Constant

Its members gained fame through their affiliation with other European experimentalists under the name Cobra. This young generation of artists revolutionised painting after the Second World War, but the Cobra movement itself fell apart in 1951. Constant then embarked on his urban planning project New Babylon, a city of the future populated by the intrinsically creative homo ludens, or ‘playful human’. He worked for 18 years on this Gesamtkunstwerk comprising maquettes, paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, films and the written word. Constant often switched style and medium, moving from painting and drawing to sculpture and architecture, and in 1974 he finally returned to painting again. His interest in the human as a social being is a connecting factor throughout his wide-ranging body of work.