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Constant Nieuwenhuijs showed artistic talents as a child, he draws, sings and plays the guitar and violin. He made his first painting at the age of sixteen. Between 1932 and 1942 he was a student at the School of Applied Arts and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. He signed his work with Constant and for that reason he was always referred to by his first name. After his education he came into contact with Asger Jorn during a short stay in Paris, an experimental Danish artist who encouraged Constant to found a new, international avant-garde art movement in 1948: CoBrA. This group opposed traditional art movements and tried to create a new art in the forties and fifties through spontaneity and expression. Within CoBrA – of which Karel Appel and Corneille were also founders – Constant not only fulfilled an artistic role, but also that of theoretician. Throughout his life his work would have a socially critical undertone. Another important aspect of Constant was his affinity with surrealism. He was strongly inspired and influenced by artists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Constant often used surrealistic elements in his paintings and sought the boundaries of imagination by combining fantasy and reality.
After the end of the Cobra movement in the fifties, Constant remained active as an artist and experimented with different styles and techniques. His work became more abstract and developed more in the direction of spatial experiments and architecture. He sought connections with kindred spirits, including the architects Aldo van Eyck and Gerrit Rietveld. In the autumn of 1952, he stayed in London for three months with a grant from the Art Council of Great Britain. In that city, Constant noticed that modern buildings offered few opportunities for creativity and were only practical. Back in Amsterdam, he did not let this go and he immersed himself in architecture, urban development and utopian ideas. After reading Homo ludens by Johan Huizinga, the idea for a city of the future, New Babylon, for which he designed models, sculptures and constructions, formed. This city was considered a visionary work that explored the relationship between art, technology and society and was a source of inspiration for artists, architects and thinkers. Constant stopped painting to devote himself entirely to the New Babylon project, which he worked on from 1956 to 1974. In 1959, the first version of the New Babylon project was exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum. In 1974, the project was officially concluded with a major exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.
In 1966, Constant represented the Netherlands with New Babylon at the Venice Biennale. In the museums of that city, he was impressed by the colorism of the Venetian Renaissance masters. After fifteen years of working on New Babylon, Constant returned to painting, watercolors and etching in 1969. Just as in his early painting period, he remained inspired by socially critical and political subjects, but in his painting technique he now allowed colors to flow into each other, without sharp contours. A painting comes to life layer by layer, sometimes with as many as ten layers of paint. Each layer had to dry before the next could be applied. This laborious technique meant that he only managed to make three to four paintings a year. Rudi Fuchs wrote in his foreword for the Constant exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1996: ‘Some people regard Constant’s later work as a return to tradition. I, however, do not share this opinion at all. I regard his development from the seventies onwards as a deeper penetration into the garden of painting.’
