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Lot Essay
Karel Appel’s riveting painting, Tête Bleue (Blue Head), depicts a single child, a corporality of lapis and navy. The bodily forms are coloured with washes of goldenrod and burnt sienna, set against a background of rose and creamy white; atop, Appel has inscribed a lattice of black marks. The painting is vividly unrestrained: heavy and thick black lines forcefully streak the canvas while the figure’s probing stare penetrates the viewer’s sphere. Characteristic of Appel’s practice, Tête Bleue is governed by a tumult of sophisticated chromatic harmonies and robust lines, what art critic Alfred Frankenstein referred to as the ‘infinity of textural effects’ (A. Frankenstein, Karel Appel, New York 1980, p. 13). Devoted to chromatic juxtapositions, Appel understood blue to be the most introspective of colours, and it allowed the artist to summon the whole spectrum of emotion: ‘In modern art, I feel closest to Van Gogh, to the vehemence of his emotions and to his revolutionary spirit. When he paints the blue of the sky, this isn’t the blue that the eye sees; it’s bluer than the blue of the sky, it’s the blue of his emotion. He, too, showed us something of life’s secret’ (K. Appel, quoted in Appel, exh. cat., Osaka, The National Museum of Art, 1989, p. 12).
Appel co-founded the influential artist group CoBrA, but by 1953, its frenetic energy had been exhausted. Seeking new inspiration, he moved to Paris, the centre of the European art world. Appel was particularly enthusiastic about Jean Dubuffet, whose work he had first seen exhibited years earlier at the Galerie Drouin in Paris, and he felt an affinity for Dubuffet’s embrace of the primitive and naïve. ‘[Dubuffet’s] strength,’ remarked Appel, ‘lay in the primitiveness of his figures and portraits as well as the simplicity of his expression. We [sic] were especially inspired by the drawings done by children… Dubuffet gave us the stimulus to break away, to conquer a new expression, a new dimension, a new space’ K. Appel, quoted in Appel, exh. cat., Osaka, The National Museum of Art, 1989, p. 12). Indeed, children were a recurrent subject for Appel, as was the visualization of a childlike state, embodied in Tête Bleue through the wildly expressionistic composition. The lyrical portrait is a confrontation, at once innocent and unsettling, an homage to spontaneity and momentum in a bold, new formal language.
Appel co-founded the influential artist group CoBrA, but by 1953, its frenetic energy had been exhausted. Seeking new inspiration, he moved to Paris, the centre of the European art world. Appel was particularly enthusiastic about Jean Dubuffet, whose work he had first seen exhibited years earlier at the Galerie Drouin in Paris, and he felt an affinity for Dubuffet’s embrace of the primitive and naïve. ‘[Dubuffet’s] strength,’ remarked Appel, ‘lay in the primitiveness of his figures and portraits as well as the simplicity of his expression. We [sic] were especially inspired by the drawings done by children… Dubuffet gave us the stimulus to break away, to conquer a new expression, a new dimension, a new space’ K. Appel, quoted in Appel, exh. cat., Osaka, The National Museum of Art, 1989, p. 12). Indeed, children were a recurrent subject for Appel, as was the visualization of a childlike state, embodied in Tête Bleue through the wildly expressionistic composition. The lyrical portrait is a confrontation, at once innocent and unsettling, an homage to spontaneity and momentum in a bold, new formal language.