Jan Yoors
1922 - 1977
Jan Yoors was born in Antwerp, Belgium to a cultured, liberal family of artists. At the age of twelve he ran off with a Gypsy tribe and lived with the kumpania on and off for the next ten years. (His memoir of this period, “The Gypsies”, was published in 1965 and remains a seminal work on the subject). During World War II, Yoors worked with the Allies to help the Gypsies who were being systematically exterminated. Jan Yoors captured the modern spirit of the 1960s and 70s in his tapestry designs in the same way that the Abstract Expressionists were able to express it through their paintings. Jan Yoors work was featured in “Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Art Institute of Chicago. A major Yoors retrospective was held at the FelixArt Museum in Brussels, Belgium in November 2012. His tapestries have received coverage in the New York Times, Modern Magazine and Metropolis Magazine. Most recently Architectural Digest (June 2014) published a feature on a Nantucket home with an important collection of Yoors art work.
Jan Yoors Art
Jan Yoors Art
