Hans van Norden - Large caricatured watercolor "depression" painted in 1986, signed

• Van Norden was a son of artist Willem van Norden and Bets Hakkert. The family lived in Gouda from 1923, where father was given artistic leadership of the Goedewaagen factory. In 1934 Hans moved from Gouda to Amsterdam. He was trained at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten as a student of, among others, Johannes Hendricus Jurres and Heinrich Campendonk. He made paintings, mosaics and murals and also worked with ceramics, glass and textiles. He made notes and sketches along the way, and he did the painting in his studio. In addition to being an artist, he was a teacher at the Academy for the Training of Drawing Teachers in Tilburg.

Van Norden was active in several areas. In 1945 he founded the Scapino Ballet with Hans Snoek and Nicolaas Wijnberg. For more than twenty years he designed sets and costumes for, among others, the Scapino Ballet, the Rotterdams Toneel and De Nederlandsche Opera. With Wijnberg and Theo Kurpershoek he was one of the founders of the painting group De Realisten (1948), which opposed abstraction and wanted to develop expressive figurative art. Artists such as Kees Andrea and Lex Horn joined the group. In 1952, Horn became the first chairman and Van Norden secretary of the Association of Practitioners of the Monumental Arts. Together with Wijnberg, Van Norden was responsible for designing the literary magazine Tirade, which started in 1957. Van Norden was also involved with Kabinet Floret (1959-1966), an art gallery on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam, where Harry op de Laak, Van Norden and Wijnberg were the artistic directors.
Van Norden died in 2011, at the age of 95.