Lucebert
(Amsterdam 1924 - Alkmaar 1994)
The Vow (The Vow) (1988)
Signed and dated '88 lower left
Oil on canvas, 89.9 x 65.2 cm
Provenance:
– Galerie Nouvelles Images, The Hague
- Private collection, the Netherlands
Note:
Lucebert belonged to the CoBrA movement, which was a group of artists who focused on semi-abstract paintings with brilliant colour, violent brushwork and distorted human figures. Although his involvement in CoBrA was only brief and tangential, it was nevertheless of fundamental importance to him as an artist-poet. In the fifties, Lucebert became a nationally famous visual artist and possibly the best-known poet of his generation. He proceeded to devote himself to the art of painting for some decades, first in the child-like CoBrA style, but during the first half of the sixties, he made his most beautiful and impressive paintings, in which fairy-tale and mythical, sometimes frightening creatures appear. In his later work, he lets distorted characters and fantasy creatures, set up in powerful contour lines, portray scenes and tell their stories. In this work by Lucebert, a mother and child are clearly recognizable, but their forms have been broken down into blocks of colour. His influences when growing up, such as Picasso and comic books, can be clearly seen in this work.