Eugène Brands
(Amsterdam 1913 – 2002)
Garden (1969)
Signed lower right
Signed, titled, dated 1969 and numbered 22 on the stretcher
Oil on canvas, 59.9 x 50.1 cm
Provenance:
– Auction Gray’s Auctioneers, Cleveland, 14 November 2009, lot 4
– Auction Christie’s, Amsterdam, 29 November 2011, lot 109
– Private collection, the Netherlands
Note:
The Dutch painter Eugène Brands was an early member of the CoBrA movement. Like most artists associated with CoBrA, Brands wanted to free himself from the existing rules of art and drew inspiration from children’s paintings. He was only briefly a member and left the movement shortly after the notorious joint exhibition in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in late 1949. In the 1960s, Brands abandoned representational art in favour of abstraction. As can be seen from this work on offer, he began to paint large areas of colour of an impenetrable, cotton wool-like substance.