The flamboyant Nola Hatterman was born in Amsterdam into a privileged white colonial family in 1899.[1] Her father worked as an accountant for a company importing goods from the Dutch East Indies. When in the 1930s immigrants from the former colonies entered the society, they became fashionable painter’s models. Nola would never look back: she propagated a black beauty ideal, fought against racism and supported young Surinamese students in Amsterdam. She shared their commitment to independence. In 1953, she emigrated to Suriname. As the director of the School of Fine Arts in Paramaribo, she left her mark on the local art scene.

An early feminist, Hatterman started out as an actress: she believed women were equal to men on stage. Between theater rehearsals she exhibited her first drawing with De Onafhankelijken at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1919. Six years later, she abandoned the theater to become a fulltime artist. Hatterman never attended art school; her first teacher was the Italian painter Vittorio Schiavon (1861-1918) who taught her fine Italian watercolor technique.

Hatterman was certainly not unique in portraying the colored overseas migrants, but her friendship and commitment to their plight was. Her home at Falckstraat was welcoming to Surinamese tenants. In 1931, Hatterman married Jewish theater director Maup de Vries. Keenly aware of the developments in Germany, Hatterman joined the protest against the curtailment of free art. With her drawings, Hatterman criticized Hitler’s racial doctrine of the Aryan ideal of beauty and gender: white, blond and blue-eyed Aryan race and the mother’s role given to women. When her marriage ended, Hatterman engaged with a communist resistance fighter. During the Second World War, she refused to register with the German-controlled Kultuurkamer and no longer could exhibit.

After the war, a new influx of Surinamese men arrived in The Netherlands to study. In postwar art movements, African culture was rediscovered as painter’s exotic object. Nola rejected this exoticism: black people were part of her life. In 1953, she left for Suriname by boat. There, she advocated for the abandonment of the European model, in favor of focusing on developing authentic national art. As a white woman, Hatterman received criticism, shocking her to her core. She moved away from the capital to the heartland of Suriname, where she finished her epic series on slavery and resistance, painting the Surinamese heroes who revolted against colonial enslavement. In 1984, Hatterman was killed in a car accident on her way to a group exhibition in Paramaribo.

Hatterman’s strong feminist views shaped her response to the subordination of women. In this subjugated position she felt kinship with other oppressed groups: laborers, Jews, new immigrants, and the colonized. After Suriname’s independence in 1975, her position as a foreign Dutch white woman led to friction. Only recently has her role as an important Dutch artist been reclaimed while it remains difficult to reconstruct her entire oeuvre. Working outside of The Netherlands contributed to Hatterman being an overlooked participant of the New Objectivity movement.