CHRISTINE BOUMEESTER

Christine Boumeester (1904-1971), born in Meester Cornelis (now Jakarta, Indonesia), spent her childhood in the heart of lush nature, made up of mysterious forests, mountains and bamboo, which she describes as “the main thing” in her sensory universe.

Around the age of 16, shortly before leaving for Europe, she discovered by chance an exhibition of oil paintings, an aesthetic shock which appeared to her as a first glimpse of her “promised land” (Le cahier de Christine Boumeester, Coprah editions, Montpellier, 1977)

Christine Boumeester studied at the School of Fine Arts in The Hague, where she graduated as a drawing teacher in 1925, before moving to France.

In 1935, she exhibited for the first time in Amsterdam, then moved to Paris and enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She then frequented Kandinsky, Arp, Hans Hartung, Vieira da Silva and the surrealist circles, while developing a personal expression.

She met the painter Henri Goetz, whom she married, and with them formed a couple of artists committed to modernity.
From the late 1930s, she participated in the Salons des Surindépendants and gradually moved towards abstraction.
During World War II, she went into exile in Carcassonne, then in Nice, where she joined the Resistance and forged papers.

She contributed to the clandestine magazine La Main à plume alongside poets and artists fighting against the Occupation.
In Nice, she became friends with Francis Picabia and restored his painting Udnie, a testament to their artistic closeness.
She also frequented Arp, Magnelli, and Nicolas de Staël, reinforcing her place in the European avant-garde movement.
After the war, she returned to Paris and organized her first solo exhibition at the Colette Allendy Gallery in 1948.

She experiments with transparency, collage, and lyrical abstraction imbued with subtlety and poetry.
Her work explores the relationship between light and form, often in small formats, in an intimate and refined vein.
She translated Kandinsky’s Point, Line, and Surface into French, contributing to the dissemination of his aesthetic theories.
Her works were exhibited in Amsterdam, London, Geneva, Milan, and several French galleries in the 1950s and 1960s.

She also participated in groups such as Graphies and interacted with artists from the Informel movement.
In the 1960s, she divided her time between Paris and Villefranche-sur-Mer, where she worked intensively.
Ill in the late 1960s, she died in 1971 in Villejuif and was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Her work is now housed in several museums, including the Goetz-Boumeester Museum in Villefranche-sur-Mer, which is dedicated to her. She remains a discreet but essential figure in modern art, somewhere between surrealism and lyrical abstraction.