Bernhard Willem Holtrop - master of the political cartoon
If you look at the postwar cartoonists of Dutch origin, Bernhard Willem Holtrop is certainly the most interesting, according to Frenk Driessen. He wrote his PhD thesis on Holtrop - who drew for HP/De Tijd and Charlie Hebdo, among others - and then also published it as a book.
When Frenk Driessen talks about Holtrop, not only his knowledge about the artist and his work but also the passion he has for the subject. Driessen is originally a graphic designer and that was one of the reasons for this choice of subject, the other being his of fascination with the political cartoon.
Provoking with pornography
'Bernard Willem Holtrop is known for his high-profile and often controversial cartoons tells Driessen. 'Perhaps his most infamous cartoon is one of Queen Juliana. It shows her as a prostitute. She sits in a window frame with a price tag. The print is from 1966 and is a reaction to the increase in her annual allowance.'
Although the print itself was not pornographic in nature, it explicitly referred to a sexual phenomenon. ‘With this, it touched the territory of political pornography,’ Driessen explains. 'It earned him an arrest for defamation of majesty, which subsequently led to a court case in which he was eventually acquitted. But for a cartoonist to be arrested at all in the Netherlands is extremely exceptional. Holtrop was in fact arrested for an opinion crime and that puts him in a special category.'
France
'Holtrop then starts his own magazine, God, Holland and Orange. This, too, causes constant legal hassle,' Driessen continues. 'But it does offer Holtrop a platform and thus recognition. When the May Revolution breaks out in Paris in 1968, Holtrop is approached to draw a print for the French magazine L'Enragé. Holtrop made a drawing of Charles de Gaulle, the then president, in which he placed him on two SS-shaped stools. The print was immediately put on the cover of L'Enragé, and in one fell swoop Holtrop's name was established in France.'
With that calling card, Holtrop then ends up at Charlie Hebdo. That magazine is not at all creeped out by Holtrop's prints, seeing in that magazine a prime spot for his sexually tinged satire. 'France was a better environment for Holtrop. In the Netherlands he would most probably not have been able to express himself. The political climate in Paris was much more susceptible to Holtrop's satire because it is much fiercer than in the Netherlands - where it is mainly about the polder model and smoothing over the folds. France proved to be the ideal soil for Holtrop's political pornography. When the attack on the Charlie Hebdo building takes place in 2015, Holtrop's career is already coming to an end, but it strengthened him to draw even more of his own plan in those latter days.'