Jan Cox

The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is painting. Places of work recorded in the authority are Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels. Work by Jan Cox is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst and Mu.ZEE - Kunstmuseum aan Zee.

• Name — Jan Cox • Born — 27 August 1919 • Birthplace — The Hague • Died — 7 October 1980 • Place of death — Antwerp • Movement — Expressionism • Field — Painting

In 1945, he was a founding member of the 'Jeune Peinture Belge' group. By the end of that decade he was briefly associated the CoBrA movement, publishing some of his art in the CoBrA magazine. In 1950, he moved to New York. After a brief stay in Rome, he returned to the United States in 1956, becoming head of the Painting Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1974, he returned to Belgium, to live in Antwerp, and devote himself exclusively to painting. Jan Cox was psychically hyper-sensitive and suffered from recurrent depression throughout his life, eventually leading to his suicide, in Antwerp, in 1980. He is buried in the Schoonselhof Cemetery in Antwerp.

• Illustration — A work of Cox in the Herrmann-Debroux metro station, Brussels, Belgium Several of his paintings are abstract, though some of his major successes were with (partly) figurative work: for instance, the cycle based on the myth of Orpheus which he produced in Boston, the cycle based on Homer's Iliad he produced after his return to Antwerp.

Jan Cox was convinced that the technical capabilities of a painter were of minor importance for the quality of the painting that resulted: in his view, all the technique a painter needed for the creation of paintings could be learnt in a few months, the rest depended on the painter's creativity.

• His name was possibly the origin of an Indonesian swear word, jancok.