Mario de Graaf

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Mario de Graaf was a Dutch draftsman and painter who lived in and around Oslo from 1960 to 1966. Later in life, he also visited Norway frequently.

Mario (originally Marius Franciscus Simon) de Graaf was born on October 14, 1921, in Harderwijk, east of Amsterdam, but spent much of his childhood in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). It was not until 1933 that he returned to the Netherlands with his mother, who was a doctor and already a widow, and a younger sister. He attended a gymnasium in Hilversum, but since he was not a good student, his mother persuaded him to become an apprentice painter. After the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, the family moved to Amsterdam, where Mario de Graaf became a student at the Drawing Academy. Events during World War II prevented him from completing his studies. Around 1943, Mario de Graaf was interned in the Amersfoort concentration camp, but together with some other prisoners, he managed to escape when they were to be deported to Germany. A German soldier turned a blind eye when he witnessed their escape attempt. After 1945, Mario de Graaf traveled around Europe for several years, taking drawing courses with various artists and at different institutions, including in Switzerland, Germany, and France.

When Mario de Graaf settled in the Netherlands again, he began working as a decorator at the Bijenkorf department store in Amsterdam. He then became a designer in Switzerland, and in 1960 he moved to the outskirts of Oslo, where he stayed for six years. In Nesodden, he had students. In Norway, de Graaf also worked as a designer and held various positions in the advertising industry. Additionally, he worked as an interior architect and cinematographer. In his spare time, he devoted himself to drawing and painting pictures, including Norwegian landscapes, but he primarily created portraits of young men. Several of these were published in the Dutch magazine for homosexuals Vriendschap (Friendship), the Swiss sister publication Der Kreis (The Circle), as well as in the magazines Vennen and Eos (both Denmark), One (USA), and others. De Graaf also illustrated some of the books by the Dutch author and poet Jef Last (1898–1972), who had been in close contact with the two homosexual writers André Gide (1869–1951) and Harry Domela (1905–1979) in the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, several exhibitions of de Graaf's works were held both in the Netherlands and in Scandinavia.

Thus, Mario de Graaf, together with his Dutch friend and former student Ton van Gool (born 1947), exhibited at Centrum-Grillen in Vikersund in Øst-Modum. In the summer of 1971, the two artists - who had also worked as teachers in the Modum Painting Club for some time - displayed portraits, landscapes, watercolors, material pictures, wall hangings, and photographs there. De Graaf and van Gool lived in the old farm building at Pilterud by Tyrifjorden, and Drammens Tidende and Buskeruds Blad highlighted that the two were "very handsome and sympathetic guys." While de Graaf, who according to the journalist spoke good Norwegian, welcomed the visitors to an "improvised morning garden party," van Gool served coffee, fresh waffles, sour cream, and jam. The "bohemian lifestyle" did not tempt the two painters, claimed the journalist, and hastened to state that it was "as tidy and clean" at their place "as if a housewife had tidied up their bachelor pad." Furthermore, Mario de Graaf painted portraits on commission – for example, if one wanted a painting of their children, or of a deceased family member from a photograph, as stated in the newspaper Fremtiden.

From the early 1970s, Mario de Graaf lived in the Netherlands again, first in Amsterdam, then in Alkmaar (in the province of Noord-Holland), where he continued to work as a book illustrator. As before, he spent several summers in Norway, where he found inspiration for additional landscape paintings. Two of his last exhibitions, one with rather "homosexual" or erotic pictures of men, took place in Arkel (Netherlands) in 1999, and one with landscape paintings in Mosjøen in 2002. Additionally, de Graaf participated in a group exhibition during the Galleria art festival in Mosjøen in the summer of 2006.

Mario de Graaf died on June 2, 2008. Since then, the art foundation "Graafse," established by the family, has taken on the task of managing the few testamentary legacies and the remaining works of de Graaf, with the aim of making the artist's work accessible in the future. Mario de Graaf's works consist of paintings and ink drawings of landscapes, city views, and portraits of men and boys with more or less erotic undertones, and especially the latter can be provocative even though the boys are fully clothed. De Graaf also designed wall and floor tapestries, which he then knotted himself. Documenting his work is, however, difficult, and there are hardly any records of what he created, where, and to whom he sold his pictures. An overview of his exhibitions is also lacking.**