Jan Nieuwenhuijs

from ART CATALOGUE // COBRA - The Colour of Freedom

Karel Appel

The career of Jan Nieuwenhuijs was much less successful than that of his brother Constant, who was two years his elder. He only had a few one-man exhibitions during his lifetime and no independent publications about his work were printed. At the beginning of the war Jan Nieuwenhuijs studied for a while at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. Shortly after the war he was still working in a Cubist idiom, but in around 1947 he switched to an expressionist approach, often combined with a childlike-linear style. His paintings mainly consisted of fantastic scenes, sometimes dreamlike, sometimes emotional and expressive, in which animals played a principal role. The influence of Joan Miró can clearly be seen in the paintings with a number of small figures in a cosmic or ill-defined space. In 1948 he participated in two group exhibitions in Amsterdam where work by Appel, Corneille and his brother Constant was also on view and, partly as a result, he became closely involved with the Experimental Group attending its foundation in his brother’s house on 16 July 1948. He also joined CoBrA but withdrew again in 1949 and from then on he pursued a comparatively isolated artistic career. His style changed somewhat in the 1950s – against a background of wildly painted and expressive colours, he usually set a single large fantasy figure, distinctly evocative of non-western or prehistoric painting. In around 1960 he came visibly under the influence of the French equivalent of Lyrical Abstraction. From then on, making use of an automatic style, he painted scenes in which figuration was almost entirely absorbed by abstract forms. In order to maintain himself, he made use of the Dutch ‘Contraprestatie’ system, by which artists were guaranteed a small allowance in return for works. [PvU]

The title of this painting, Sleepwalking Cock, suggests an unreal world. Normally speaking, cocks symbolize a state of alertness, of wakening and being awake. With its pronounced squint and distorted anatomy, however, Jan Nieuwenhuijs’ cock is all too clearly in a semiconscious state. Nonetheless he performs acrobatic feats on a slack cord, while around him stars and planets shine brightly in the night sky. The cord is suspended between a flagpole and a ladder that reaches the top of the moon, while its base disappears in the dark void. On the back of the cock is a dog and on the dog a girl is dancing. The three are performing a daring circus act, such as one would only be capable of in a fantasy world or dream. Like a picture puzzle, the fluttering pennant on the left turns out to be a fourth acrobat. And when the lights are out the painting turns out to have another fairytale dimension: then the little dancer, a star and the moon light up because they are painted with phosphorescent paint. Although the cock is painted in Expressionist style, with rapid untidy brushstrokes, the other figures are done in a childlike, stiffly linear fashion that reminds one of Joan Miró. With regard to the scene as a whole – a nighttime fantasy world with stars and moons, the work of Miró, that Nieuwenhuijs may have seen both actually (in Paris) and in reproduction, seems to have been a source of inspiration.