Artwork Data
Title
Nationaal Monument voor de Koninklijke Marine
Artist
Year
1966
Material
natuursteen / rode ettinger tufsteen
Dimensions
h. 420 cm
Artwork Location
Address
Strandweg, Den Haag
City district
Scheveningen
GPS data
52.103097725879, 4.2662143056197 View on map
Artwork Description
Text
Mari Andriessen has been called 'the sculptor of resistance'. A characterisation that is due to him for two reasons. His Haarlem home and studio were the base of the armed resistance during the Second World War. And after the liberation, he received a series of commissions to make monuments in memory of five traumatic years of war.
How different his career had started. Catholic by birth, he received his first commissions from Catholic circles. His art consisted of reliefs and small sculptures, executed in an austere, highly stylised language of form. This changed in the second half of the 1930s, when he also received other, non-religious commissions. His sculptures became freer and more spatial. In his depiction of the figures, he also focused more and more on gestures and posture. This strengthened the emotional component of his work.
A good example is 'The Dockworker' from 1952, a monument to the Amsterdam February Strike of 1941. The stocky figure, both legs firmly on the ground and hands almost clenched into fists in anger, expresses the resistance to the persecution of the Jews.
Of a very different order is Andriessen's 1966 war memorial in Scheveningen. The National Monument to the Royal Navy commemorates 3,000 Navy personnel who died in World War II. No emotions here, but an abstracted history in stone. The large, red tuff stone sculpture on the embankment to Beach Road depicts a Navy ship in action. On the bow, a ship's officer peers through a scope. Behind him, next to the gun turret, is a second figure. At the stern, a sailor gives a flag signal.
It is one of the few examples of abstraction in his oeuvre, as Andriessen thought figuratively. But it indicates that the artist was open to other movements in sculpture and was able to transform a new language of form into his own imagery.
Due to the redevelopment of Scheveningen's boulevard, the National Monument to the Royal Navy was stored for several months in 2021. In early May 2022, the monument was given a temporary spot on a dune just down the road.