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Jan Mulder grew up in Maastricht, where his father was a businessman. When he retired in 1906, the family moved to Amsterdam. At first, Jan was attracted to music, but his father forbade him to develop it further. Jan therefore devoted himself to painting and initially did this secretly at a friend's house. Between 1910 and 1915 he attended vocational and art schools in Amsterdam and Haarlem and in the meantime kept in close contact with the music world. During the First World War he was mobilized from 1915 to 1918. He then worked as a theater decorator, interior designer and advertising artist and developed further as a painter. He had contacts with the Amsterdam avant-garde art scene, where he met Erich Wichmann, Laurens van Kuijck, Piet Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg, among others. In 1921 he undertook a trip to Cuba, Mexico and the United States. A year later he made his debut with his paintings in De Branding in Rotterdam. Between 1925 and 1931 he lived and worked in France, first in Paris, where he worked with Erich Wichmann on the Dutch pavilion of the "Exposition Internationale des Arts decoratifs" and later in the fishing village of Etaples-sur-Mer. He was a member and exhibited at "Les vrais Indépendents". Board posts Returning to Amsterdam, he became a board member of De Independents and chairman of the painters' association De Brug. With the latter group he exhibited annually at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1941 he refused to become a member of the German Chamber of Culture and was forced to resign. He begins to work underground in the artist resistance and as a result of this activity is interned in Vught and later in Dachau. In 1946/47 he received two consecutive grants from the Dutch-Swedish Van Gogh Committee for a stay in Sweden. This was the reason for him to settle permanently in Sweden in 1947, first in Strängnäs and from 1958 until his death in Eskilstuna. After moving to Sweden, he initially mainly made portraits, but later sought isolation in order to develop in a completely different field. He makes large canvases and watercolors that are totally abstract in the sense that they bear no relation to any observed reality. It was about the inner perception, which was expressed in a kind of trance. In the early 1980s, when his eyesight was failing rapidly, he discovered charcoal as a medium and was able to use it to further his creative powers. He did this until his death.
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