THE HAGUE.- The private collection of Hans van Manen, the celebrated Dutch choreographer whose spare, psychologically charged ballets influenced generations of dancers, will come to auction at Venduehuis der Notarissen in The Hague on October 14. Extending across more than 80 lots, the group offers an unusually intimate view of Van Manen not only as a choreographer, but as a photographer, collector and participant in the postwar European art world.
Presented as the Hans van Manen Estate within Venduehuis’s Post-War & Contemporary Art sale, the collection moves freely between photography, Pop Art, geometric abstraction and works closely connected to Van Manen’s theatrical career. It includes photographs made by Van Manen himself, portraits of him by other artists, works by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, and a substantial group of geometric and constructivist pieces by artists including Richard Paul Lohse, Bob Bonies, Ad Dekkers and Peter Struycken.
Van Manen, who lived from 1932 to 2025, created more than 150 ballets performed by over 100 companies worldwide. The catalogue describes an artist whose approach to dance was based on clarity, musicality and an acute understanding of human relationships, eroticism and equality. Those same qualities—economy, structure and attention to the body—can also be felt throughout the collection.
Photography occupies a particularly personal place in the group. Before and alongside his international career in dance, Van Manen developed a serious photographic practice, frequently turning his camera toward dancers, artists and friends. One of the most substantial lots is a group of 14 gelatin silver prints featuring figures including Albert Jan van der Stel, Keso Dekker, Jan Baart, Henk van Dijk, Rob van Woerkom, Pauline Danils, Guilherme Botelho, Marcia Hayde and others. Estimated at €4,000-€6,000, the photographs were shown in the traveling exhibition Dance Has Many Faces, including presentations at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
Individual photographs offer an equally revealing record of Van Manen’s circle. Among them are portraits of fashion designer Thierry Mugler, dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, photographer Paul Blanca, Vinoodh Matadin and numerous dancers who passed through Van Manen’s creative world. Several appeared in the 1986 publication Hans van Manen, Portrait.
Perhaps the most personal photograph in the sale is In Between (Self-Portrait 1986), estimated at €500-€800. Rather than offering a conventional likeness, Van Manen turns the camera toward the body with the same economy and visual tension that characterized his choreography. The photograph underscores how closely his photographic thinking was tied to questions of pose, physical presence and the expressive possibilities of the human figure.
The collection also records Van Manen from the other side of the camera. A large c-print portrait by Erwin Olaf opens the estate section, showing the choreographer formally dressed against a dark background. The work, measuring 100 by 105 centimeters, carries an estimate of €600-€800. Olaf is represented elsewhere by Alandus from his 1990 Blacks series, Roy from Paradise and In Memoriam Robert Mapplethorpe from the 1989 Squares series.
Another striking image of Van Manen comes not through photography but painting. Jrg Immendorff’s 1995 Portrait of Hans van Manen, estimated at €6,000-€8,000, transforms the choreographer into a densely symbolic figure surrounded by vivid red tulips and theatrical imagery. At 125 by 100 centimeters, it is among the largest and most visually commanding works in the estate.
Van Manen’s interest in American Pop Art is represented by two 1965 works by Roy Lichtenstein. Moonscape, a silkscreen printed on blue Rowlux, is estimated at €10,000-€15,000, making it one of the higher-valued works in the collection. Its synthetic, reflective blue surface is crossed by Lichtenstein’s characteristic Benday dots and simplified landscape forms.
Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke, also from 1965, carries an estimate of €6,000-€8,000. Published by Leo Castelli Gallery and printed by Chiron Press in New York, the work converts the spontaneous gesture associated with Abstract Expressionism into a crisp Pop image—an ironic transformation of painterly movement into something controlled and reproducible.
Andy Warhol appears with two works. Rain and Flowers (Detail of construction), a three-dimensional lenticular photograph published in connection with Osaka Expo ’70, is estimated at €2,000-€3,000. The same estimate is attached to SAS Passenger Ticket, a 1968 silkscreen published by Moderna Museet in Stockholm, in which an airline ticket becomes the support for Warhol’s familiar flower imagery.
Yet Pop Art represents only one side of Van Manen’s collecting interests. A recurring attraction to order, repetition and geometric structure runs through the estate. Richard Paul Lohse’s 1967 silkscreen N C II-I bears a particularly personal connection: it is dedicated “Fr Hans van Manen” and dated October 13, 1968. Works by Franois Morellet, Peter Struycken, Victor Vasarely, Jess Rafael Soto and Gnther Uecker extend that interest in systems, optical effects and carefully controlled visual relationships.
One of the strongest examples is Ad Dekkers’ Relif met halve cirkel (Relief with Half Circle) from 1967. The white painted-polyester relief, measuring 90 centimeters in diameter and estimated at €8,000-€12,000, reduces image-making to a subtle interplay of circle, horizontal division, light and shadow. Another Dekkers work, Verschoven kwadraten (Shifted Squares) of 1966, is estimated at €1,500-€2,000.
Bob Bonies’ large three-part untitled painting from 1968, measuring an overall 200 by 250 centimeters, provides another major statement of geometric abstraction and is estimated at €3,000-€5,000. The work was included in a 1986 retrospective at the Wilhelm-Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen.
The relationship between Van Manen’s collecting and his stage work becomes explicit in several objects. A photograph by Jean-Paul Vroom records the image created for the stage backdrop of Van Manen’s Twilight in 1972 and bears a personal dedication to the choreographer. Another group by Vroom relates directly to productions including Mutations, Grosse Fuge and Repetition Opus Lematre. Co Westerik’s 1964 design for the stage backdrop of Opus Twaalf similarly connects the visual art on Van Manen’s walls with the world he constructed in the theater.
There are also reminders of the international avant-garde surrounding dance during these decades. Frank Stella’s colorful poster for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s 1968 Latin American tour appears alongside works by Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner, Constant, Christo, Richard Hamilton and Robert Morris.
Seen together, the estate feels less like a collection assembled according to art-market categories than the visual environment of a working artist. Personal gifts sit beside editions by canonical Pop artists; photographs of dancers coexist with rigorous geometric abstraction; portraits of Van Manen appear next to images he made himself.
That mixture makes the sale particularly revealing. Van Manen’s choreography was famous for stripping movement of unnecessary decoration while heightening the tensions between bodies in space. His collection suggests that the same eye operated away from the stage: an attraction to structure, gesture, physical presence, rhythm and the expressive force that can emerge from relatively simple means.
The auction is online only and closes on Wednesday, October 14, beginning at 7 p.m. Viewing will take place at Venduehuis Auctioneers, Nobelstraat 5 in The Hague, from October 8 through 11, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. PWCA_okt26_bladerbaar (1)
