Anton Martineau - Seated nude

Anton Martineau Pencil drawing Seated nude 29.5 x 42 cm Signed Ca 1965
Antoon Peter Johan Martineau (1926 – 2017) was a Dutch visual artist and poet. He worked as a painter, draftsman, graphic artist and sculptor in the style of figurative expressionism. His oeuvre consists of paintings, drawings and graphics in a strongly expressionistic figurative style. In his work, spontaneous drawing plays an important role. Subjects are, first of all: 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 his upbringing, he paints the delightful, the licentious, the liberating. His lyrical style was sometimes considered part of the international new figuration but also shows affinity with the expressionism of Cobra and Lucebert. He was also 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 wanted to follow his own feeling in which, for example, a lonely naked person in a bed has something very moving. Because of his desire to follow his own path, he did not seek close ties with Cobra. However, the development of his work in the mid-1960s coincided with the spirit of the Provo movement and the sexual revolution. The pleasure that Martineau experiences in painting and dealing with the material oil paint is evident from his comparison of the sensual experience of squeezing a tube of paint with an orgasm, ... while the actual work has yet to begin.