Waiting for the Witch Doctor

Amsterdam-based counterculture protagonist Robert Jasper Grootveld (1932–2009) was a prophetic artist who addressed politically and socially charged issues related to consumerism, race and gender. Grootveld is known for his role in the happenings near the sculpture Het Lieverdje on the Amsterdam Spui. But he is also the missing link among the sea of canonical figures of the time, from Provo anarchists Roel van Duijn and Luud Schimmelpennink to cabaret performer Wim Sonneveld, painter Constant Nieuwenhuys and writer Simon Vinkenoog, to name but a few.

Grootveld’s Scrapbook, an assemblage of photographs and newspaper clippings, is a raw and visual ego document that offers a glimpse into life in the Amsterdam counterculture in the early 1960s. In Waiting for the Witch Doctor, Janna Schoenberger presents the Scrapbook as the key to the unexpected dimensions of the idiosyncratic and activist oeuvre of a man whose prophecies about the ‘addicted consumers of tomorrow’ were spot on some sixty years ago.