Postwar Culture

Constant Nieuwenhuys was born July 21, 1920 in Amsterdam. As a young child, he showed great talent in drawing, and was also incredibly musical, singing, playing guitar, violin, and cimbalon. He attended the school of applied arts and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he gleaned his first formal training in craftsmanship, which he would later draw on to develop the New Babylon models.

In 1946 he moved to Paris, where he met the young Danish artist Asger Jorn. Their friendship formed the basis of CoBrA  group, which they founded together in 1948. That same year, Constant and Karel Appel established Reflex, Nederlands Experimentele Groep. In the summer of 1956, Jorn invited Constant to Alba, Italy, for a symposium on the topic of Industry and the Fine Arts, which was organized by the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. At this congress, Constant presented a lecture ("Demain la poésie logera la vie") in which he proposed a free architecture which could stimulate rather than restrict creativity. Later that year, Constant visited Guy Debord in Alba, and while their conversations were productive, Constant declined to join the Situationist International when it was formed in 1957 under the auspices of Debord and Jorn by bringing together several avantgarde groups, including the Imaginist Bauhaus and Lettrist International. Constant was initially concerned about the equilibrium between art and politics and individuality and collective practice in the group, but after the Situationist International explicitly took up the flag of unitary urbanism, as defined by Constant and Debord, Constant became a member. He wrote several theoretical articles for the group's journal and staged events at museums in Paris and Amsterdam. It was during this time that he began to conceive of his master project, the utopian New Babylon, which combined his skills as a painter and sculptor with a concern for architecture and urban life. While he left the Situationists in 1960 after just two years, he continued to develop New Babylon until 1969, and in 2002, he exhibited the project at documenta 11.

Constant exhibited frequently at Galerie van de Loo, as did others in his circles, including Gruppe SPUR, the German continent of the Situationist International. Constant has also represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale, and in 1986 the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn presented a retrospective of his work. During the final months of his life, Thomas Doebele and Maarten Schmidt made a documentary entitled Constant, Avant Le Départ, which features rare footage of the artist working on what would be his last oil painting, Le Piège (The Trap). He died in Utrecht in 2005.