Karel Appel; Telegraph obituary (CoBrA painter)
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 06/05/2006) Telegraph
Karel Appel, who died on Wednesday aged 85, was a Dutch
painter, sculptor, printmaker and writer whose international
reputation is based on the expressive, almost violent images
he created in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a leading
figure in the CoBrA group.
CoBrA (the name was an acronym from Copenhagen, Brussels and
Amsterdam, the native cities of the movement's members) was
distinctive for its powerful group dynamic in which
disciplines and ideas were shared and mixed between its
loosely-affiliated members.
The emphasis in its imagery was on individual imagination
and a spirit of artistic liberation that did not
differentiate between the beautiful and the ugly.
Yet Appel continued to break new ground artistically for
many years afterwards. His vehement brushstrokes, bright
colour and crude collaged blocks of found materials
reflected his outrage and frustration at the social
injustices he perceived in both Europe and New York where,
after 1957, he spent much time.
As Sir Alan Bowness of the Tate remarked in 1986: "Appel is
concerned with big moral and personal issues, but it's done
in a very straightforward fashion, without preaching and
entirely through the language of paint."
A turning-point in his style had come around 1945 with
exposure to the work of Picasso and Matisse, which
influenced his adoption of a very personal vocabulary of
forms.
Childlike beings and amicable animals were recurrent themes
at this time; and a desire to free his vision of
preconceptions led him to look for inspiration to the
spontaneity of children's art.
Christiaan Karel Appel was born on April 25 1921 in
Amsterdam, where his father was a barber. As a teenager
Karel worked in the paternal barbershop, but at the age of
18 he embarked on an itinerant existence as an artist.
In 1940 he won a scholarship to the Rijksakademie van
Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, and studied there for three
years. In 1946 he had his first one-man exhibition, at the
Groningen.
He began to paint with a vigorous style in emulation of van
Gogh and German Expressionism, and in this formative period
also became interested in the visceral subjectivity found in
Giacometti and, especially, Jean Dubuffet.
In 1949 Appel was commissioned to paint a mural for the
canteen in Amsterdam's city hall. The result, Children
Begging, used exuberant bright colours to express the
awkward movements and bitter smiles of his subjects; but its
modernistic style so upset the lunching civil servants that
they took revenge by flicking pats of butter on to it, and
the authorities covered it with wallpaper. The cognoscenti,
however, admired the work.
CoBrA was formed in Paris in 1948 through a desire to create
an art relevant to the post-war situation. It was given
initial shape by the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont and
the Danish painter and writer Asger Jorn.
Appel, who was already a member of the progressive
Nederlandse Experimentele Groep, was an energetic
participant in the publications and the exhibitions in 1949
and 1951 that disseminated their ideas.
Although short-lived (it disbanded in 1950), CoBrA remains
one of the most important of the counter-cultural groupings
that laid foundations for the radicalism of the late 1960s.
In 1950 Appel moved to Paris where he was introduced to
Michel Tapié, who organised several exhibitions of his work.
He was awarded the Unesco prize at the Venice Biennale of
1954 and commissioned to execute a mural for the Stedelijk
Museum in 1956.
His work still attracted controversy including, in 1958,
when his erstwhile fellow CoBrAs Jorn and Constant
criticised him - after he had supplied a painting for the
new Unesco building in Paris - for turning the group's
primitive style into fashionable art.
But other awards followed, and in 1960 he won first prize at
the Guggenheim International Exhibition for his vibrant,
colourful composition Woman with Ostrich - of which The
Daily Telegraph remarked at the time, "neither the woman nor
the ostrich is apparent".
Also in 1960, he had his first major show in the United
States, followed by important exhibitions in Paris,
Amsterdam, Brussels, Basel and Utrecht. A retrospective of
his work toured Canada and America in 1972.
A survey of Appel's work between 1980 and 1985, shown at the
Arnolfini, Bristol, in 1986-7, was the first at a public
British gallery since 1957 and reflected a new interest in
his career among curators and artists.
After 1957 Appel divided his time between Paris and New
York, where he came into contact with leading jazz musicians
such as Miles Davis and Count Basie; Dizzy Gillespie's music
was included in the first film about the artist in 1961.
At this time, too, he concentrated on making
brightly-coloured sculpture, the medium which displayed well
the intuitive, spontaneous and child-like qualities of his
work.
When Appel emerged from under the shadow of the CoBrA period
in the mid-1970s with still-lifes constructed with broad,
rhythmic brushstrokes, some saw the influence of his musical
contacts as well as of his close study of details from van
Gogh's paintings.
The following decade saw a freer, more expressive approach
in which Appel engaged with universal themes such as hunger
and poverty; while his "cloud" paintings from 1984 were more
ambiguous in meaning and more ambitious in scale - with
their swirling lines and luminous colour, they recalled
Munch and Nolde in their attention to powerful natural
forces which defy easy interpretation.
Appel's later paintings did not, however, mask his
essentially optimistic vision. A humorous element had been
characteristic of his art since the 1940s, and came to the
fore in Hip, Hip Hoorah!, a painting from 1949 acquired by
the Tate in 1988.
Its joyful hybrid creatures, which combine human and
bird-like features, were intended to communicate the
artistic freedom from tradition that CoBrA and Appel
encapsulated.
Karel Appel's wife, Machteld, was a former Dutch fashion
model for Balenciaga.