The Museum of Broken Things

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I would like to invite you to a very sad museum in the Northern Netherlands.  Known as The Museum of Broken Things, it features the life’s work of a Frisian artist named Jopie Huisman, who was born in 1922 in a town called Workum, known as a long-established center for craftspeople – ceramicists, wood workers, metals smiths and more.

Jopie Huisman, De eerste en da laatse schoenen, 1974

Jopie was a painter, with a strong passion for the farmland that surrounded his city, and he loved to take his small boat out at night and fish for eels in the canals.  He lived a relatively happy, simple existence for a while until World War II came along and he was arrested by the Nazi police.  He found himself imprisoned in a labor camp in Kassel Germany, which was traumatizing in and of itself, but his horror was compounded by the fact that Kassel was being bombarded.  He saw bombs falling from the sky like an enormous flock of geese and soon the city and the surrounding countryside were engulfed in flames.

Jopie somehow managed to escape the work camp alive and returned home to Friesland, but he was not the same.  Traumatized and broken, he started to develop an affinity for discarded things, and eventually started a business as a rag-and-bone man, buying and selling used clothing and scrap metal. The objects spoke to him – they had stories to tell.  One time, he went to purchase the contents of a house in which a very old woman had recently passed away.  Inside her armoire, he found two pairs of shoes, one for a baby and one for an adult woman. He realized that these were the very first and very last pairs of shoes she had ever owned – and that together, they summed up her entire life.  At that point, he turned his attention from landscape painting to objects: dented buckets and ripped fishing nets, used overalls splattered with paint, broken toys and scorched cookware.  These things became his subjects because he felt he could relate to them deeply.

His wife was less enamored than he was with old junk, and was frustrated by her husband’s inability to put food on the table for their children.  She eventually left him, which made him throw himself into his work more, but mostly in solitude.  After years of painting, he finally managed to land an exhibit in a neighboring city, but some of his paintings went missing from the walls, so he resolved to never loan his work out again.  After that he turned his own home into a museum of broken things.