Op weg naar New Babylon

Exhibition curated by Ton Geerts at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, March 29 till June 9, 2003.

Exhibition photo's by Rick Klein Gotink.

Op weg naar New Babylon
Between 1952 and 1960, Constant Nieuwenhuys (Amsterdam 1920) worked on a series of works that showed a great interest in architecture and the urban environment. After the experimental group Cobra disbanded in 1951, painting faded further into the background for him.
Constant believes that the experimental character of the group has been lost and that its own style, its own aesthetic, has emerged. It results in a rigorous artistic turn for the artist. In the years 1952/53 he experiments with abstract forms that no longer have anything to do with Cobra. In the years that followed, his interest in architecture increased and he worked on spatial constructions, models, drawings and plans that were eventually presented around 1960 under the title New Babylon.

In the period between Cobra and New Babylon, a number of important artistic developments occurred in Constant's work, which determined his vision of the modern city of the future and the role of its residents in it. The works between 1952 and 1960 already exude the atmosphere of his New Babylon project. These are often spatial works in which Constant experiments with new shapes and materials. The influences he incorporates have their origins in contacts with new views on architecture and society. As in the Cobra period, Constant thus rebels against existing artistic conventions.

Cobra

In 1948, the painters Karel Appel (1921), Constant, Corneille (1922), Eugène Brands (1913) and Lucebert (1924-1994) formed the Experimental Group Holland, which in the same year grew into the international movement COBRA (Copenhagen, Brussels). , Amsterdam).
Cobra considers activating the urge to create as the main task of art. They want to stimulate spontaneity and creativity. COBRA's ideas about human creativity, which emerges from the subconscious in fantasy and dream images, are in line with the Surrealists, who in the 1920s were already experimenting with so-called automatism (free drawing, controlled as little as possible). through the mind). Unlike the pre-war expressionists who often expressed their feelings inspired by visible reality, Cobra painters drew more from a fantasy world. Children's drawings, art by the mentally ill and primitive art are, in addition to folk tales and legends, the most important sources of inspiration.
Constant is the driving force in the creation of the Experimental Group Holland and Cobra. He manifests himself not only as a painter but also as a theorist. In the first issue of Reflex, the group's magazine, he expresses the principles of the new artistic ideal of the Cobra movement. Constant, whose ideas are influenced by Marxism, advocates a future society in which art is not only made for the people, but especially by the people. In the post-war years he resisted all existing (aesthetic) conventions. In his paintings one does not find uncomplicated and cheerful figures, as in Appel's work, but fearful aggressive creatures. He emphasizes that the traditional ideal of beauty must be put aside.
The break with the Cobra group caused an artistic turn in Constant's work. Painting fades further into the background to make way for a number of experiments in which the relationship between space and color is central.

Spatial Colorism

At that time he shared his interest in the relationship between space and color with the architect Aldo van Eyck, who introduced him to architecture. With Van Eyck he developed a spatial color experiment that was presented in 1952 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam under the title 'For a spatial colorism'. It is a plea for an active - not functional or decorative - role of color in architecture, for a combination of form and color as a unity, in order to achieve a new experience of space. Through the spatial and emotional qualities of color, they want to make architecture more exciting and evocative in order to stimulate human creativity.

A good example of this is the work 'Series of six colored surfaces' (Gemeentemuseum Den Haag collection) from 1953. The seemingly autonomous experiments with color surfaces are in fact studies for a series of works in which the spatial application of color is central.
The interest in the relationship between space and color is gradually shifting to an interest in space itself: architecture and the urban environment in particular. In particular, the wastelands left behind by the violence of war and his wanderings through major cities such as London and Paris strengthen his interest in new architecture and urban planning. Special attention is paid to places where people come together: squares, cafes and streets. According to Constant, social life is not only influenced by the shapes of blocks or buildings, but precisely by social spaces.
Constant experiments with architectural forms from a number of playful, mobile models made of plexiglass, steel wire and aluminum that he made around 1953. It is precisely these modern materials that are important because he believes that they are not being used optimally. The playful, round and oval shapes of these models are a response to the strict horizontal and vertical elements in the architecture of that time. He wants to indicate how a much more varied spatial environment was possible than was achieved in current functional architecture. In his view, the current architecture at that time was too mind-numbing.

International contacts

Asger Jorn, as a Constant former member of the Cobra Group, is also intensively involved with architecture. Jorn had created a movement 'Pour un Bauhaus imaginiste' in 1953 and brought Constant into contact not only with this but also with 'l'Internationale Lettriste' by the Frenchman Guy Debord. In 1956, both movements merged into 'l'Internationale situationniste', which Constant also joined. It is essential that Constant joins movements that consider it of great importance in changing the social structure. Man must first be freed from his subjection to the productive economic process, only then can man truly begin to live creatively. Also important is the notion that increasing automation in the 1950s could benefit humans. There would be much more free time in which people could become creative. In that sense, the models and spatial constructions that Constant made at that time are visual models of a new world that contribute to the process of awareness. That process can then lead to a social revolution in the future.

The model 'Design for a gypsy camp in Alba' from 1956 is the result of the evolving insight that, in order to lead a meaningful and creative existence, man must be freed from his mind-numbing environment and lead a nomadic existence. That model is an important phase on the road to New Babylon:

Those gypsies who visit the Piedmontese town of Alba during their wanderings have for many years been in the habit of setting up their camps under the canopy of the cattle market, which is only used on Saturdays. There they built fires, there they hung tent canvases from the rafters to shelter or isolate themselves, there they used crates and planks left behind on the market to set up makeshift spaces for themselves. The traces left by their presence on the market site, the need to have the market place cleaned by the municipality after their departure, prompted the city council of Alba to ban the Zingari from camping on this square. From that moment on, for their stay in the city, they had to rely on a strip of grassland along the bank of the small river that flows through Alba, the Tanaro, a strip that could hardly be imagined as more miserable. In December 1956 I visited them there in the company of the painter Pinot Gallizio, to whom this land belonged and who had ceded it to the gypsies. It was muddy, bleak and dreary. Using planks and petrol cans, the space between some caravans had been made into a secluded whole, a 'gypsy town'.
On that same day, my plan for a permanent gypsy camp for Alba was born, a design that would become the first step in the series of models for New Babylon, where a collective shelter is built with mobile elements under a roof, temporarily, but always again, and different, rebuilt, a nomadic camp on a global scale.

Other models are also models for the designs of the new city in the making. By experimenting with more dynamic constructions, for example in the 'Egg-shaped construction' from 1957 (Rijksmuseum Twenthe), Constant shows that the city of the future can take a creative and ever-changing shape. The construction 'Fleur mécanique' (Rijksmuseum Twenthe) dates from 1956, but took on a more mobile form in 1959. It is initially presented under the title 'Spaceship' and will later be given a concrete base. Despite the use of materials such as copper, iron and concrete, the 'mechanical flower' (the statue has been hidden in the artist's garden for years) points to a future in which life itself, according to Constant, becomes poetic.
The models are never static, they are not concrete architectural models, but, as people in New Babylon will be, always in motion and subject to change.

In this vision of the future, man leads a nomadic existence and is therefore free to move from place to place. Constant then borrows the idea of ​​the human being at play, homo ludens, from the cultural historian Johan Huizinga, after Huizinga's 1923 book of the same name.
Yet the collaboration with the 'International Situationist' does not last. A collaborative creative activity, which Constant expects from this organization, does not materialize. From that time on, he worked alone on the realization of New Babylon, a city that ultimately assumed great proportions in Constant's imagination and in countless models, constructions, plans and drawings.

New Babylon

New Babylon is made up of a number of sectors (20-50 ha), which are located approximately 16 meters above the ground, connect to each other, continue in all directions and open up the landscape; one total world city is created that relaxes the earth like a net. The ground remains free for fast traffic and agriculture, nature and historical monuments; the roofs of the sectors serve as airports and promenades. All sectors consist of several floors: the areas of the sectors can be changed by mobile elements according to the needs of the users; in addition, each sector has one or more permanent residential hotels and public buildings. Except for the residential hotels, the indoor spaces are intended for collective use and have no other function than to be an 'artistic medium'. 'New Babylon' is one immense labyrinth. Every space is temporary, nothing is recognized, everything is discovery, everything changes, nothing can serve as orientation. This psychologically creates a space that is many times larger than the actual space.'
The rooms have their own atmospheres, which can be determined, among other things, by climatology. 'A wide variety of resources, both technical and natural, can play a role in the creation of atmospheres. One crosses cool and dark spaces, warm, noisy, colorful, brightly lit, gloomy, empty, suffocating spaces, wet windy spaces under the open sky, obscure corridors and alleys, perhaps a cave of glass, a wandering garden, a pond, a wind tunnel, but also spaces for cinematographic games, for radiophonic games, for psychological games, scientific games and erotic games, and spaces for isolation and tranquility.'

The architectural models show a fantastic world, made of metal and plastic. They suggest a technical environment that is poeticized and no longer oppressive. Fantastic atmospheres are created full of variety and surprises. Mysterious, closed and transparent skeletal constructions contrast with each other and add tension to the overall picture. A labyrinth is created that continually produces new discoveries. Everything is fermenting and moving. The sculptures that preceded New Babylon have grown into a complex world with new spatial relationships. He suggests a new form of life for the coming man without work who does not have to die of boredom but can give meaning to his existence more intensively than ever before in an environment that creates this.

Constant continued to work on the elaborations of his utopian city until 1974, before finally dedicating himself entirely to painting again, realizing that New Babylon had become an impossibility.