“I keep finding new stuff all the time, stuff I had no idea existed: sketches and photographs, but also notes, false passports, letters he wrote to his parents when he was traveling with the gypsies...” Kore Yoors trails off. The son of Belgian sculptor, photographer, weaver, former Nazi prisoner, part-time gypsy, and lifelong bohemian Jan Yoors, is showing us around his apartment in the West Village. The space is equal parts dwelling, archive, and living museum. Kore and his mother, Marianne Yoors, live there among the relics of their deceased husband and father—quite possibly the most fascinating artist you’ve never heard of.
Kore and Marianne are fascinating artists, too. Marianne, a sprightly and affable 88-year-old, is a weaver and ceramicist, while Kore, a burly man with an impressively bushy beard and disarming smile, is a painter. Over the last couple of years, though, he’s spent most of his energy gaining exposure for his father’s work, and archiving all of his art and documents. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the unconventional Yoors family—mothered not only by Marianne, but also her best friend, Annebert—rubbed shoulders with the likes of Marc Chagall, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sam Cooke, and Yoko Ono (once a model for Jan). Yet, Marianne and Kore say, he’s always been something of an outsider in the artworld, never getting the recognition he deserves.
“I guess that’s the gypsy in him,” Kore ventures, sitting under Mist, an abstract, monumental tapestry, at a wooden table made out of the loom they once used to weave. The gypsies are where Jan Yoors’ story starts. Born in Antwerp in 1922 to a family of liberal, Belgian artists, he decided to run off with a wandering band of gypsies at the ripe age of 12. For ten years, on and off, he would travel along with their kumpania, from country to country. “He once said that if his parents would have resisted, he’d probably still be living with them,” Kore explains. A range of photographs from this period—beautiful black-and-white portraits of the Romani in traditional clothing, of an ethereal, timeless quality—adorn the bookshelves. “They gave him some guidance, but mainly just told him to go along for the ride and to observe. That’s why we have all these incredible pictures he took during that period. I mean, which 12-year-old would have thought of bringing a camera along at that time?”
This idyllic adventure was interrupted by the horrors of World War II. In order to help his gypsy family, Jan joined the Resistance in Paris—only to be hunted down, imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced to death by the Gestapo. Miraculously, he made it out alive. These early episodes—beautifully documented in his books The Gypsies and Crossing—continued to shape his life and career in myriad ways. “I think his experience with the war and the gypsies made him incredibly careful about maintaining his freedom,” Kore says. “He wanted to be able to do what he wanted.”
Doing what he wanted meant moving to London, where he studied international law and created sculptures between classes. “He wanted to be a diplomat. He really believed in world peace and the concept of the United Nations,” Kore explains. “But eventually, he figured he could do more good in the world with his art than with diplomacy.” Doing what he wanted also meant living in a polyamorous household—with his wife, Annebert and her best childhood friend, Marianne. (“It was the most normal thing in the world,” Marianne says. “We
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In The West Village, A Secret Museum Of Artist And Gypsy Traveler Jan Yoors
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