Ger Gerrits

Gerrit Jacobus Gerrits, known as Ger Gerrits, was born on 24 December 1893 in Nieuwer-Amstel, now part of Amstelveen, Netherlands. He attended the School voor Kunst en Kunstnijverheid in Haarlem and the Teekenschool voor Kunstambachten in Amsterdam, and around age 15 trained as a reproduction lithographer. In painting he was largely self-taught, though he received informal instruction from Heinrich Martin Krabbe, Georg Rueter, and Jaap Veldheer, and took further lessons at Jan Havermans's Amsterdam studio around 1928, the point at which he began working as an independent artist.

His early work was figurative, including landscapes and still lifes. In the first years of his career he sometimes exhibited under the pseudonym Portheine, including at the 1946 exhibition "12 Schilders" (12 Painters) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. According to Artsy's biography of the artist, he was also active in artists' resistance during the Second World War alongside figures such as Gerrit van der Veen and Willem Sandberg.

After the war, Gerrits moved decisively into abstraction, drawing on Kandinsky, Mondrian, and constructivist and neoplasticist ideas. He became a central organizing figure in Dutch abstract art, serving as a co-founder and driving force behind three key post-war associations, Vrij Beelden, Creatie, and Liga Nieuw Beelden. He was also a member and board member of the artists' association De Onafhankelijken, advocating throughout for the professional and financial standing of visual artists. He died on 5 July 1965 in Amsterdam.

Available sources do not preserve an exact, attributable critical quotation about Gerrits from a named critic in a major outlet, so none is reproduced here. What is well documented instead is institutional recognition of his organizing role: dealer and encyclopedia biographies consistently credit him as a co-founder and driving force behind Vrij Beelden, Creatie, and Liga Nieuw Beelden, the associations that carried Dutch art from wartime figuration into post-war abstraction, and note his membership and board role within De Onafhankelijken. The recurring frame in these sources is Gerrits as a builder of the post-war Dutch abstract scene as much as a painter judged on individual canvases.

No verified all-time auction record for Ger Gerrits could be confirmed. The internal record field for this artist was empty, and the research dossier did not surface a specific work, price, house, and date that could be documented as his auction high. MutualArt's database confirms that recorded auction results exist for the artist, indicating an active but modest secondary market, though a precise lot count or ranked top price could not be independently verified.

His work is mainly traded through Dutch dealers rather than an international gallery system. Mark Smit Kunsthandel and Simonis & Buunk both maintain artist pages and regularly list his paintings for sale. As one illustration of current retail levels, Simonis & Buunk has listed a still life, "Stilleven met fruitmand en taart," at an asking price of EUR 8,800; this is a dealer asking price, not a confirmed auction result, and should not be read as a market benchmark. No catalogue raisonne exists for the artist.

Gerrits's market is thin and regionally concentrated in the Netherlands, with no confirmed high-value auction result and no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and attribution should be checked directly against dealer records such as those held by Mark Smit Kunsthandel and Simonis & Buunk, and against reported museum holdings at the Frans Hals Museum and the Spoorwegmuseum. Early works may appear under the pseudonym Portheine rather than his own name. Collectors should also take care with identity: another Dutch painter, Gerard Christiaan Joseph Gerrits (1893 to 1959), shares the surname and birth year but is a distinct artist, and search results for "Gerrits" can be crowded out by the unrelated, far more famous painter Gerhard Richter.