Lucebert (Amsterdam, 1924 - Alkmaar, 1994)
Lucebert, who's real name was Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk, was and
still is a well known painter and poet. He began studying at the
Kunstnijverheidsschool in Amsterdam in 1938. He left it after a year
and a half, but continued to produce drawings and paintings. His poetic
work was discovered by Gerrit Kouwenaar in 1948. Lucebert became a
member of the Dutch Experimental Group and later also of CoBrA. He
participated with his poetry at the CoBrA exhibition in Amsterdam in
1949, at which point he left the movement.
Although his
involvement in CoBrA was only brief and tangential, it was nevertheless
of fundamental importance for him as a poet-artist. CoBrA stimulated
him and other experimental poets (including Vinkenoog, Kouwenaar,
Elburg and Schierbeek) to commit themselves fully to the freedom of
language that they had hitherto explored only hesitantly. At the same
time, it also left deep marks on him as a painter.
During the
1950s he was subject to many influences, and in this period he
concentrated mainly on painting. The myths that he created both in his
expressionistic paintings and in his poems were rooted in the human
world and are full of literary allusions. In the 1960s he became
particularly interested in the child-like CoBrA style, but this quickly
gave way to a caricatural, demonic vision of the world, which he kept
on expressing until his death in 1994.