Anton Rooskens

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Anton Rooskens (born March 16, 1906 in Griendtsveen , Horst aan de Maas , Province of Limburg , † February 28, 1976 in Amsterdam ) was a Dutch painter and co-founder of the artists' association CoBrA .

life and work

Anton Rooskens went to the technical school in Venlo from 1924 to 1934. Then he did an apprenticeship with an instrument maker. As a painter he was self-taught .

In 1935 Rooskens moved to Amsterdam. In 1945 he saw the exhibition Art in Freedom in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which showed African sculptures and ancestral pictures from New Guinea. His work was influenced by it. Since 1946 he was in contact with Karel Appel , Corneille and Eugène Brands . In 1948 he got to know Constant and co-founded the Experimentele Groep in Holland , which later became part of the CoBrA artist group. Rooskens took part in the large CoBrA exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1949 . Then he distanced himself from the group of artists.

“Anton Rooskens, almost a generation older than the other artists, already had a career as a painter when he met them, but he is one of those who are looking for new forms of expression after the war. He rejects his expressionist style, which is strongly indebted to Van Gogh and the Flemish Permeke , and willingly opens himself to the influences of Picasso and Matisse . [...] During the COBRA era he coined his own "dialect", a variant which draws on the art of the Africans and the American Indians. COBRA's own imaginary beings are not in the foreground in his pictures, rather it is "magical signs" that one encounters here. From 1957 his painting became more melancholy, the paint seized the canvas with extensive, passionate brushwork. It was not until the end of the sixties that the mythical elements characteristic of the beginnings of COBRA reappear - similar to Appel and Corneille; the style is powerful, figurative. And as with Appel and Corneille, the bright, cheerful COBRA colors again seize Roosken's work. "

- Willemijn Stokvis

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jaski Gallery Anton Rooskens accessed on February 14, 2018 (Dutch)
  2. ↑ cobra, Willemijn Stokvis, An International Movement in Art after World War II, pages 13 and 23, Barcelona 1987, ISBN 3-07-50-9200-2
personal data
SURNAME Rooskens, Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch painter and co-founder of the artists' association CoBrA
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Griendtsveen , Horst aan de Maas , Limburg Province
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1976
Place of death Amsterdam