Mari Andriessen

Mari Andriessen


Mari Andriessen was born in Haarlem in 1897. He studied for several years at the Kunstnijverheidsschool in Haarlem and then studied sculpture at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where he was taught by the sculptor Jan Bronner. His first monumental commissions came mainly from the Catholic Church: distillations of Bible scenes in stone. From the second half of the 1930s he also received commissions from non-Catholic sources. He moved from carving to modelling and his work became freer and more spatial.

Andriessen made several war memorials following the Second World War. The first of these was for a memorial in Enschede in 1949. He designed various figures; a soldier, a Jewish woman and child, bomb victims and resistance fighters, and placed them on individual plinths on a lawn. In the same period Andriessen was approached by the City of Amsterdam to design a memorial to the Strike of February 1941. For this sculpture Andriessen chose the strident figure of a robust and militant dockworker. Since its unveiling by Queen Juliana on 19 December 1952 the sculpture has been widely regarded as a national symbol of the Resistance in the Netherlands.

In 1962 Andriessen was commissioned to design a national monument to Queen Wilhelmina in The Hague. He also made sculptures of the engineer Lely at the Afsluitdijk and of Anne Frank, which has been displayed in Amsterdam since 1977. Andriessen was admired for the manner in which he expressed his subjects; characters without excessive detail. He remained active until an advanced age. He died in Haarlem in 1979.

Artworks