Lucebert

from ART CATALOGUE // COBRA - The Colour of Freedom

Theo Wolvecamp

Painting and literature began to interest Lucebert (pseudonym of Lambertus Jacobus Swaanswijk) from an early age. In 1938 he studied for six months at the Amsterdam Institute for Applied Art, but as a painter he is in fact selftaught. After the war he decided to be a free artist, changed his name, Lambertus, to Luce(= light)bert, and began roaming through Amsterdam as a bohemian. In 1948 he met the experimental poet Gerrit Kouwenaar, who introduced him to the members of the Experimental Group. Lucebert took the stage as poet and draughtsman at the first CoBrA exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, but did not make his mark as a painter until the end of the 1950s. In 1958 he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Espace. Shortly thereafter Lucebert achieved international fame. In 1959 he took part in Documenta II in Kassel. In 1964 his work was shown at the Venice Biennale and he made his debut in New York. From 1961 onwards a contract with the Marlborough Gallery in London afforded Lucebert more financial elbow room. Lucebert’s extensive visual oeuvre is suffused with CoBrA attributes, such as abstraction, a multiplicity of colours and spontaneity, to which he adds humour and the gaze of a social critic. His great inspirations, aside from the painters Picasso, Klee, Ernst and Dubuffet, are primarily the critical writers in pre-war Germany, such as Tucholsky, but also the poets from the history of classical German literature, such as Hölderlin. In addition Lucebert was a great fan of contemporary jazz music. The sounds of jazz musicians Chet Baker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bessie Smith echo through his associative fusion of images. Lucebert was unfettered by stylistic classifications and had no desire to be innovative per se:

‘Anything that crosses my mind I paint; I sketch and paint anything on anything; I take in all notions simultaneously; I don’t make a selection among motivations and I don’t strive for syntheses; I simply allow opposites to come to me and while they struggle with one another I offer no resistance – I stay out of the line of fire and I experience the freedom that only they hold out to me, my paintings, my poems, these joyful playgrounds where no seesaws crowd out swings, where Saharas and great oceans come together in sandboxes.’

[LN]

Beast Tamer

1959 oil on canvas 88.0 x 128.5 cm S/134 acquisition from Lucebert, 1959

details: dated VIII ’59.

With the painting Beast Tamer Lucebert shows himself at once a painter and a draughtsman. The large head and shoulders on the right and the mysterious creature on the left are painted with black drawing lines. They are the result of Lucebert’s extensive study of Paul Klee’s drawing technique. Startling combinations give the individual lines distinctive, surreal significations. The two bodies (beast and man) seem to share one head. Or are there actually two: one face spherical with two circles as if drawn by a child and one head with a snout and floppy ears? On the right side of the canvas horizontal lines drive aggressively into the square figure. This gives this figure a mouth with teeth, and from the appropriate distance it stands in relation to the beast with two bodies, it naturally becomes the beast tamer Lucebert alludes to in the title. The associative visual language is characteristic of Lucebert’s painting and fits in with CoBrA’s spontaneous paintings, anchored in coincidence. The variegated foundation upon which the creatures are painted is testament to the pleasure Lucebert took in painting. Putting down layer upon layer of colour was something Lucebert was familiar with from the work of his father, who had a painting business in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district, where he learned the painter’s craft in his youth. In 1959 Lucebert produced for the first time a large number of oil paintings in sizeable dimensions, and Beast Tamer is just one of them. The affinity with oils that Lucebert displays in these associative and caricatural paintings sets the tone for his extensive body of work. [LN]

Untitled

1959 oil on hardboard 122.0 x 144.0 cm S/159 donated by Mr. & Mrs. Sanders, 1960

details: dated 1 IX ’59.

At the end of the 1950s Lucebert brought the CoBrA language back to life with his strongly associative painting style. His unfettered expression of form fits in seamlessly with what Constant wrote as early as in 1948: ‘An art that does not resolve the problem posed by a predetermined conception of beauty, but acknowledges no norm other than expressiveness and spontaneously creates what intuition points out.’ Lucebert made his paintings without preliminary studies and let no aesthetic ideal stand in his way. He applied lines and blots spontaneously. Associating from the composition which this created he patiently accentuated volumes and lines and paints over fragments that were too distracting. This painting, which has no title, is a colourful panel over which round wheels roll and other, non-figurative shapes emerge out of a light blue-grey world. The playfulness of children’s drawing was an inspiration to Lucebert. Round shapes become wheels; here and there ladders and arrows appear. It is a purely associative play of line, colour and form, without any single signification. In 1961 Lucebert wrote about his work method:

‘Anyone who, while painting eggs, remembers the Easter eggs of years gone by no longer feels like celebrating Easter. A good painting, a good poem, in fact comes into being in no-man’s-land, a border zone between design and perception, a zone where neither conventions of memory nor the wishful dream dictates of any Utopia can play their restrictive parts.’

[LN]