‘Most arrested Dutchman’ gets statue
Leader of counter-culture movement to be remembered
By Massimo Benvegnù
A procession of boats on the Amstel river at the end of February was the last performance of Robert Jasper Grootveld. Dubbed ‘the man who put Amsterdam on the map’ by the media, Grootveld passed away at the age of 76. A shipbuilder by trade, he’s mostly remembered for being one of the fathers of the early 1960s counter-culture movement known as ‘Provos’ (short for ‘provocation’). Bashing the bourgeois conformism of the time and the repression of the local police, the Provos would gather every Saturday in the central Spui square, by a small statue of a child called ‘Het Lieverdje’, and most of the time would end up being arrested for laying flowers on the statue or pretending to smoke marijuana. This violence against non-violent ‘happenings’ was the starting point towards Amsterdam’s current liberal policy. Grootveld was probably the most arrested man in the Netherlands, but also “the first Dutch philosopher of the spoken word since Erasmus and Spinoza,” as artist Max Reneman said. Now the idea is to erect a statue of him in the Spui square, possibly right next to Het Lieverdje, even though Grootveld himself might have questioned such an official recognition of his legacy.
