Karel APPEL

Karel Appel (1921–2006): Life, CoBrA and Original Prints

A founding member of CoBrA, the Dutch artist Karel Appel (1921–2006) – painter, sculptor, printmaker and poet – remains one of the boldest voices of post-war European art. In his canvases as in his prints, unmixed colour is laid on thickly and at speed, and children, birds, cats and faces seem to surge out of a single spontaneous gesture. For some sixty years he pursued a deliberately “barbaric” art, in the hope of seeing the world again through the eyes of a child.

At Le Coin des Arts, our Paris gallery of original prints, you will find a selection of Karel Appel’s works on paper, chiefly pencil-signed and numbered colour lithographs, each chosen for the quality of the impression, its provenance and its condition.

Early years in Amsterdam

Karel Appel was born on 25 April 1921 in Amsterdam, where his father kept a barber’s shop in a working-class district. He finished his first canvas at the age of fourteen and, during the German occupation, trained at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he met Constant and Corneille, his future companions in arms. His first solo exhibition was held in Groningen in 1946. The early paintings owe much to Picasso, Matisse and Jean Dubuffet, yet Appel was already after something more direct: from 1947 he was assembling found objects and painting them in bright colours.

CoBrA and the “Questioning Children” affair

In 1948 Appel, Constant and Corneille formed the Dutch Experimental Group and launched its review, Reflex. On 8 November of that year, in a Paris café, they joined the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont and the Dane Asger Jorn to found CoBrA – an acronym of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Soon reinforced by Pierre Alechinsky, the group turned its back on academic painting and geometric abstraction alike, and looked instead to folk art, children’s drawings and so-called “primitive” art.

Its 1949 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam caused uproar. The same year, the mural Vragende kinderen (“Questioning Children”), painted by Appel for the canteen of Amsterdam City Hall, met with such hostility that it was papered over for a decade. Visitors to Tate can see the theme in the gallery’s own Questioning Children of 1949. Appel left the Netherlands for Paris in 1950; there he came across drawings by patients of the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, which prompted his Psychopathological Notebook. CoBrA broke up in 1951, but its spirit never left his work.

An international career: Paris, London and New York

In 1952 the critic Michel Tapié placed Appel within “art autre” and Art Informel. Recognition followed quickly: a solo show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1953), the UNESCO Prize at the Venice Biennale (1954), a first American exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, that same year, then the Museum of Modern Art’s The New Decade (1955).

London took notice early. The Institute of Contemporary Arts gave him a solo exhibition in 1957, and from 1959 he showed regularly with the dealers Gimpel Fils; in 1964 he featured in Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 54–64 at the Tate Gallery. Meanwhile, from 1957, he divided his time between Europe and the United States, where he befriended Willem de Kooning and painted jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. He won the international painting prize at the São Paulo Biennial in 1959 and the Guggenheim International Award in 1960. In 1961 Jan Vrijman filmed him flinging paint at the canvas for De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel (“The Reality of Karel Appel”), with music by Dizzy Gillespie; the short film took the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1962.

Sculpture, travel and the stage

Appel was a sculptor too. After the CoBrA assemblages and the ceramics he made in 1954 at Asger Jorn’s invitation, he carved burnt olive-tree stumps in the early 1960s, before turning to figures in painted wood and aluminium. In 1964 he bought the Château de Molesmes in Burgundy; later he would divide his life between Paris, New York, Tuscany, Connecticut and Switzerland. In 1976 he painted murals with local residents in Villa El Salvador, Peru, and began the Visage-Paysage series, while the late 1970s belong to his exuberant “Circus” period of clowns, acrobats and animals. In Britain, the Arnolfini in Bristol gave him a solo exhibition in 1986. In the 1990s and 2000s he designed opera sets for De Nederlandse Opera and staged large installations such as Singing Donkeys; the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague held a major retrospective in 1990.

Appel the printmaker

Printmaking was, for Appel, painting by other means. He never set out to reproduce his canvases; he wanted the sheet itself to carry the force of his colour and the freedom of his line. Lithography was his favourite medium, but he also made woodcuts, etchings and screenprints.

He worked with the great Parisian printers – the Mourlot workshop and Clot, Bramsen et Georges among them – and with publishers such as Galerie Lelong. His lithographs are recognisable at a glance: brilliant flat areas of red, yellow, blue and green, ringed in black, from which his favourite subjects emerge – faces, birds, cats, figures and dreamlike landscapes.

Notable print suites and posters

Collectors particularly seek out the circus suites of the late 1970s, notably The Appel Circus with its clowns, bareback riders and animals, the Cats series (1978) and Night Faces on Broadway (1975), inspired by his stays in New York. His exhibition posters, many of them lithographed, are also much in demand.

No single catalogue raisonné of Appel’s graphic work exists to date. The Karel Appel Foundation, which the artist established in Amsterdam in 1999, looks after and documents his output and is the first port of call for questions of identification.

Final years and legacy

Appointed Officer of the Légion d’honneur in 2003, Appel moved to Zurich, where he died on 3 May 2006 at the age of eighty-five; he lies in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The Cobra Museum in Amstelveen honoured him with exhibitions in 2001 (Beelden 1936–2000) and 2008 (Jazz 1958–1962), and in 2017 the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris staged Karel Appel. L’art est une fête ! following a major gift from the Foundation. In the UK his work belongs to Tate, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and the Ulster Museum in Belfast; elsewhere it is held by the Stedelijk Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, and the Centre Pompidou.

Collecting Karel Appel’s original prints

With Corneille and Pierre Alechinsky, Appel is one of the CoBrA artists most often found on the print market. Issued in print runs ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred impressions, his colour lithographs are an affordable way of living with the work of a major twentieth-century painter.

Before buying a lithograph or etching by Appel, check the technique, the print run and its justification (numbered impression, artist’s proof, hors commerce), the pencil signature, the publisher and printer, whether the sheet comes from a suite or portfolio, and of course its provenance and condition. The colours should have kept their original brilliance, with no light-staining or fading.

Original print or reproduction? Appel’s images have been widely reproduced as posters and offset prints. An original print is conceived by the artist for printing, issued in a limited edition and usually signed and numbered by hand on fine paper; a poster generally carries lettering and is unnumbered.

Le Coin des Arts selects each of Karel Appel’s original prints for its authenticity, provenance and condition, and is happy to advise collectors on choosing a work, on framing and on conservation. Explore, too, the other CoBrA artists in the gallery, including Corneille, Pierre Alechinsky and Jean-Michel Atlan.

Sources and further reading

Karel Appel Foundation, Amsterdam · Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, Karel Appel. L’art est une fête !, press kit, 2017 · Tate, Karel Appel · Jan Vrijman, De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel, film, 1961.