'Diep Thougts?' (2008).
Peter Klashorst was a controversial Dutch painter, sculptor, photographer and musician. He built a reputation for making brutal abstract-expressionist paintings, full of hardcore pornography and iconoclastic deconstructions of media celebrities and pop culture characters. Outside of his artistic career, Klashorst's private life was frequent tabloid fodder, making him one of the most talked about artists of his lifetime. In his work, Klashorst sometimes depicted comic book characters and he also made a few one-page comics of his own.
Early life and career
Peter van de Klashorst (who later shortened his name to just "Peter Klashorst") was born in 1957 in Santpoort, a town in the province of North Holland, but spent most of his youth in the nearby city of Haarlem. His father was a sales representative, his mother worked as a cleaner. Klashorst's father was a Communist and Polish Nazi camp escapee, who gave his son a strict upbringing and didn't support his artistic ambitions. From a young age, Klashorst enjoyed drawing and delving into fantasy worlds. According to him, he never really evolved beyond the things he drew in kindergarten: throughout his life he always wanted to capture that same feeling of spontaneity. At age 14, he tried to be accepted at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam, but was advised to finish high school first.
Barely making it out of high school, Klashorst took a job as an office clerk, but hated the boring paperwork so much that he started to call in sick. He later tried to get fired by dressing filthy and eating garlic to give himself bad breath. Succeeding in this plan, he joined the squatter's movement and lived illegally in houses in Amsterdam and Haarlem. In 1976, a semi-sequential series of erotic drawings by Peter Klashorst appeared in 'De Topeloeng', a one-shot comic magazine also containing work by Bernhard Willem Holtrop, Hupet and Phil van Tongeren. A couple of years later, he also appeared in the alternative comic magazine Speedo, alongside artists like Aart Clerkx, Herman Brood and Joost Swarte.
Drawing by Peter Klashorst for 'De Topeloeng' (1976).
Between 1976 and 1981, Klashorst studied at the Rietveld Academy, where he met fellow creative spirits like the brothers Maarten (1958-2004) and Rogier van der Ploeg (b. 1961), who, like Klashorst, also shortened their names to Maarten Ploeg and Rogier Ploeg. Together, the artists made iconoclastic paintings, sculptures and photographs. They also performed with the punk band Interior, which in 1981 evolved into the new wave collective Soviet Sex. With Klashorst on bass, the Ploeg Brothers played guitar, with Maarten taking vocals. On drums have been Bart Domburg and Bob Eisenberger. In 1982, Klashorst left the band, which then changed its name to Blue Murder. When Soviet Sex reunited in 1997, Klashorst joined in again, along with Ellen ten Damme on vocals, violin and keyboards. In the 2000s, Klashorst sometimes played bass in the punk band Dikke Vla.
As true subversive renegades, Klashorst and the Ploeg Brothers held illegal TV broadcasts under the name PKP-TV, derived from the first letters of their last names. By manipulating a transmitter on the roof, their broadcasts could be watched by a large group of people. The TV pirates recited poems, read stories and interviewed people. A celebrity who participated in these broadcasts was Tosca Niterink, later famous as Thea in the subversive children's show 'Theo en Thea'. As their artistic and musical career took up more of their time, Klashorst and company eventually quit their illegal broadcasts.
Peter Klashorst version of Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge.
Art career
Among Klashorst's graphic influences were traditional painters like Rembrandt Van Rijn and Vincent Van Gogh, but most of all abstract-expressionists (Karel Appel) and pop art painters (Roy Lichtenstein). His main inspiration came from the Neue Wilde ("New Wild Men", or "New Fauvists") movement, with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georg Baselitz, Keith Haring, Anselm Kiefer, A.R. Penck and Julian Schnabel as the most famous representatives. Their artworks were brutal and aggressive, with paint splashed all over the canvas. Sometimes they used their entire bodies to smear the paint on paper. If the works featured figurative images, they were deliberately drawn simple and clunky, to heighten the crude artificiality. Klashorst also cited the Dutch Disney comics weekly Donald Duck as a strong influence. Interviewed by Maarten Slagboom (2 December 1991), he said: "The influence of comics has been visible in my work for years. That imagination; anecdotal, combined with Greek heroic poetry."
In The Netherlands, Klashorst rose as the best-known Dutch Neue Wilde representative. In 1982, he received the Johan and Titia Buning-Brongers Award and, a year later, a royal subsidy for painting, which increased his fame. During exhibitions in New York City, he met fellow artists Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, but also pop stars David Bowie and Madonna. In general, the Neue Wilde movement polarized art critics and museum visitors. While dismissed by some as utter trash, it gradually became one of the leading art movements of the 1980s, much to Klashorst's concern, who felt it eventually became yet another form of establishment.
In 1987, Peter Klashorst, Jurriaan Van Hall, Bart Domburg, Gijs Domburg, Justus Donker and Ernst Voss moved into an opposite direction by founding the After Nature movement. Instead of being bold, experimental and aggressive, After Nature went back to the roots of art. The artists simply wanted to make realistic landscape paintings, still lives and studies of the naked body. Traditional works, without any higher meaning or concept. They even organized painting courses, held in their own academy, the Amsterdam Institute for Painting (AIS). One of his students there was the painter and graphic novelist Edwin Hagendoorn. Klashorst said that many abstract painters he met basically made non-figurative works to mask their lack of graphic skills. He therefore wanted to show critics and fellow artists how actual academically schooled artists do it, simultaneously debunking the rumor that he couldn't draw. The After Nature movement lasted until 1995, after which Klashorst returned to his trademark Neue Wilde art style.
'Apocaliptic Rider' (2015).
Klashorst often showed social engagement. In 2006, he established his own political party, "Huisje-Boompje-Beestje", which defended the rights of artists. During the municipal elections in Amsterdam, they didn't manage to rise above the five percent electoral threshold, whereupon he disbanded the party. In 2011, Klashorst exhibited in the Tuol Sleng Museum in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, where he presented portraits of victims of the Red Khmer dictatorship (1975-1979). The expo received official support from Unesco. Klashorst also criticized far-right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn and U.S. President Donald Trump in several of his paintings. After the sex scandal surrounding businessman Jeffrey Epstein broke loose in the late 2010s, Klashorst made a canvas depicting Epstein alongside Bill Clinton and Trump, dressed in Nazi uniforms alongside underage children. In 2020, his 'Dirty Diaries' book portrayed Dutch queen Maxima in pornographic poses and crown princess Amalia being fondled by a black Gambian model. Interviewed by Nick Muller (2 July 2020), Klashorst stated that he wanted to destroy the "divine" status of the royals. When he was young, a woman in his neighborhood actually believed that the queen never went to the toilet or had sex, instead being impregnated by "thighbone fertilization." His iconoclastic deconstructions of pop culture characters, like Bob Marley, Charlotte Rampling in 'The Night Porter' and Scarlett Johansson in 'Girl with the Pearl Earring' fell in the same category.
Wuppy Comix, 2012.
Comics
The most frequently recurring characters in Peter Klashorst's work came from the world of comics and cartoons: Hanna-Barbera's Fred Flintstone, E.C. Segar's Wimpy, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Goofy and Hergé's Tintin. Many of these characters were degraded by being shown in pornographic poses, such as a porn actress giving three ducks fellatio (presumably adult versions of Huey, Louie and Dewey) in a pun-based work titled 'Suck My Duck'. In 2015, Klashorst painted a parody of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Last Supper', depicting behind the table himself and several of his graphic heroes, including Rembrandt, Robert Crumb, Donald Duck, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso and Caravaggio. In 2013, he also repainted Roy Lichtenstein's 'M-Maybe', which in itself was based on a comic book panel by Tony Abruzzo.
Klashorst's 2016 book 'Painters Tales' was made in the style of a cheap comic book, with Tintin in tropical helmet painting a nude model, while having an erection. Another mock comic book was Wuppy Comix, in which a Tintin-like character walks the Bangkok market, against several photographs of local streets, while a parody of the Comics Code approval sign appears in the top left corner. Klashorst also spoofed famous Tintin covers, like 'Tintin in Africa', where the quiffed reporter gives a black African a blowjob. Klashorst also ridiculed the 'Tintin' sex parodies 'Tintin in Switzerland' by Efdé and 'Tintin in Thailand' by Baudouin de Duve with the work 'Kluifje in Thailand'. The cover is an altered version of 'Tintin in Switzerland', only with Klashorst's face pasted on Tintin's.
Peter Klashorst's contribution to the '50 Years Lambiek' book (2018), featuring Willy Vandersteen's Lambik and Jerom.
While Klashorst often used comic characters in his art, or reimagined comic book covers, he only made actual comics on rare occasions. In 2008, he drew 'Diep Thougts' (deliberately misspelled), a gag comic in which he walks around in Bangkok, resisting the temptation of going home with a prostitute, but eventually succumbing, to regret it afterwards. When the Amsterdam comic store Lambiek celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018, Klashorst made another comic to celebrate the event. It was printed in the '50 Jaar Lambiek' (2018) anniversary book and featured Willy Vandersteen's Lambik claiming that "despite being 50", he wants to get laid. He then decides to use money to go to the red light district, making the money stashed away in his pants look like he has a huge penis. His sidekick Jerom, who apparently is well-endowed, wonders why Lambik "with his tiny dick" manages to get so many chicks? Even when ill later in life, Klashorst kept making comics. From his hospital bed, he drew the gag comic 'Pattaya Porn' in his sketchbook, depicting himself swimming in a river, while a dog pees on his clothes and a woman relieves herself in the stream. Disgusted, he eventually goes out to have sex with an Asian woman.
'Pattaya Porn', drawn in a sketchbook during a hospitalization.
Controversy
Throughout his career, Klashorst was often the subject of criticism. Like many Neue Wilde painters, he was at first dismissed as a complete hack. His own TV show 'De Sprekende Ezel' (1999), in which he interviewed celebrities who posed for paintings, intensified his stigmatization as a sell-out. In reality, though, Klashorst was never quite "accepted" in most museums. Despite a steady rise in the early 1980s, he disliked the snobbish art world and decided to make and sell art as an independent artist, instead of trying to get exhibited in museums. Also, this would have required him to stay in the Western world, while he enjoyed globetrotting. Klashorst earned enough money to have a stable career, but at the same time he squandered most of it instantly, or gave it away to people he pitied. Klashorst criticized the notion that people admire artists for being commercially successful, while simultaneously rejecting them for "selling out". In interviews, like any other creative soul, he also honestly expressed his insecurities about his talents. Klashorst didn't take himself all that seriously either: some of his canvases are signed with the name Pablo Picasso, instead of his own.
While Klashorst was a prominent modern artist in The Netherlands, he owed most of his reputation to scandals and other negative media attention, instead of his actual art. General audiences and several art critics felt his paintings were messy, obscene and sometimes utter disposable trash, seemingly obsessed with sex. On 10 January 2017, Facebook blocked his account for posting provocative paintings on his profile and baseless accusations that his models were minors. In interviews, Klashorst talked openly about his hedonistic lifestyle, which involved taking drugs and letting prostitutes stay over. Reporters sometimes filmed and photographed him while he worked in the nude. Interviewed by De Volkskrant in 2014, he boasted: "I don't like The Netherlands, where women only want sex six times a day." He spent most of his later years in Senegal, Kenia, Cambodia and Thailand, where local women were invited over to either "pose" for him, or get paid for "additional" services. Klashorst confessed that he didn't always use contraceptives, which resulted in some of these women getting pregnant.
On 22 April 2000, local police forces in the Senegalese capital Dakar raided his home on accusations of debauchery and defilement of women. The authorities not only held his "obscene" art against him, but also took condoms, lubricants and porn videos along as evidence. Klashorst was imprisoned without any order of arrest or trial, and put in a crowded cell where fleas and mosquitoes were everywhere. Some of the prisoners succumbed to malaria. After three weeks of jail time, he was eventually able to bribe himself free again and quickly fled the country. But in November 2002, while living in Gambia, he was threatened for similar offenses again and was only able to remain free thanks to the aid from a Dutch consul and local lawyer. In 2015, Klashorst was arrested once again, this time in the Netherlands, when he refused to leave his house atelier of thirty years in the Tabakspanden group of buildings in the Amsterdam Spuistraat. Squatted since the 1980s, the occupants were evicted and the buildings were mostly demolished prior to redevelopment.
Various Dutch tabloids delighted in writing reports about Klashorst's "immoral" activities, with him frequently being pigeonholed as an exhibitionist, pervert, whoremonger and exploiter of poor African and Asian women. In 2004, when HP/De Tijd magazine organized an election of "The Worst Dutchman", Klashorst was one of the nominees, though not voted into the final Top 10 list. Interviewed by Rosa de Souda for Dwars door de Buurt in 2008, Klashorst dismissed most of what was written about him as "nonsense". He also felt the criticism of his sex life was hypocritical, since artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were also frequent whoremongers. Interviewed by Hans van Scharen for De Groene Amsterdammer (23 November 2002), he also stated that journalists took some of his claims literally, instead of understanding he was just joking with them. When he said that he "slept with all his models", he merely meant it as a metaphor for how he became one with them in his paintings. When asked whether he had sex with "eleven-year olds", Klashorst snapped back: "No, only five-year olds". Klashorst also stated that his reputation as a sex maniac was strongly exaggerated, since he painted more than he screwed around.
Final years and death
In 2014, Klashorst informed the press that he was diagnosed with HIV. His health slowly but surely deteriorated when he received additional diagnosis of tuberculosis and lymphoma cancer. In 2024, he died at age 67 in a hospital in Amsterdam.
Books about Peter Klashorst
For those interested in Klashorst's life and career, Robert Vuijsje's biography 'King Klashorst' (2003) and Klashorst's autobiography 'Kunstkannibaal' (2011) are highly recommended.
Self-portrait (2021).