Constant Nieuwenhuys biographies

Constant Nieuwenhuys, better known as Constant, was a Dutch painter and sculptor among the founders of the Cobra group. He was born in Amsterdam on July 21, 1920. From a young age, Constant showed great talent in drawing and music. At just sixteen, he painted his first artwork, De Emmaüsgangers, which depicts the revelation of Jesus to two of his followers at Emmaus. Unable to purchase drawing materials, Constant executed the artwork on a jute sugar bag with pigments he had bought from a painter. After a year of studies at the School of Arts and Crafts, from 1939 to 1941, Constant attended the State Academy of Fine Arts. From 1941 to 1943, he lived and worked in Bergen until the city was evacuated by the Germans, forcing Constant and his family to return to Amsterdam. During this period, he led a clandestine life to escape the Nazi occupation. After the war, he freely resumed his artistic activity, beginning to experiment with multiple techniques.
In 1946, he went to Paris for the first time, where he met the young Danish painter Asger Jorn, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. In July 1948, Constant, along with Corneille, Karel Appel, and his brother Jan Nieuwenhuys, founded the magazine Reflex, in which he emphasized the importance of artistic research even more than the artwork itself. Also in 1948, on the terrace of the Notre Dame café in Paris, the founders of the Reflex magazine were joined by Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret from Belgium and Asger Jorn from Denmark to form the CoBrA group, a name coined by Dotremont and derived from the first letters of their hometowns: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The members of the group opposed aesthetics in painting and bourgeois art in general. The group exhibited in two major collective exhibitions: one in Amsterdam in 1949 and one in Liège in 1951, during which the group disbanded.
Returning to Amsterdam in the summer of 1952, Constant developed an interest in spatial architecture and three-dimensional works. In the same year, he received a scholarship from the Arts Council of Great Britain to study in London for three months. Back in Amsterdam, he worked on the conception of a utopian city: New Babylon, a condition of an "other" culture founded on the possibilities of creating in freedom. During the same period, Constant and Asger Jorn founded the Situationist International, a movement that brought together the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the Lettrist International.
In 1969, Constant returned to painting, watercolor, and graphics by applying the technique of colorism. Following this technique, the artist does not use charcoal or pencil sketches but applies the color directly onto the canvas with a brush, creating soft transitions instead of sharp outlines. The most important characteristic of this technique is the way light is expressed in the painting by integrating it into the color.
Constant passed away in Amsterdam on August 1, 2005.