CONSTANT
Constant Nieuwenhuys, better known as Constant, was a painter and Dutch sculptor among the founders of the Cobra group. He was born in Amsterdam on July 21, 1920. From childhood, Constant showed great talent in drawing and music. At only sixteen years old, he painted his first artwork, De Emmaüsgangers, which depicts the revelation of Jesus to two of his followers in Emmaus. Unable to buy 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 ended, he freely resumed artistic activity beginning to experiment with multiple techniques.
In 1946 he went for the first time to Paris where he met the young Danish painter Asger Jorn with whom he formed a lasting friendship. In July 1948, Constant together with Corneille, Karel Appel and his brother Jan Nieuwenhuys founded the magazine Reflex in which he reaffirmed 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 Reflex 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 derived from the first letters of their hometowns: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The group members 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 dissolved.
Returning to Amsterdam in the summer of 1952, Constant developed an interest in spatial architecture and three-dimensional artworks. 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 based on the possibilities of creating freely. At the same time, 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 applying the technique of colorism. Following this technique, the artist does not use charcoal or pencil sketches but applies color directly on the canvas with the brush, building soft transitions instead of sharp outlines. The most important feature of this technique is the way light is expressed in the painting by integrating it into the color.
Constant died in Amsterdam on August 1, 2005.
