Cornelis Bernardus (Kees) van Bohemen was a Dutch painter born in The Hague in 1928. He attended the Royal Academy of Art there from 1943 to 1948, which set the stage for his lively and changing career as an artist.

When Van Bohemen was twenty-four, he received a grant to travel to Paris, meeting artists from the recently ended CoBrA movement and sharing a studio with Corneille until 1957. These experiences strongly influenced his early work.

At first, Van Bohemen’s art was mostly abstract, especially when he worked with the Nederlandse Informele Groep and the ZERO group around 1959 and 1960, alongside artists like Jan Schoonhoven and Armando. In the early 1960s, he began painting large female nudes, marking a major change in his style.

Travel kept shaping his art. After spending time in the United States in 1966 and 1967, he created a series of paintings focused on sports. Later, a trip to Africa in the early 1970s led him to paint scenes of the savannah and jungle.

Trains became another recurring subject in his work. Van Bohemen was fascinated by their speed, movement, and powerful forms, which inspired him to create a series of paintings depicting trains in motion in 1980s.

Many major museums, such as Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, have Van Bohemen’s work in their collections. By always exploring new styles and subjects, he created a unique place for himself in postwar Dutch art and left a varied and impressive legacy.

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