Medusa chooses the sea

The acquisition of Charley Toorop’s Medusa chooses the sea shows that Hammacher also has an eye for additions to the painting collection.

As early as 1940, a collector offers the painting to Willy Auping, who is responsible for the museum’s collection during the war years. Auping hesitates because the painting is damaged. He asks Hammacher, already a well-known writer and art critic at that time, for advice, but decides not to purchase the piece.

Hammacher had visited Charley several times in her studio while she was working on Medusa chooses the sea. Thus, he experienced first-hand how the composition came about. Now that he himself is director of the museum, he eventually purchases the painting for 2,000 guilders. He finds it important for the artist to be represented in the collection with a late work of high quality.

‘It is a mature, highly worked painting […]. The forms are tense and so large that the head of Medusa, which yields to the dark forces of the sea and sky, expresses the same infinite turbulent spatiality as the sea itself.’