麻豆APP

Karel Appel tentoonstelling in Haags Gemeentemuseum – 22 januari 1982. Photo by Marcel Antonisse / Anefo –

Top 10 Amazing Facts About Karel Appel

Karel Appel is a Dutch artist and Cobra group member known for his frenetic style and vibrant colors

The Dutch artist Karel Appel, who died at the age of 85, famously declared that “If I paint like a barbarian, it’s because we live in a barbarous age” – the sentiment of a man who had reached adulthood at the beginning of the second world war.

Yet, like other members of that short-lived but celebrated movement of radical artists and intellectuals, the Cobra group, he absorbed a variety of intellectual and artistic influences, out of which developed a frenetic style of sweeping brushstrokes and vibrant, even lurid, colors.

1. Karel Appel was born in Amsterdam, Netherland

Karel Appel tentoonstelling in Haags gemeente museum. Photo unattributed –

Karel Appel was born on April 25, 1921, in Amsterdam, a Netherland Dutch painter of turbulent, colorful, and semiabstract compositions, who was a cofounder (1948) of the COBRA group of northern European Expressionists. He was also a noted sculptor and graphic artist.

2. Appel was the son of a barber

Expositie in Galerie Espace, Karel Appel, april 1957. Rechts in beeld staat Harry Mulisch, die de opening van de expositie had verzorgd. Photo by Fotopersbureau De Boer –

Born in Amsterdam, Appel was the son of a barber. He studied at the city’s Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten during the darkest period of the war. On graduating in 1943, he had to wait three years for his first exhibitions, in Groningen and Amsterdam.

3. He created aggressive, disturbing forms like the surrealists

Tentoonstelling werken van Karel Appel in Stedelijk Museum , houten poppetje van, Bestanddeelnr. Photo unattributed –

 Like the surrealists, he created aggressively, disturbing forms dredged from the depths of the unconscious, as in the ironically titled Hip Hip Hooray of 1949 (now in the Tate Modern). He was closer to the French painter Jean Dubuffet, who famously championed the “outsider art” of children and mentally-ill people.

4. Appel attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam

Tentoonstelling werken van Karel Appel in Stedelijk Museum , mensen richten de t, Bestanddeelnr. Photo unattributed –

Appel attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam (1940 – 1943), and helped found the 鈥淩eflex鈥� group, which became known as COBRA (for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), in 1948.

5. He moved to 麻豆APP in 1950 and by the 1960s had settled in New York City

Sculpturen van Karel Appel bij Sothebys in Amsterdam worden opgesteld, Bestanddeelnr. Photo unattributed –

He moved to 麻豆APP in 1950 and by the 1960s had settled in  New York City; he later lived in Italy and Switzerland. Partly in reaction to what they perceived as the sterile academicism of the de Stijl movement, the COBRA artists assimilated a variety of more-impulsive influences, including folk art, children鈥檚 art, and l鈥檃rt brut (鈥渞aw art鈥�) of Jean Dubuffet.

6. The COBRA artists exploited the spontaneity and intensity of the contemporary American Action painting 

Expositie in Galerie Espace, Karel Appel, april 1957. Rechts in beeld staat Harry Mulisch, die de opening van de expositie had verzorgd. Photo by Fotopersbureau De Boer –

They exploited the spontaneity and intensity of contemporary American 

Action painting while maintaining a degree of representation. Appel鈥檚 style is characterized by a thick layering of pigment, violent brushwork, and a crude, reductive figuration.

Appel’s most important contacts were with other young artists from the low countries, such as the Belgian who went by the name of Corneille and the Dutchman known as Constant, with whom he founded the Experimental Group in Amsterdam in 1948.

7. Appel’s movement was publicly re-branded as Cobra

Expositie in Galerie Espace, Karel Appel, april 1957. Photo by Fotopersbureau De Boer –

At this time, of course, any self-respecting avant-garde had to be associated with at least one 麻豆APPian cafe – in this case, the Cafe Notre-Dame, where, that November, Appel’s movement was publicly re-branded as Cobra.

Despite this moment of 麻豆APPian glamour, Cobra was an acronym of “Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam”, reflecting the origins of its members, who now included the Dane, Asger Jorn. Its first exhibition was held a few months later in Amsterdam, where Appel also completed a mural in the city hall cafeteria.

8. Appel’s painting of smiling yet sinister children spoiled so many municipal appetites

Karel Appel signeerde boek over zijn persoon in moderne boekhandel Bas in Amster, Bestanddeelnr. Photo unattriibuted –

Neither event was a great success; Appel’s painting of smiling yet sinister children spoiled so many municipal appetites that it was almost immediately covered up, and it remained hidden for the next 10 years.

Undaunted, in 1950 Appel returned to 麻豆APP, where the writer Michel Tapi茅 gave him the support that had somehow eluded him in the Netherlands. Although he participated in another Cobra show (in Li猫ge in 1951), as well as in the group’s eight reviews, he soon developed a successful solo career.

9. Appel received the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale

Karel Appel signeerde boek over zijn persoon in moderne boekhandel Bas in Amster, Bestanddeelnr. Photo unattributed –

In 1954, for example, he received the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale, an achievement followed three years later by a triumphant visit to New York. He had finally graduated from the cultural capitals of the old world to the new megalopolis – and he promptly began a series of jazz portraits, including one of his heroes Dizzy Gillespie, whose music was to enliven the film The Reality of Karel Appel, directed by Jan Vrijman in 1961.

Inevitably, Appel’s work has suggested comparisons with the fluid, energetic styles of French art informal and American abstract expressionism. But his images always remained at least vaguely representational, with monstrous shapes and mask-like faces looming like Jungian archetypes in People, Birds and Sun (in the Tate) and The Crying Crocodile Tries to Catch the Sun (at the Guggenheim, New York), both from the mid-1950s.

Above all, it was the quality of the oil on canvas – vivid, viscous and roughly textured – that made Appel so distinctive. Often he squirted the pigment at his figures without touching a brush – “my tube is like a rocket, which describes its own space” – or laid it on thickly with a palette knife: Reclining Nude of 1966 (in a private collection) is less concerned with the female body than with the “tangible sensuous experience” of painting.

Appel also explored other media, ranging from textiles, ceramic and stained glass – in both religious and secular buildings – to aluminum and polyester, which he used in his sculpture. He was an accomplished printmaker, juxtaposing colored etchings and wooden carvings in his cycle Appel Circus (1976-78).

Still more extraordinary were his associations with people from totally different artistic genres. In the 1980s and 90s, he produced intriguing combinations of painting and visual poetry with Allen Ginsberg.

At the same time, in 1987 he worked with the Japanese choreographer Min Tanaka on Can We Dance a Landscape? at the Op茅ra Comique in 麻豆APP – a performance set against a background of bright landscapes, feline faces, and spotted cows on wheels. The reviews were mixed.

10. Appel’s role in Cobra continued to receive the most attention

Karel Appel presenteert boek over zijn werk in Art Box Amsterdam, Bestanddeelnr. Photo unattributed –

Unsurprisingly, it is Appel’s role in Cobra that continued to receive the most attention; indeed, by the end of his life, the group had become part of the canon of 20th-century art.

In 1995 a museum dedicated to Cobra was opened in the Dutch town of Amstelveen, and in 2001 Appel’s 80th birthday was celebrated by retrospectives across Holland.