Family Saga: Dutch painter Jan Toorop, his daughter Charley, her sons and grandson all grappled with major changes in European art over the course of the modernist era - Report From Utrecht

"Four Generations: A Century of Art by the Toorop/Fernhout Family," at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, chronicled a Dutch artistic succession something like the American Wyeths, but with a more avant-garde cast. Jan Toorop introduced Symbolism and Neo-Impressionism to Holland. His daughter Annie Caroline, known always as Charley Toorop, was a noted Expressionist by the 1930s. Her sons John and Edgar Fernhout were a filmmaker and a painter, respectively. Edgar was a realist who became an abstractionist; in his later years he was associated with a leading-edge Dutch graduate program, Ateliers 63. Edgar's son Rik, after a career as a writer and working for Sotheby's, turned to painting full time in the 1990s, producing abstractions in which some critics have perceived fractured reflections of some of his great-grandfather's ornamental motifs.

The exhibition was cleverly organized to run backward in time, saving the blue-chip Jan Toorop for last (though the catalogue runs chronologically, old to new). That strategy was probably designed to ensure that the lay public saw the whole show. For the most attentive viewers, it also had the interesting effect of revealing sources after showing influences, so that your mind constantly shifted back and forth in time as you looked at the work.

Jan Toorop (1858-1928), born in the Dutch colony of Indonesia, studied in Amsterdam at the Rijksakademie and also at the Brussels Academy, where he joined Les Vingt when Ensor and Khnopff were members. He lived for a time in England before returning to Holland. He organized the first Dutch show of van Gogh in 1892. He segued through Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism and even made some works that recall van Gogh's Potato Eaters style; many of his later paintings were commissions from the Catholic Church. He was a major figure in Dutch art, and reproductions of his works hung in middle-class homes.

Toorop's works now look to have been a succession of extremes. Perhaps the most charming to present tastes are his Neo-Impressionist dune-and-sea studies; only grasses and gulls anchor the soft-color dots of paint to a landscape reality. But more breathtaking, for me, are the highly decorative Symbolist works such as Song of Good Tidings (1893), a scene of mythological figures in a stylized landscape in which the linear effects of hair and clouds continue onto the broad, flat surfaces of the frames.

Jan must have been a tough act to follow; one of his daughter Charley's best-known paintings shows her seated in the foreground in a painting smock, a palette in her right hand and a brush raised in her left. Behind her on the right is her son Edgar; behind her on the left is an enormous, looming, brooding bronze head of her bearded father. Charley (1891-1955) was the only child of Jan and an Englishwoman named Annie Hall. Charley married Henk Fernhout, a philosopher, in 1912, after becoming pregnant with Edgar. John was born the next year and a daughter, Annetje, in 1916 before the marriage ended.

Charley moved in avant-garde circles, for a few years living with the anarchist Arthur Lehning, but she left him so that she wouldn't be distracted from painting and eventually moved to her father's studio near the coast. She had a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as early as 1927, and represented Holland in the 1954 Venice Biennale, along with Karel Appel, Corneille and Wessel Cozijn.

Early on, Charley painted still lifes and landscapes in dark, glowing, exaggerated colors--a northern Fauvism, perhaps.

After she spent some time in Paris, her colors calmed down. In her paintings, she had a tendency to pull everything right up against the picture plane and paint with woodcutlike heavy lines. Figures are cut off as if exceeding the pictorial frame, and in her group portraits, heads are often too large. She painted serious faces, big eyes, dark tones even for blonds. Farmers (1930) has five stern-faced men holding tools. They are all short-haired, sunburned, the same height, and two of them look very much alike. They are so packed together that only the center face is entirely visible. The smooth surface of the painting is in tension with the salt-of-the-earth imagery, in which the men almost could be imagined turning their tools into weapons. Her many self-portraits have the same immediacy. They demonstrate her commitment to her art even as they show her in family and social settings, with such friends as Gerrit Rietveld; whereas her father and son, like most artists, left their work for the appreciation of future generations, Charley left a record of her whole life in her work, perpetually open to viewers.

Edgar Fernhout (1912-1974) had his first solo show at age 18, but his precocious success apparently didn't make life easy. His youthful realism seems clouded and ominous. In one of the museum's balcony alcoves, used to show small works and documentation, Edgar's early still lifes were paired with several of his mother's. Hers are invariably warmer and more robust; her abstracted skull--still signaling a spirit of life--contrasted with his meticulously painted skull on a windowsill before a golden-to-bare autumn landscape, which was altogether more melancholy. Edgar stopped painting for a while in his 30s. His 1948 self-portrait shows him with a fine brush in hand, wearing a soft turtleneck and windbreaker, against a brown, cloudy sky. His brows are knit as if looking into light or recoiling. His skin is so patchy, in an almost paint-by-numbers style, that one thinks of Ivan Albright's renditions of corrupted flesh.