Henk Pander lived a long life as a pure artist, undiminished in the moral voracity and aesthetic ferocity with which he confronted the universe. His paintings are brave, plaintive and vivid, deeply personal and yet, for precisely that reason, challengingly universal. Henk embodied the best of representational realism—appropriate for an artist trained in the classical Dutch traditions of Rembrandt and Vermeer. But he was also, as an immigrant, American, and product of Portland’s 1960s counterculture, a universalist driven by moral outrage. His art exemplified the power of visual art to express both historical significance and intimate emotion, a history painter who magnified and heightened historical reality through the prism of his delicate imaginative vision: Henk Pander was justifiably proud to be an heir to Rembrandt.
This was Henk’s gift to his viewer: he refined images robustly sustained in imagination, polishing their precision, ultimately producing a tableau of human moments which could sometimes seem almost too painful to behold unblinkingly. Over many years, Henk embodied the classically courageous duty of the artist to remind us, in the most vivid and sometimes disturbing ways, of the unsettling issues in our world today. This was his fearlessly sustained lifelong vocation. He never imagined a day when he would not work. That this day has come is painful for all of us who loved him dearly.
OJMCHE first exhibited paintings by Henk in 2012 in a show that also featured works by his father, Jaap Pander. On June 11, 2023, OJMCHE will feature etchings by Rembrandt and paintings by Pander on the subject of the Jews of Amsterdam.
Rest in peace, cherished friend, and may your memory be a blessing for Jody, Jacob, and Arnold as well as all who were fortunate to know you.