Room of Ideals

This is a tactile object. You may touch it.

The cloth hanging in front of you is a white napkin from the Museum’s collection. It is made of damask, a kind of linen and meant to be touched and felt. Damask is a woven fabric. By varying the weaving techniques, a pattern is formed in the fabric, which creates a subtle play of shadows when you move it through your fingers. On all four sides a pattern of five butterflies is woven along the edges. Their triangular shapes are consistently rotated so they sometimes point towards the edge with their heads and sometimes with their tails. In the centre flower-like, almost square shapes are arranged in three rows of three, forming a square. Around these flowers there's a grid-like pattern of smaller round flowers. 

The napkin measures 68 by 66 centimeters and was manufactured by the firm of E.J. van Dissel & Sons in the city of Eindhoven. It was designed in 1906, by Chris Lebeau. As an artist Lebeau was active in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a real jack-of-all-trades: he painted and drew, but also designed fabrics, stamps, and all kinds of other graphic art. Furthermore, he made glass vases, book covers and many other things. Chris Lebeau used to design his patterns as follows: first he made sketches of animals and organic elements in the open air. He then simplified these figures and shapes and arranged them so as to create a pattern. To transfer this pattern onto the table linen required different weaving techniques. You can form a mental image of the figures, like the butterflies, by feeling them.  

‘I remember a scrawny boy in an old overcoat and threadbare trousers. Rain or shine, that’s how he showed up at drawing school every day. It was obvious that he came from a poor family. “Child of the lumpenproletariat” he used to call himself. No, it wasn’t his appearance that impressed me. It was his talent. I am Anna Leverington, former classmate and ex-wife of artist Chris Lebeau. 

‘I am Karel Sluyterman, architect and designer. I met Chris Lebeau in 1899 when we were both travelling to Paris. Chris wanted to see the artworks everyone was so excited about at the time. He was fresh out of drawing school and desperate for commissions. I saw his talent immediately. The precision, the craftsmanship. Lebeau was an absolute master of technique. When I was invited to design the Dutch Pavilion at the World Fair the following year, I really needed a pair of accurate hands like Chris’. And that’s how Chris Lebeau became my assistant.’  

‘You only really get to know people in times of crisis. I got to know Chris Lebeau during one of Europe’s greatest crises: World War II. During that period, I often modelled for him, and I was also his apprentice. My name is Sixta Heddema. To continue working as an artist, Chris had to join the Kultuurkamer, the organisation through which the Germans controlled art made in the Netherlands. But Chris refused to become a member and as a result of this, many of his commissions fell through. For a man with such strong ideals, enemy occupation feels like the height of injustice. 

Anna Leverington: ‘Chris often talked about his family. About how they lived in their drayghty cellar house in Amsterdam. En how his family, as staunch socialists, got involved in riots with the police. I was shocked to hear that, but Chris seemed proud of it.’   

Karel Sluyterman: ‘The Dutch entry for the World Fair included works made using the batik technique, which wasn’t very well-known then. The technique originated in the colonies, in the Dutch East Indies. It was a method of painting fabrics with several layers of paint. Lebeau made the technique his own in no time. Suffice to say he became a master at it.’ 

Sixta Heddema: ‘During the war, Chris began forging identity documents so convincingly that even the Gestapo could hardly distinguish them from the real thing. People around him often warned him: “Be more careful about voicing his political opinions”. He didn’t listen. In the autumn of 1943, Chris and his wife Sof Lebeau-Herman were rounded up by the Germans.’  

Anna Leverington: ‘Something I will always remember is his birth announcement, that his brother and sister submitted to the local paper. “We regret to announce the birth of yet another child because it means that once more, our parents will insist we have to give up some of our food and clothing.” Chris’ parents felt it was so important to help the poorest of the poor that they were prepared to let their own children go hungry. Rather than feeling hard done by, Chris always took his parents’ compassion as an example’.  

Karel Sluyterman: ‘After the World’s Fair, he received all kinds of commissions. Together with his wife, who was also an artist, he ran a business. They made cushions, rugs, curtains, anything really, all with the batik technique. As a socialist, Lebeau naturally wished that his work could also be bought by clients on a tight budget, but batik was too expensive. It simply wasn’t feasible. His drive for quality collided with his socialism.   

Sixta Heddema: ‘His talent also caught the eye of Fischer, the notorious SS officer. With no intention of obtaining them, Chris was granted privileges that others thought impossible. For instance, he was allowed to collect his drawing materials from his studio under supervision and told that he’d even be released if he promised not to engage in any more illegal practices, such as making fake ID papers. But he, of course, refused to stoop so low. This attitude meant that he remained a prisoner. Chris was taken to a cell in Scheveningen, later to camp Vught, and still later to concentration camp Dachau…  

Karel Sluyterman: ‘Over time, Chris abandoned the batik technique to make objects that were more accessible to a wider audience. That’s how he ended up with table linens. Later, he might have begun to see himself as more of a visual artist. So, he went to Antwerp to study figure drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts. He always stuck to his ideals. For instance, I have heard that he designed stamps but without the queen’s face because he opposed the monarchy. And when he started designing glasses for the factories in Leerdam and Winterberg, he only designed vases, because he didn’t drink alcohol.’ 

Sixta Heddema: ‘Chris died of exhaustion in Dachau concentration camp, four weeks before the liberation. His camp friends secretly made an imprint of his face. They buried him wearing that death mask. That’s how the American liberators knew who it was. In 1961, he was reburied with dignity.  

This is a core object. You can listen to information here. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to touch this object.

Lebeau painted this portrait on canvas in 1936. It represents his pupil Sixta Heddema. The oil painting shows a young, white woman with medium-length dark brown wavy hair, wearing a floral dress. She’s sitting on a dark brown wooden chair in front of a neutral beige background. Note the contrasting effect of the vertical black band in the background on the right.

Sixta is sitting on a chair with her body turned a little to the right so that she is depicted at a slight angle. She has turned her head and seems to be looking past the viewer into the distance on the left. Her blue-grey eyes have a neutral look. She has a light blush on her cheeks. The dress with a colourful flower print has a low round neckline and no sleeves but frills of the same fabric around the shoulders. Around her neck Sixta is wearing a large orange teardrop-shaped stone on a thin chain. The stone rests on her chest. The painting is exceptionally detailed and realistic, as if the woman depicted could just stand up and walk away.

Lebeau was a perfectionist. For this portrait, he had his student Sixta Heddema pose no less than 120 times. That’s how he managed to capture even the smallest detail spot-on. For example, that gleaming pendant: there's a window reflected in it, with someone sitting in front of it – probably the painter himself at work on the portrait. 

During World War II, Lebeau and Heddema worked closely together. For the resistance movement they made false documents that were indistinguishable from real ones. Yet Lebeau got caught and ended up in the Dachau concentration camp, where he died. Heddema survived the war and ensured that a large part of her teacher's art ended up in the Drents Museum, including the floral dress she’s wearing in this painting.