Karel Appel and Cobra

Karel Appel

No discussion of postwar Dutch art - or postwar European art - is complete without mentioning Karel Appel, whom many consider Holland's most important painter. Karel Appel attended the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam from 1940 to 1943, and then bided his time painting landscapes and portraits in an era when artists were forbidden to buy materials or exhibit unless they joined the German ìChamber of Culture.î After the liberation, as reproductions of works by Pablo Picasso and others began to find their way to Holland, Karel Appel rebelled against his studio training, founded several avant garde groups (including Cobra), and then moved to Paris. Years of travel and experimentation with subjects, colors and materials, left him with a close relationship to the American art community and studios all over the world. Karel Appel was a sculptor and a ceramist, too, but he is above all an expressionist, a man of passion led by spontaneity, who has conversely made a lasting mark.

Karel Appel retrospective

Karel Appel: Retrospective 1945-2005 by Gerard Meulensteen and Vincent Polakovic
Distributed Art Publishers (DAP)
ISBN: 808902517X

Psychopathological Notebook: Drawings and Gouaches 1948-1950

Karel Appel's early involvement with the famed avant-garde artist's group Cobra (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) led to an interest in folk art, children's art, and art by the mentally disturbed. In 1950, Karel Appel visited the great "International Exhibition on Psychopathological Art" at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris. On the pages of the exhibition catalogue, Psychopathological Art, he painted and drew figures over the text with ink and gouache. This stunning facsimile of the pages includes texts by Donald Kuspit, Rudi Fuchs, and Johannes Gachnang.

Drawings and Gouaches

Psychopathological Notebook: Drawings and Gouaches 1948-1950 by Karel Appel
Publisher: Gachnang & Springer, Verlag
ISBN: 3906127575

Cobra

The radical post-war Cobra group of artists and poets (1948-51) took their name from the three cities where the main participants lived: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. The group included some of the most important European artists of the second half of the twentieth century - Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Constant, Asger Jorn and Carl-Henning Pedersen - who collaborated in a search for a universal artistic language. Inspired by the creative impulse which they found in the art of so-called primitives, of children and of the insane, the group made idealistic, Marxist-inspired plans for a future in which a new folk art would be created. Cobra is the first detailed survey of the movement in English and provides a fascinating picture of this vibrant group of artists. Willemijn Stokvis reveals the different impact which Cobra had in Belgium, Denmark and Holland, and places the movement within the wider context of twentieth-century art, showing how it emerged from Surrealism and Expressionism and found a continuation in the politically engaged artistic movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The book reproduces the Cobra artists' most important works of art in color alongside black-and-white photographs of key archival material, and provides an essential introduction to this accessible and popular art.

Willemijn Stokvis

Willemijn Stokvis is the leading authority on the Cobra movement. Stokvis is the author of numerous books, exhibition catalogues and articles on Cobra, many of which have appeared in languages other than her native Dutch. Currently Willemijn Stokvis is a freelance art historian, she was until 1999 a Lecturer in the History of Modern Art at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.

Cobra: Last Avant-Garde Movement of the 20th Century

Cobra: Last Avant-Garde Movement of the 20th Century by Willemijn Stokvis
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Company
ISBN: 0853318980

More information

Arts Main Page
Pablo Picasso