In the Netherlands, Charley Toorop (1891–1955) and Pyke Koch (1901–1991) are regarded as two of the most important figurative painters of the twentieth century – perhaps the most important. Charley Toorop & Pyke Koch | All or Nothing is the first exhibition to bring together the work of these two distinctive artistic personalities. Their significant oeuvres reveal clear parallels, and their lives and loves intersected on numerous occasions. With an extensive selection of their finest works, Museum MORE orchestrates an unprecedented artistic encounter, revealing surprising connections between Toorop and Koch.
On view at Museum MORE in Gorssel from 21 June to 25 October 2026.
Intense and volatile
Charley Toorop and Pyke Koch were contemporaries, friends and admirers of each other’s work, but art history has long kept them apart on stylistic grounds: Toorop an Expressionist, Koch a Neorealist or Magic Realist. Seen side by side, however, they reveal a tapestry of artistic similarities and fascinating interactions.
Their personal connection was close yet mercurial – intensive across three distinct periods, with intervening lulls that sometimes lasted years. There was mutual admiration and influence, as is evident in their themes, compositions and sustained engagement with classical genres such as portraiture, landscape and still life. The apex of their friendship is captured in Toorop’s monumental work Meal Among Friends (1932/33), a group portrait of family members and artist friends in which Koch stands close to her ‘self-portrait’ – a cigarette in his mouth, its glowing tip directed to her. Perhaps a reference to what may once have been more than a platonic relationship.
All or nothing
Were they ‘friends with benefits’? There are indications that suggest so. Koch and Toorop had numerous love affairs, yet were wholly devoted to their art. Both appeared to have something to prove; their lives were marked by an all-or-nothing attitude. Neither received formal artistic training, and both developed highly individual visual languages. Toorop worked with emphatic brushstrokes, seemingly at speed, while Koch was a painstaking perfectionist who would often destroy his work when dissatisfied.
Toorop was the formative influence in their early artistic relationship. Koch’s first paintings show her impact: the frontal depiction of the human face, the penetrating eyes, the fixed gaze directed at the viewer. She developed this schema as an expressive device, and he refined it with technical precision and a narrative, at times ironic, charge entirely his own.
Both artists were fascinated by the self-portrait as a genre, though their approaches differed markedly. Toorop painted herself at least seventeen times, with unflinching honesty. Koch produced only three self-portraits, and after the war, his Self-Portrait with Black Headband (1937) became – unintendedly – a controversial political emblem.
Acrobats and funfairs
As portrait painters, both rejected flattery. Toorop depicted those around her – children, friends, patrons, psychiatric patients – with a directness that at times proved too confronting for her contemporaries; Koch, even in commissioned work, strove for a timeless, idealized figure. Their voices also resonate in still-lifes, landscapes and cityscapes: Toorop confronting the harsh reality, Koch in meticulously constructed scenes imbued with symbolism.
Thematically, they moved through related worlds. The funfair and the circus offered both an artistic stage for human existence: Toorop in colourful, at times turbulent gatherings of people; Koch focusing on a single, hypnotic figure – the woman in the shooting gallery, the contortionist – as a personification of fascination and danger. Their views of women, however, diverged fundamentally: Toorop saw them as social beings, embedded in a harsh reality and attentive to the tragedy of their lives, while Koch approached the female figure as a psychological enigma, charged with eroticism and mysticism.
Farewell
Towards the end of their lives, both produced works that can be read as testaments. Toorop painted herself in parting, in a gesture of openness: her gaze cast over the shoulder, the curtain behind her half-drawn. Koch veiled his own farewell in allegory: a tightrope walker with a black cloth over his head, performing his act one final time on the slack rope.
Shown together, Toorop and Koch reveal what art-historical labels obscure: two singular artists who are far more closely related than might be assumed. It is precisely in the tension between affinity and individuality that the richness of their ‘parallel worlds’ emerges.
The exhibition is guest-curated by Carel Blotkamp and Mieke Rijnders. The accompanying catalogue, including essays by the curators, is published by Waanders.
