Kees Maks

Cornelis Johannes "Kees" Maks was born on 22 August 1876 in Amsterdam. He studied for a time at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, though the exact dates are not documented, before becoming a pupil of the painter George Hendrik Breitner.

According to dealer biographies, Maks also traveled to Paris, Spain, and Rome early in his career, and these sources credit exposure to Edouard Manet, Diego Velazquez, and the Italian painter Antonio Mancini with shaping his technique, though this itinerary is not corroborated by other reference sources reviewed here. He built his reputation on animated scenes of circus performers, theater life, dance halls, and fashionable leisure, a subject matter that contemporaries considered strikingly modern and, for a Dutch painter, unusually attuned to Parisian taste.

He exhibited at the Munich Secession in 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1914, and participated in the Paris Salon d'Automne annually between 1910 and 1940. In 1927 his painting Nightcafe was purchased by the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris, then the French state's museum for living artists, a milestone that contemporary commentary treats as confirmation of his standing. He was included in the major 1939 survey exhibition Onze Kunst van Heden (Our Art of Today) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and his work was entered in the official art competitions held alongside the 1928 Amsterdam and 1948 London Olympic Games. Kees Maks died on 28 October 1967 in Amsterdam.

Dealers and reference sources consistently place Maks alongside Kees van Dongen and Jan Sluijters as one of the important figurative painters working in the Netherlands at the start of the twentieth century, a grouping that reflects his shared subject matter, his Paris exposure, and his training under Breitner. A 1920 review in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, as later paraphrased in secondary sources, characterized him as a painter willing to embrace the fashions and spectacle of his own time rather than retreat into more conventional Dutch subject matter. His 1927 inclusion in the Musee du Luxembourg's purchases and his 1939 presence in the Rijksmuseum's Onze Kunst van Heden survey are the two clearest institutional endorsements documented for his career, alongside his participation in the official Olympic art competitions of 1928 and 1948.

No verified, sourced all-time auction record for Kees Maks could be confirmed as of 2026-07-13. The clearest price reference available is a retail asking price, not an auction result: the Dutch dealer Simonis & Buunk has offered a painting titled Portret van een jonge vrouw at an asking price of approximately EUR 6,000. Separately, an auction-house lot description records provenance for one Maks work through a Sotheby's Amsterdam sale on 26 May 2005, though the realized price for that sale is not documented in the sources reviewed. Taken together, the available record suggests an active but modest secondary market handled mainly by Dutch dealers and regional auction houses, without the kind of consolidated, high-value auction history seen for better-documented peers such as Kees van Dongen.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Kees Maks, so attribution and dating rely on dealer and auction-house connoisseurship, on his C.J. Maks signature, and on whatever provenance a given work carries. The publicly available auction record for the artist is sparse and, based on the sources reviewed, does not currently support a reliable benchmark price; collectors should treat any single sale result, gallery asking price, or online listing as an individual data point rather than as evidence of a broader market trend. His work is held by the Stedelijk Museum Zutphen and Museum Henriette Polak, and his Nightcafe was historically acquired by the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris, but a comprehensive list of institutional holdings could not be confirmed from the sources available and would benefit from direct verification against individual museum collection databases.