Dutch Bible illustrator Kees de Kort died

His name is unknown to many, but the work of the painter, designer and illustrator Kees de Kort (1934-2022), is almost inescapable for those who grew up with the Bible: paintings of Bible stories without perspective, with large areas of colour, often with people whose emotions can be read in their eyes. “For many who grew up with his work, the astonished look of the blind Bartiméus who can see again is unsurpassed”, the Christian Dutch daily Nederlands Dagblad writes.

De Kort was the first Dutch artist to illustrate Bible stories with modern twentieth-century art. His work initially appeared in square booklets, each containing a separate Bible story. The series was called ‘What the Bible Tells Us’ and the first volume appeared in 1967. The series appealed to a large audience and was translated into almost one hundred languages.

As his son announced on the artist’s website on Thursday, De Kort died on August 19 in his Dutch hometown of Bergen. The pioneer of modern illustration of children’s Bibles was 87 years old.

The artist was born on December 2, 1934, in Nijkerk, the Netherlands. De Kort studied art at the Art Academy in Amersfoort, as well as in Utrecht and Amsterdam. In 1965 he was allowed to create a series of Biblical stories for people with intellectual disabilities for the Dutch Bible Society.

For De Kort, that was something of a breakthrough. Newspapers wrote very positive reviews, De Kort recalls in an interview with the Christian German magazine PRO in 2019. It was important to him to create images that are not too complicated for the viewer. It was right “to accompany the stories of the Bible with the simplest possible pictures”.

Pigs

De Kort was so busy doing commissioned Bible paintings, including for the Pope in 2017, that he had little time to paint for himself. But he did. He was fond of painting pigs, which he found sympathetic and intelligent. This writes Dutch daily NRC. He made poignant paintings of pigs with stress symptoms: “Man is sometimes more of a pig than the pig itself,” he said of them.

His fascination for pigs was partly due to the fact that he painted them as an illustration for for ‘The Prodigal Son’ in the 1970s. And painting the Bible improved, he said in an interview, after he had first painted a pig as an autonomous artist.