in the public space through the BKR. Not only is the ‘collection’ that remained after the divestment now of great museological and financial value, it also affords a representative overview of Dutch art from the second half of the last century. ‘No one would claim that all the artists in the BKR were great. However, it is a fact that practically every important artist in the Netherlands was in the BKR at one time or another,’ said Jan Sierhuis (1928).³³ The BKR is rightfully worthy of a monument, which took shape in the form of two exhibitions in 2020-2021 at Museum Gorcum and the Purmerends Museum, and a publication. The title for the exhibition in Gorcum comes from the painter Jan van Dis (1945). When he came to retrieve one of his paintings in the 1990s, it had a ‘large tear’ in it. Van Dis took it in stride. ‘Maybe I’ll paint it over with the title: Monument to the BKR.’³⁴