The Dutch cartoonist Willem, 83, who marked generations for his black and white drawings in the Liberation newspaper, will receive the Grand Prix of the Academy of Fine Arts tonight on Wednesday, March 5.
It will be given under the dome of the Palais of the Institut de France by the press designer and author of comics Catherine Meurisse, member of the Recording and Drawing section of the Academy.
This distinction is part of the “Grands Prix of the Academy of Fine Arts” created in 2023 and with 30,000 euros.
“Kill shit”
Born on April 2, 1941 in Ermelo, 70 km east of Amsterdam, Bernhard Willem Holtrop was part in the 1960s of the Dutch articometic movement movement. He feels against censorship and founded a satirical newspaper that is seized after the publication of a drawing that represents Queen Juliana as a prostitute.
Cultivated and polyglot, also speak French, German, English and Norwegian, had left Libé in 2021 after 40 years in this newspaper, giving way to Coco Designer, who came from Charlie Hebdo.
The antimilitarist, anticlerical, Willem had continued collaborating for Charlie Hebdo and chewing the absurd and abject, he said, “kills shit.” He landed in France in 1968, in a Paris Hiraring, tied with Topor and Siné.
He worked for the enraged and then Hara-Kiri, and was administered in 1976 surprise, ephemeral comic. The adventure ends from the fifth number after the prohibition of the sale to minors pronounced by the Government.
Look
As of 1981, he published a daily chip in Liberation, where he gave free rein to his acute look in the world, attacking politics and sex in sometimes violent images. It also joined, at the same time, the new Formula team of Charlie Hebdo was launched in 1992.
Removed in the 2010 decade in Brittany on the island of Groix, outside Lorient, stops participating in editorial conferences. This is what saved him, on January 7, 2015, of the jihadist attack in the siege of Charlie Hebdo, who decimated The Weekly’s writing.
When Libé left, at 80, Willem lamented that “the politically correct now slows down many people.” “When I started, censorship came from justice or state. Today comes from editors or friends. Now, moral lead is ‘good side'”.
Source: BFM TV
