Nico Molenaar, Sigarenbandjeshuisje / Cigarbands House

a scene of Venice
this picture and the next three (2013) 

courtesy of Leslie Gardner (Flickr)

Above image of a gondola in Venice, which was created by adding the medallions of cigar bands to a panel, once was part of the attic of a house in the old center of the Dutch village of Volendam. In the 1950s the site became known as the Cigarband House.

 Life and works

This rather specific art environment was created by Nicolaas Molenaar (1894-1964). He was the middle child in a Volendam family and had three brothers and three sisters.

Growing up in a Catholic environment, after his primary education Nicolaas went to a monastery, where he stayed for many years until he left it in the early 1940s.

Martini Tower in the City of Groningen, Netherlands

Molenaar returned to live in Volendam and in June 1944 he married Grietje Tuyp (1896-1981), who was also a former monastic (she had joined the monastery after her fiance drowned while fishing at sea). Their marriage remained childless.

The couple lived in a house in the old center of the village, a neighborhood with narrow streets and rather haphazardly situated authentic houses, which is why it is also referred to as Doolhof  (Labyrinth).

Statue of Liberty, New York

To provide for income, Molenaar sold eels from home. 

As a hobby he collected cigar bands and in 1947 he came up with the idea to make decorations with these bands and to display these in the attic. Once started with this project, it became an activity that never left him and on which he worked with unbridled commitment. 

Molenaar cut off the ends of the cigar bands and glued the medallions on boards, arranging these into the representation he had in mind and in a pencil sketch already had prepared on the panel.

After a while the collection had grown to such an extent that it became known in the village and people wanted to come and see it. Molenaar thought that was fine, and the arrangement became that people were allowed to take a look in the attic if they also bought a portion of eel

The project was well received by the inhabitants of Volendam. In any case, this applied to the Volendam children, because in order to get enough material, Molenaar gave a few cents to a child who brought a box full of cigar bands.

map of the northern part of the Netherlands,

the white square (added by the editor of this post) 

indicates the location of Volendam

One of the decorations in the Cigarbands House is above map of the northern part of the Netherlands. It shows the large inlet of the North Sea on which Volendam is located.

In 1932 the Afsluitdijk was completed, an enclosure dam 32 km long and 90 meters wide (the not so easy to identify yellow line in above map). This had major consequences for Volendam, that traditionally had a lot of saltwater fishing. Postwar developments have also resulted in only a limited number of boats currently remaining from Volendam's once sizable fishing fleet.

Manneken Pis in Brussels and a scene of Venice

this picture and the next three (2009) 

courtesy of Allison (Flickr)

Molenaar's collection includes numerous images of historical buildings.

There are images of internationally known structures such as Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Tower of Pisa, the Big Ben in London, the Cathedral in Cologne, the Statue of Liberty in New York.

But he also depicted Dutch buildings such as windmills, the Water Tower in Sneek, the Martini tower in Groningen, the St Vincentius Church in Volendam and the Basilica of Saint Servatius in Maastricht.

Molenaar also looked into completely different themes, such as all Volendam football players who in 1959 for the first time promoted to the premier league, all provincial arms of the Netherlands, the Dutch royal family with (the current king) Willem Alexander as a baby on the arm of his father prince Claus, maps of the Netherlands, and Manneken Pis in Brussels.

There are also images as above and below with black outlined scenes, for which the ends of the cigar bands were used.

After Nico Molenaar died on May 13, 1964, the entire collection, meanwhile including some 7 million cigarbands, was taken over by a neighbour, Jan Sombroek, who installed the collection in his own house.

In the 1960s in Volendam the arrival of international tourists started to increase and Sombroek and his wife Jannig Karregat have done a lot to transform the collection into a tourist attraction.

They added informative panels decorated with cigarbands to the collection, and also ship models and items like the decorated table tops, vases, (gin) jars and plates, covered with cigarbands, as in below picture.

In December 1993, the Volendams Museum bought the collection.

To accommodate it, a wing has been added to the museum building. On May 11, 1994 the first pile was driven by Nico's brother Jaap Molenaar (1903-1995), who at the time was 90 years old.

Volunteers carefully refurbished the panels as necessary and on May 5, 1995 the new museum hall was officially opened.

In 2017 the museum submitted an application to register Cigarbands House in the Guiness book of records. In this context also a promotional film was made (see documentation)

Documentation

* Website of the Volendams Museum
* Article (April 2019) on weblog I Becoming Dutch
* More pictures of the creations on Flickr, by Leslie Gardner and by Allisson

Videos
* Video on Instagram showing the decorated panels as exposed in the Volendam Museum

* Video Cigarbands Mosaic made in the 1950s by Nelleke de Wit (YouTube, undated, 1'24") showing Nico Molenaar at work

* Video (2013, YouTube, 3'31") by madeleinepa3cuz, showing the setup of the panels with cigarbands in the Volendam Museum

* Video of a film (2017) made by the Volendam Museum to promote Molenaar's creation as the world's only cigarband house

Nico Molenaar 

Cigarbands House

formerly situated in the attic of a private houses along

Dril, corner Oude Draaipad, Volendam, Netherlands

decorations currently exposed in

Volendams Museum

Zeestraat 41, 1131 ZD Volendam, Netherlands

streetview

former location of the Cigarband House

Karel Forman, Interiér zdobený kolážemi / Interior decorated with collages

 this picture and the next four by Milan Svacinka, 
courtesy of Pavel Forman, from his website

Above picture depicts Karel Forman¹ in his apartment in the community of Bruntál in the Czech Republic.

It's an ordinary flat in an ordinary three-storey residential block such as those built in the 1950s and 1960s in so many European towns.

Not ordinary however, is the decoration of this apartment. All available space on walls, ceilings, but also on furniture and utensils has been decorated with collages.

Life and works

The author of this creation, Karel Forman (b. 1929), grew up in Ludkovice, where he trained to be a baker. In the 1950s he moved to Bruntál, where he got a job as a truck driver and ultimately became a bus driver.

Retired in 1990, Forman began his decorative project in 1995.

Karel Forman's grandson, Pavel Forman (b. 1977), who became a visual artist, has watched the work of his grandfather from the beginning, "one postcard in the bathroom, with a family photograph somehow worked into it".......

Although Karel Forman's wife was not amused and tried to stop the increase of collages on the walls, year by year the decorations grew until after some decades of work, the whole apartment was decorated with collages and had become transformed into -as Pavel says- a "unique and unrepeatable masterpiece".

As so many outsider artists, Karel Forman worked quite intuitively, without any preconceived plan, using materials that were available around, such as clippings from magazines, chocolate and candy wrappers, beer mats and family photographs.

Pavel Forman and his grandfather

Karel Forman's grandson Pavel Forman, as said, has become a visual artist, who is well known in the Czech Republic and other countries. 

In 2009 Pavel introduced his grandfather at the opening of an exposition he had in the Caesar art gallery in Olomouc in the Czech republic. At the occasion he published a folder entitled No Return. 

"Pavel Forman's grandfather Karel"

Pavel has converted fragments of his grandfather's work through digital printing and painting into his own work.

As Pavel says: "The reality captured by cameras in other people's hands was turned into a new one seen on the walls of my grandfathers flat and I will consequently work it into a new level... What comes into being is a visual family saga (...)"

Documentation

* Article by Pavel Konečný on Facebook, with many pictures (September 2013)

* Tomás Koudela, Karel Forman - Byt jako socha (A flat like a sculpture), Ostrava, 2012
* Pavel Forman's introduction to No Return, the family saga, in OEE texts

note

¹ I would like to acknowledge that I learned about Karel Forman from Pavel Konečný

Karel Forman

Collage decorated interior

Bruntál, district Bruntál, Moravian-Silezian region, Czech Republic

no public visits

Ilmari Salminen, Finland Militäru Museum / Finland Military Museum

screenprint from the Erkki Pirtola video
(see documentation)

Believe it or not, but Finland had an outpost in international and interplanetary communications, located in the military museum in Petäjävesi and operated by Ilmari Salminen.

Life and works

Ilmari Salminen (1929-2008) was born in Helsinki, Finland. During world war II, at age 14, he was moved to the countryside, where he settled on the farm of an uncle in the community of Petäjävesi. After his uncle died in 1986, Salminen became the main tenant of the property.

In 1994, Salminen moved into a small, red painted cabin with some two rooms, in the woods of Metsäkulma, outside of Petäjävesi, that belonged to his friend Pekka Strömberg.

Salminen transformed this cabin into a decorated art environment by covering the walls with all kinds of collages, combining photos of famous people with his own decorations, making illustrated inkjet prints of poems, etc.

This kind of creative activity earned him the nickname "the Andy Warhol of the woods".

picture courtesy of Gabi Schaffner

But Salminen's creative mind also focused upon transforming his cabin into kind of an outpost in the international and interplanetary communication. 

He constructed and decorated radio's (like the one in the next picture), he made cell phones and devices to make it possible to have contact not only with world leaders, but also with other realms in the galaxy by means of his own UFO station.

picture courtesy Esa Salldén, Radiomuseu, Finland

Salminen made his own banknotes and constructed military equipment, like guns

He liked to see his art environment as kind of a museum and was happy to show visitors around, playing the accordion. I am not sure what name he gave to the museum, because I get the impression he used a variety of names, including Finland Militäru Museum.

His work was represented in the 2005 exposition In another world in the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki.

Salminen passed away in 2008.

Salminen's artistic legacy

In 2009 the cabin was still extant, but it was closed for the public because of some repair work. I couldn't find information about the state of the property after 2009.

However, Salminen's artistic legacy, including a lot of collages, has been donated to the Kokkola ITE museum.

Salminen in relation with art environments

In 2015 this museum had an exposition about some Finnish outsider artists who abundantly decorated their home, among whom Ilmari Salminen. The picture below shows how he was featured.

picture by Minna Haveri

Documentation

* Article on website ITE-taide

* A video on YouTube (uploaded November 2010, part of a film by Erkki Pirtola on Finnish outsider artists) has a portrait of Ilmari Salminen which starts at 1'52", Finnish spoken, some international and interplanetary communications are in English

first published October 2009, last revised August 2019

Ilmari Salminen

Finland Militäru Museum

Petäjävesi, Central Finland, Western and Central Finland 
closed for visits