Anton Rooskens

Anton Rooskens (1906-1976) was a self-taught Dutch painter who spent most of his artistic career in Amsterdam and became one of the founding members of the celebrated CoBrA group. Born in Griendtsveen in the southern Netherlands, Rooskens came to painting without formal academic training, developing his practice through direct study and independent experimentation. This unschooled path gave his work an unusual freedom from established conventions and prepared him for the radical avant-garde community he would help launch in the years following the Second World War.

The decisive moment in Rooskens's career came in 1946, when he met Karel Appel and Corneille, two young Dutch painters whose commitment to spontaneous, expressive painting resonated deeply with his own developing sensibility. Their friendship greatly influenced the spontaneity that Rooskens brought to his mature practice, and together with Constant, Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn, and Joseph Noiret they founded the CoBrA group in 1948, taking their collective name from the initial letters of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The CoBrA artists espoused a complete freedom of form and color in art and stood in opposition to the Surrealism movement, seeking to reconnect painting with the immediate, expressive energy they associated with children's drawings, folk art, and non-Western artistic traditions.

Rooskens's mature painting drew particularly deep inspiration from African and Oceanic tribal art, whose bold forms, mask-like faces, and symbolic imagery entered his work as central visual vocabulary. His characteristic paintings feature stylized figures, animals, and mythological beings rendered in strong, unmodulated color and vigorous gestural line. This engagement with primitive imagery was fundamental to the CoBrA aesthetic, and Rooskens's contributions helped establish the movement's distinctive visual character during its brief but consequential period of activity from 1948 to 1951.

Even after the formal dissolution of CoBrA, Rooskens continued to develop his practice along the lines the group had established, producing paintings of unusual expressive force and chromatic intensity for the remainder of his life. His works are held today in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, and other significant Dutch and international collections.