Constant (Amsterdam, 1920, 2005)
Constant Anton Nieuwenhuijs attended the Kunstnijverheidsschool and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam
successively, from 1939 to 1942. He met Asger Jorn in Paris in 1946.
After this meeting fantastic beasts and aggressive, frightening animal
and human figures began to appear in his paintings. Constant held his
first one-man exhibition in Amsterdam in 1947. In the following year he
was co-founder of the Dutch Experimental Group and also of CoBrA.
Constant
is the author of the "Manifesto" that appeared in the first number of
"Reflex" (the newsletter of the Experimental Group). Together with
Christian Dotremont he was the leading theoretician of CoBrA. In the
countless manifestos and articles that he wrote for the group he
examined the social role of the artist, calling for the liberation of
creativity and imagination at the service of a culture constantly
renewing itself. In the work that he produced during the CoBrA years we
see the same sort of figures derived from children's drawings as with
Karel Appel, in rough lines and deliberately clumsy forms.
In
1950 Constant settled in Paris, where he met Stephen Gilbert. In this
period he produced his "war paintings," filled by the remains of a
destroyed world in which helpless people stretch out their hands to
heaven. It was in the late 1950s that Constant developed his ideas
about the ideal city, "New Babylon," in which people freed from work,
"homo ludens," would be able to develop their creative abilities.
Constant took part in the 1956 conference "Mouvement pour un Bauhaus
Imaginiste," organised by Jorn, and in the following year he was one of
the co-founders of the "Situationist International."
From the
1970s onwards he concentrated more on painting, water colours and
drawings, with the work of the old masters forming an important source
of inspiration. Constant died in 2005 and will remembered as one of the
best post-war painters The Netherlands produced.