and sloppy, it does not remain silent while suffering or laughing, it gladly allows itself to be well-thumbed and changed over time by an eccentric.’ (from Stay calm children, something important is happening).
In his visual work Lucebert often does the opposite of what he sees and combats in the world around him: he gives mastery to his powerlessness, uses the weapons of his artistry, rather than abusing power in order to impose his will on other people and on the things he makes. His art gives the appearance of having arisen spontaneously; the artist need do nothing other than conceal himself: ‘I allow fools, emperors, mandarins and similar figures to speak for me and if necessary I objectify myself a little’, as he said in an interview in 1959.
The results emerge in an experimental process, while he is working in communication with his materials: drawings employing the most wideranging techniques, collages, etchings, lithographs and screen prints; paintings in gouache, acrylics and oil; ceramics and photography - almost everything can serve his improvisation; just as the rhythm of his drawing and painting hand can be led by the jazz of Thelonious Monk or Dizzy Gillespie.
All this does not mean that there is no development or thematic line in his work: every drawing and every painting is unmistakeably a Lucebert. Initially his work was playful and fantastic, with a good deal of humour, but after 1958, when Lucebert had had his own studio for a number of years and had also begun to concentrate on painting with oils, the aggression increased. His work became angrier, with frenzied generals and teeth-grinding tyrants. Senseless abuse of power is ranged against defenceless subjectivity in these works. Lucebert mirrored himself on the world of Hieronymus Bosch, and in fact wrote a long poem on one of Bosch's works, The Garden of Earthly Delights, in 1968.
Lucebert spent a good deal of time in Spain from the mid-sixties onwards, and developed an interest in the culture of that country; partly influenced by the Spanish sun, his work became clearer and sharper, angrier and more satirical. It acquired the impact of the work of El Greco or Goya with their visionary, grim, uncompromising expression, something which also characterises the canvasses of Francis Bacon, for example. ‘Perhaps that is why the monsters no longer disguise themselves,’ said Lucebert, ‘but reveal themselves as they are and as I see them: as boundless lusts for power or as powerless sighs of resentment’.
His anger cooled and his criticism became more controlled, but this did not lessen the impact of his works. With a slight variation on a poem from 1981 for the poet / painter Breyten Breytenbach (see The Low Countries 1995-96: 252-258), who was imprisoned for his views on apartheid, Lucebert's work also ‘was ashamed to be a poem and not a bullet / with which - poet - it could murder your executioner.’
The horrors of war and execution, of terror, racial hatred and vanity continued to be a major motif in Lucebert's work in the seventies. He forced the viewer to look at the roll-call compounds, at the selection yards and at the huts (‘The Perfect Crime’ - ‘De perfekte misdaad’, 1968).
Lucebert's cynicism about a world which repeats itself but does not improve itself increased after this period, though there was still a place in his work for playful humour and light-hearted irony, which gave the aggression against repression a more anecdotal character.
