born April 25, 1921, Amsterdam, Neth.
Dutch painter, sculptor, and graphic artist.
He attended Amsterdam's Royal Academy of Fine Arts (194043) and was cofounder of the COBRA group of northern European Expressionists. In 1950 he moved to Paris; by the 1960s he had settled in New York City. An exponent of expressive abstraction, he developed a painting style characterized by thick layering of pigment, violent colour and brushwork, and crude, reductive figures. His figurative sculptures are executed in metal and wood. He painted portraits of jazz musicians and a number of public works, including a mural in the Paris UNESCO building.