Constant Nieuwenhuys

Constant Nieuwenhuys was born on 21 July 1920 in Amsterdam. He spent a year at the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs (School of Applied Arts) before studying drawing at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam from 1939 to 1941.

In 1948, Constant co-founded the CoBrA movement in Paris with Karel Appel, Corneille, and the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, among others, promoting a spontaneous, expressive form of figuration in reaction to prewar abstraction.

From around 1956 Constant began New Babylon, a project he developed for nearly two decades in dialogue with the Situationist International, of which he was a founding member in 1957. New Babylon envisioned a networked, roofed, endlessly reconfigurable city built for a society freed from labor. At the close of a major exhibition in 1974, he sold the complete New Babylon corpus to the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (now Kunstmuseum Den Haag) and returned to painting for the remainder of his career.

Constant died on 1 August 2005 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, at home with his wife, Trudy van der Horst.

Constant is treated by major museums as a central figure of postwar European art, credited both for his role in founding CoBrA and for New Babylon, which curators at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia have described as one of the last great utopian projects in European art. Kunstmuseum Den Haag, which holds the complete New Babylon corpus, presents the project as the defining statement of his career, developed between 1956 and 1974 in close dialogue with the Situationist International. Institutional attention has intensified in recent decades, with major New Babylon presentations at the Reina Sofia in Madrid (2015 to 2016), Kunstmuseum Den Haag (2015), the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen (2016), and Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam (2021 to 2022), reinforcing his standing as a canonical figure of the CoBrA and Situationist generations rather than a market-driven name.

Constant's auction market is thin relative to his institutional standing, and public price databases do not agree closely on the details of his top result. The most frequently cited figure for his auction record is approximately USD 680,454 for a painting, reported by the market-data aggregator MutualArt as the highest realized price in its summary of his sales. That source does not identify the specific work, nor does it disclose the auction house, sale location, or exact sale date, and no other source reviewed independently corroborates a result at that level, so this figure should be treated as reported rather than fully verified. The bulk of documented sales for the artist, across several auction databases, fall in the low thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, mostly for smaller paintings and works on paper.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Constant, and the estate's archive is maintained by Stichting Constant in Amsterdam, which should be the first point of reference for questions of attribution or provenance. His market is split between CoBrA-period paintings and works connected to New Babylon, including drawings and architectural models, categories that can trade very differently and are not always distinguished clearly in auction summaries. Publicly available price databases disagree on the details of his top auction result, so collectors should treat any single quoted "record price" with caution and verify underlying sale details directly with the auction house before relying on it.