Constant Dutch, 1920-2005

Constant (Amsterdam, 1920 - Utrecht, 2005. Born Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys) studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam before co-founding the Experimentele Groep Holland in July 1948 together with Corneille and Karel Appel. That same year, on 8 November in Paris, the group merged with like-minded artists from Belgium and Denmark to form CoBrA, named after the members' home cities of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The movement's energy crystallised in the landmark exhibition International Experimental Art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1949. Through his prolific theoretical writings on the relationship between art, culture, and society, Constant became recognised as the movement's leading intellectual voice. The group disbanded following an exhibition in Liège in November 1951, though its spirit continued to resonate among artists well into the end of the century.

After his CoBrA period, Constant turned his attention to the synthesis of the arts. Between 1957 and 1960 he was a prominent member of the Situationist International (SI), the radical avant-garde movement founded by Guy Debord, for whose journal he contributed several theoretical texts.

It was during this period that his most ambitious project took shape. New Babylon - developed between 1956 and 1974 - is a visionary design for a future city encompassing the entire world, realised through maquettes, constructions, sculptures, geographic maps, paintings, and drawings. The project imagines a society freed from labour and organised around creative play, structured as a planetary network of interconnected sectors through which homo ludens - man the player, man the creator - moves freely. It is not a blueprint to be replicated, Constant insisted, but an illustration of a possible way of life. Key works from this period include Ode à l'Odéon (1969), painted in response to the Paris student uprising, and the monumental series of sector maps and spatial constructions now held largely by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. New Babylon continues to be regarded as a seminal reference in architectural thinking to this day.

Returning to painting after 1969, Constant pursued sustained experiments in the creation of space and depth through colour - a technique known as colorism, with roots in the work of Titian, Delacroix, and Cézanne. In his later years his canvases increasingly engaged with urgent political realities, including the Vietnam War, African famine, and the Kosovo conflict, demonstrating that his commitment to art as a form of social reflection never diminished.

Selected Public Collections

Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague | Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam | Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam | CoBrA Museum, Amstelveen | Centre Pompidou, Paris | Tate Modern, London | MoMA, New York | MACBA, Barcelona