Stedelijk Museum Schiedam receives Constant studio legacy in long-term loan
The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam has received a substantial long-term loan consisting of 52 works from the legacy of Constant (Amsterdam 1920 – Amsterdam 2005). The loan consists of 17 paintings and 6 spatial constructions dating from 1952-1958, and 25 paintings and 4 works on paper dating from 1971 to 2005. All works have come from the Amsterdam studio in which Constant worked from 1964 onward and which was cleared with assistance from the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam at the beginning of this year. The long-term loan will be on display for the very first time in the exhibition entitled Constant. In het atelier (Constant. In the studio) which will run from 14 December 2008 to 22 March 2009. The exhibition will also witness the presentation of the book: Constant - De late periode. Tegen de stroom in naar essentie. Une peinture nouvelle (Constant – The late period. Against the stream toward the essence. Une peinture nouvelle) by the art citric Trudy Nieuwenhuys - Van der Horst, Constant's last wife. It is published by BnM Publishers, Nijmegen.

Constant
Constant (A. Nieuwenhuys) is one of the most important Dutch artists from the second half of the twentieth century. His oeuvre covers a period of more than sixty five years. It is multi-facetted in its manifestation and coherent in artistic and intellectual terms. His work is greatly appreciated internationally and is regarded as an important contribution to the development of post-war visual art, architecture and urban planning in Europe. He is represented by paintings, works on paper, and spatial objects in museums of modern art all over the world. His work is regularly shown in presentations of the museum collections of the Tate Modern in London, the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

In 1948, Constant, Karel Appel and Corneille were the frontrunners in the foundation of the Experimentele Groep in Holland. As such, Constant was also at the basis of the international CoBrA movement (1948-1951), a co-operation of Dutch, Belgian and Danish ‘experimental artists'. Emerging as one of the most prominent theorists of CoBrA, his socially engaged texts, largely inspired by Marx, belong to the classic art-theoretical writings of this period. As the secretary of the Experimentele Groep, Constant persuaded Willem Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, to make his museum available for a large-scale CoBrA exhibition that ultimately caused great commotion in 1949.

The works in the long-term loan
The loan comprises 17 paintings and 6 spatial constructions dating from the period 1952-1958. The paintings from the fifties belong to the least-known part of Constant's oeuvre. From 1952 onward, when he created woodcuts for the print folder Het uitzicht van de duif (The View of the Dove), the figuration in his work became increasingly strongly stylized. Irregular colour surfaces interlock, and in 1953 he eventually arrived at pure geometrical abstraction. This was when he made his first spatial constructions, originally consisting of rectangular surfaces of painted metal and plexiglas. However, he soon discovered the possibility of bending and distorting this relatively new material. In combination with curved wire, he produced whirling constructions, two of which have been acquired on long-term loan: the Nébuloses mécaniques (1958) and also the first models for New Babylon. With this work, Constant explored the spatial effects of colour, partly inspired in this pursuit by his contacts with architects such as Aldo van Eyck and Gerrit Rietveld with whom he co-operated by furnishing several of their architectonic designs with colour. This theme also receives a theoretical review in Constant's dissertation Voor een spatiaal colorisme (1953), in which he advocated a major role for painting in the built-up environment. He devoted the next fifteen years to the pursuit of a Synthesis of the Arts. The later painting, Adieu la P. (1962), clearly indicates that Constant then rejected the notion of autonomous painting.

When Constant was arranging his exhibition in the Dutch pavilion at the Biennale of Venice in 1966 and entered the Galleria dell'Accademia during a break, he was stunned by the Pietà by Titian (1570-1577). Inspired by the sublime colourism of Titian's masterpiece, Constant renewed his focus on painting during his later period (from 1969 to 2005). Initially, from 1969 onward, he painted labyrinthine spaces, consisting of lines, grid and coloured expanses, in an extension of the architecture of New Babylon. Examples of this in the loan collection include De stoel (The Chair, 1971) and Les touristes (1972). In the mid-seventies, Constant again attracted attention with paintings on the basis of complex literary and politically critical iconography, including Cyrano déclare son amour (1976), which is also part of the loan collection. After this, the coloured surfaces that strongly determine the space in the painting tended to vanish, to dissolve as it were in a space that is modulated purely by colour.

In the ‘late period' (1969-2005), Constant manifested himself as the critical artist that he had always been, averse to prevailing trends and established opinions, and with a sharp eye for distressing social questions. Although he regularly took his personal life and love for music and animals as themes for his paintings, topical issues were often the source of a succinct image. Examples of this in the loan collection are Rwanda (1994) and Les expulsés (1999), which displays war refugees from Kosovo on their mass flight to Albania. The painting L'exécution (1982) is also based on a dramatic event: the murder of IKON journalist Koos Koster and three Dutch colleagues who, on 17 March 1982, fell into an ambush set by the Salvadorian army. A highlight is L'insurrection/De Opstand (The Uprising, 1985) which is a universal representation of any uprising anywhere in the world.

A prominent work in the loan collection is the self-portrait from 1991, with an important alteration in 1994. Trudy van der Horst writes about this in the book that will be presented at the exhibition. Constant's self-portraits are an exceptional element in his oeuvre. His first self-portrait dates from 1942 and between 1974 and 1999 he painted five more. Comparison of these portraits, and particularly the alteration in the 1991 portrait, gives an excellent overview of the development of Constant's colourism in particular. In this self-portrait, he changes the colours so that the space is formed purely by colour. Due to the immeasurable space behind his position at the right-hand side of the canvas – but facing the viewer – he seems to be moving out of the picture. A typical feature of Constant's work is the way he handles the brush: right at the end. Accordingly, he exerts ‘as little pressure on the brush hairs as possible, and allows his “handwriting” the greatest possible freedom'. This brush technique apparently corresponds to that of Delacroix. In 1988, Constant wrote that ‘Delacroix compares brush technique to the bowing technique of a violinist.'