De helden van het circus

The circus in its present form exists since 1766 and was instantly popular with the wider public. It was not until 1870 that it became a major theme in visual art. From about that time artists began focusing their attention on depicting everyday life and also visited the circus. There acrobats played tricks with the laws of nature and clowns ridiculed life.
At first artists usually portrayed the circus in an attractive and atmospheric manner but from around 1900 they increasingly discovered, alongside its amusement value, the symbolical meaning of it. To artists the circus, and elements of this, contained double meanings that illustrated aspects of life itself.

This new book, within the context of the Year of the Circus (2006), shows the circus through the eyes of artists. Paintings, prints and drawings from, among others, Pablo Picasso, Isaac Israëls, Paul Klee, Gino Severini, Fernand Léger, Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Kees Maks, Charlie Toorop, Pyke Koch and Karel Appel bring alive the bewitching and colourful atmosphere of the circus. Yet they also show the circus as a metaphor, as a reflection of life itself, in which clowns, tightrope walkers or snake charmers all have a symbolical meaning.