Ein Streitbarer Visionär

The article describes Constant Nieuwenhuys as a fiercely independent artist whose career moved from revolutionary postwar painting to utopian urban planning and back to politically charged figurative art.

From COBRA to artistic independence

Constant co-founded the COBRA group in 1948, which rejected the polished, market-friendly art of its day. Its artists embraced spontaneity, childlike drawing, and raw imagery as a challenge to bourgeois taste and postwar conformity. Unlike many peers, Constant made the violence of his time explicit in works about war, air raids, and concentration camps.

When COBRA dissolved in 1951 and the Cobra works became commercially successful, Constant distrusted the art market and chose a different path. He remained committed to art as a form of cultural and social opposition rather than a fashionable product.

New Babylon: a vision of a society beyond work

From 1958, Constant largely stopped painting to develop New Babylon, a ten-year project of models and plans for a future city. It imagined a highly automated society in which work would diminish and people, as Homo ludens—the playing human—could live creatively, freely, and collectively.

The project opposed functionalist urban planning and treated the city as an open environment for imagination, movement, and encounter. The article contrasts this ideal with the prefabricated social housing built near his Amsterdam studio: a restrictive “housing cage” rather than a space of freedom.

A return to painting, without surrendering his critique

By the 1980s, Constant painted slowly and meticulously, producing only three large works in two years. His newer paintings are figurative and sometimes politically direct, yet filtered through memory, layered color, and ambiguous, often faceless figures. In The Interrogation, inspired by a report of torture in El Salvador, the victim has no face and is led toward death, while the interrogators are given dog-like snouts.

He deliberately used traditional craft, tonal color, and elaborate frames to make paintings meant to endure rather than serve short-lived trends. Constant attacked the commercialization of “innovation,” anti-art, and avant-garde branding, arguing that art had become driven by promotion, speculation, and rapid consumption.

Overall, the article presents Constant not as an artist who abandoned radicalism, but as one who redirected it: from COBRA’s rebellious painting, through the social utopia of New Babylon, to durable paintings that resist both political indifference and the art market’s fashions.