Annie Christine Boumeester, who often sign her works by the only firstname Christine, was born in Batavia (today Djakarta – Indonesia) in 1904. Her family, originally from Holland had lived in the colonies for five generations. After her family lived few years in Sumatra, it turned over definitively to Holland in 1921 (The Hague).
Very young, the child lived with the passion of drawing. From 1922 to 1924, she studied to The Hague’s Beaux-Arts; she particularly learnt how there to engrave. She got the drawing professor diploma but she never taught. She spent few months in the south of France (Nice, 1925), then opened an atelier in Amsterdam where she worked under Reuter’s painter advices.
She discovered several countries, settled down in Texel island, stayed in Germany, and organized her first personal exhibition in Amsterdam year 1935 (Gallery Santee Landweer). This same year, Christine Boumeester settled down in Paris where she met, married and shared all her life long with Henri Goetz. She exposed in several Parisian galleries and her first one was organized in Paris, in 1937.
After a short fantastic art time, she began abstract compositions, probably influenced by Hans Hartung. She got a discreet but attracting character, and she struck up friendship with many artists: Hartung, Kandinsky, Schneider, Gonzalez, Vieira da Silva and Szenès, Breton, Eluard, Ubac, De Staël, Picabia, Picasso, Lam or Arp were friends. From 1939, Christine Boumeester was represented by the Gallery Jeanne Bucher.
With the war, she left with her husband for Carcassonne where they joined up the Belgian surrealist group (Ubac, Magritte, Scutenaire). The couple evolved in secret and worked for Resistance. They created, with Ubac and Dotremont, the review “La Main à Plume”. Shown to German as resistants, Goetz leave for Nice, thus joining De Staël, Picabia, Arp and Magnelli. Christine Boumeester encouraged De Staël to create abstract painting.
From Immediate post-war time to her death, she was exhibited forty times specially in Parisians Salons too. The artist illustrated many works, carried out tapestries and mural decorations, translated in French “Point Ligne et Surface” from Kandinsky (1962).
Naturalized French in 1949, Christine Boumeester died in 1971. Her art distinguished by its delicate ranges and major blacks, all in suggestion and modulation, collected before all the significant atmosphere of perceived realities.