Eugène Brands

Painter

Eugène Brands was a Dutch painter who dedicated his artistry to the imagination of freedom, movement, and the cosmos. After his education at the School of Applied Arts in Amsterdam (now: Rietveld Academie), he began his career as a graphic designer and advertising artist. However, his heart lay with painting, where he could follow his intuition without clients.

In 1948, he joined the experimental and avant-garde Cobra movement, which aimed to liberate art from rules and conventions. Brands’ colorful and playful works, inspired by children’s drawings among other things, perfectly aligned with this vision. He admired Cobra’s energy but was annoyed by the group behavior and the dogmatism of manifestos and meetings. For Brands, painting was an intimate quest, not a collective struggle, and he left after a short period. He chose a solitary path. His leitmotif became ‘Panta Rhei’ – everything flows, an idea from the Greek philosophy of Heraclitus: nothing is permanent, everything is constantly changing. For Brands, this was not an abstract thought, but a way of life and an artistic principle. In numerous paintings and gouaches bearing that title, he allowed color and form to merge into vibrant fields, as if he wanted to make the eternal movement of the universe visible. Music, myths, cosmos, and childlike imagination converged in his artworks, which appear both playful and mysterious.

With his lyrical and cosmic visual language, Brands is considered a poet among painters. He did not seek a fixed style or harsh contours, but allowed his work to breathe and flow. In doing so, he gave a unique voice to post-war art in the Netherlands: a voice that was soft, poetic, yet radically innovative. Many paintings, drawings, and gouaches by Brands are included in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.