Anton Martineau - grote litho: Appassionato IV - 1998 - Sold

Colorful lithograph by Anton Martineau. Title: Appasionato IV. Year: 1998. Number: 67/75. Dimensions of the presentation: H84 x w62cm. Dimensions sheet: H100 x W68cm.
The work is signed at the bottom right by the artist. The authenticity of the work offered is fully guaranteed. A certificate of authenticity can be emailed upon request.


Upon purchase, the work can be picked up in 's-Gravenzande (near The Hague (Scheveningen), Rotterdam and Delft and 5 minutes from the beach). The term for collection, when paid in advance, is very long, ie the buyer can collect the work weeks or even months later and if possible combine it with a visit to one of the above-mentioned cities or the beach. The work can also be sent. Our shipping days are Tuesday and Thursday.

Anton Martineau grew up in the area around the Red Light District in Amsterdam and learned in his youth from his father, who was a house painter, to make simple decorations such as plant and animal shapes for decoration and advertising. As a painter he says he is self-taught. He did attend the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where he studied in the advertising and photography department with, among others, Paul Schuitema and, according to data from the RKD, in 1946 the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His father was not very fond of art and artists, but his mother stimulated him in his ambitions. Among the painters who fascinated him at the beginning of his career are Bram van Velde, Rembrandt, Breitner and Goya. He also admired Van Gogh's spontaneous letter drawings.
Paris and Amsterdam
Martineau traveled to France several times shortly after World War II and in the 1950s, staying in Paris where he interacted with the generation of the Fifties. In the summer of 1948 he stayed with Lucebert in Les Pavillons-sous-Bois near Paris, where they painted a staircase of a school together. At that moment, Lucebert made a breakthrough to a much freer form of poetry. The friends traveled together for several months through France, sleeping as clochards under bus shelters and drawing prayer cards of Saint Anthony and Cecilia to sell to Catholic faithful.
His first exhibition took place in 1948 in the meeting room of the Drink Control Association in the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam. Lucebert also contributed to this exhibition. In The Hague, Martineau worked between 1950 and 1955 as a designer and painter for the advertising agency Enhabé. Later he lived and worked in Amsterdam, where he lived in a spacious studio with a surface area of one hundred and ten square meters and a height of five meters in Loods 6 of the former KNSM on the KNSM island. He lived and worked in the Eastern Docklands for over forty years.
painting style
His oeuvre consists of paintings, drawings and graphics in a strongly expressionistic figurative style. Spontaneous drawing plays an important role in his work. Subjects are, in the first place: man, dancing couples, tango, eroticism, drama of love and death, joy and fear, absurd portraits and still lifes. Women and the feminine dominate the masculine in his emotionally charged work. Against the oppression of education, he paints the delightful, the licentious, the liberating. His lyrical style was sometimes considered part of the international new figuration, but also shows a relationship with the expressionism of Cobra and Lucebert. He was therefore friends with Karel Appel, Corneille and the poet Gerrit Kouwenaar and with Jan Sierhuis, who once advised him to make less sexually explicit work in order to be able to sell more. Martineau rejected this suggestion because he mainly wants to follow his own feeling in which, for example, a lonely naked person on a bed has something very moving. Because of his wish to follow his own path, he did not seek close affiliation with Cobra. However, the development of his work in the mid-1960s coincided with the zeitgeist of the Provo movement and the sexual revolution. The lust that Martineau experiences in painting and dealing with the matter of oil paint is apparent from his comparison of the sensuous experience of squeezing a tube of paint with an orgasm, ... while the actual work has yet to begin.
Quote: If I paint flesh, I also paint vulnerability; but I also paint the scars. The scars of impermanence. The whole spectacle of love. I also paint the pain. In a painting I have grasped the whole cycle of being born, living and dying. It is about accepting the life cycle; but that is not possible without humor, and I express it in colour.
Monumental work
Head with four Noses (2008), Bijlmerdreef Amsterdam-Southeast
Martineau twice designed monumental sculptures for the public space in the Bijlmermeer. In 1975, the Bijlmerman (officially Man with a chocolate box) was installed at the Ganzenhoef metro station. It was lost during an urban renewal. The artist received a request/commission for a new work: Head with four noses. In 2006 Martineau designed a bronze urn monument in memory of the historian Richter Roegholt at De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery. In 1986 he painted the 'Plantagetram' for the Municipal Transport Company Amsterdam.
Lithograph
The most important graphic technique in his oeuvre is lithography. In his characteristic smooth and whimsical drawing style, many colorful prints are created in which the male-female theme plays a leading role. Occasionally texts are included in the image. The lithographs are produced in several printing runs and show a true-to-life representation of his spontaneous handwriting, as can also be seen in his collages and mixed techniques on paper. In one of his series he took portraits of the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez as the basis for a number of 'portraits' by l'Infante. Also 'tango' and 'the painter and his model' are recurring subjects. His graphics can be seen at art libraries and art dealers throughout the Netherlands and on the internet.
poet
As a poet, Martineau sought a strong expressiveness by 'kneading', rearranging and rewriting his material, until the most expressive form is found, without falling into the pursuit of effect through a deliberate firework of expletives; quiet moments and emptiness also have their value, he says. Although he had been writing for much longer, he only made his debut as a poet in 1992, with the collection Martineau, poetry by a double talent, edited by Frank Schuitemaker.