Lot 13
13
Karel Appel (1921-2006)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more COBRA 70 YEARS: CREATION BEFORE THEORY‘It is undeniable that Cobra has not ceased to be haunted by a violent desire for a form of art capable of transforming everybody’s existence’ – Max Loreaucorneille and appel came to see metold about the new groupfounded in parison a terrace near notre dameartists from occupied capitalsCOpenhagen BRussels Amsterdam (cobra)wanted to demonstrate togethertheir spontaneous vitalitynext fall in the stedelijk:the first cobra show!when the exhibition was mountedi felt enchanted:red roaring beasts black monstersshouting from the museum wallsfrightening visitorswho had come to enjoy “fine arts”a black cage at the entrancehung with manifestos by writersoutcries of poets against the establishmentinfuriated the criticsnewspaper headlinesstrongly decried the scandal:“insanity extolled as art!”“tumult in a museum!”– Willem Sandberg, curator of the Stedelijk Museum, 1974When the painter Pierre Alechinsky first saw the work of the Cobra movement in Brussels in 1949, he instantly declared allegiance to its utopian, revolutionary spirit. ‘Cobra’, he said, ‘means spontaneity; total opposition to the calculations of cold abstraction, the sordid or “optimistic” speculations of Socialist Realism, and to all forms of split between free thought and the action of painting freely; it also means a step towards internationalism, and a desire for despecialisation (painters write, writers paint)’ (P. Alechinsky, 1949, quoted in A. Frankenstein, ‘Cobra’, in Karel Appel, New York, 1980, p. 21). In the first days of a newly-liberated Europe, the artists of Cobra drew on a powerful, hopeful energy that was permeating the continent. Transcending the traditional domains of painted canvas and printed page, they sought to create a new art for a new society. Bound together by their uncontainable exuberance, raw vitality and spirited resistance to accepted modes of art-making, their aspiration to reinvent civilisation through reinventing art made Cobra perhaps the last true avant-garde movement of the 20th century. Across the Post-War Contemporary Evening and Day sales, Christie’s is delighted to present a selection of works which document the dynamism of this period of European history.Though it is difficult now to reconstruct the essence of vigilance, resistance and revolt which permeated the meetings of the artists, and which crowded the pages of the Cobra journals with polemical letters and declarations, the movement had its origins like all true avant-gardes: in the smoky back rooms of a Paris café. On 8 November 1948, in the café-hôtel Nôtre-Dame on the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques, members of the Dutch De Experimentele Groep, Constant, Karel Appel and Corneille, met with their Danish counterpart, Asger Jorn. Escaping the warring factions of post-war Surrealism, and guided by the Belgian surréaliste-revolutionnairé Christian Dotremont, then and there they wrote and signed their first manifesto, The Case Was Heard. Dotremont later recalled the founding principles which had, in that moment, united them: ‘Creation before theory; that art must have roots; materialism which begins with the material; the mark as a sign of wellbeing, spontaneity, experimentation: it was the simultaneity of these elements which created Cobra. Cobra was, fundamentally, a simultaneity. Also elements of the popular, crude, expressionist, infantile, surrealist, even. Also that of painting and of written verbal expression’ (C. Dotremont, ‘Archive Cobra’, 1963, reproduced in Cobra, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels 2008, p. 14).Defined by the geographical loci of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam – all cities, pertinently, that had been only recently liberated from the cultural dictates of Nazi occupation – the original Cobra members sought to distance themselves from the theoretical infighting of Paris, founding a collaborative northern European network. They were as much opposed to the hard geometry of Mondrian and de Stijl as they were to the Academy, seeking to break free from the rigid forms and restricted palettes that dominated the avant-garde scene at the time. The movement quickly outgrew its origins, eventually involving some sixty poets, painters and sculptors from Germany, Sweden, France and England, as well as from Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. Together, they made exuberant, collective, experimental and interdisciplinary works, striving to capture that most elusive and authentic act: creating freely and spontaneously.Inspired in part by Surrealist automatism, which revered the secret, magic instant of unconscious inspiration, the Cobra artists set about supplementing their visual vocabulary with sources outside classical Western art. Ancient Nordic myths, children’s drawings, primitivism in the tradition of Miró and Picasso – Karel Appel once wrote he was ‘making a powerful primitive work, more primitive than … Picasso’ – all came together in what would later become known as the ‘language of Cobra’ (K. Appel, letter to Corneille, 1947, quoted in K. Kurczynski and N. Pezolet, ‘Primitivism, humanism and ambivalence: Cobra and Post-Cobra’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 59/60, 2001, p. 290). On the pages and canvases produced by the Cobra artists, a joyous chaos ensued, where form and colour, finally liberated, erupted and clashed in a riot of semi-figural, symbolic forms. For Asger Jorn and the other Cobra artists, these sources of inspiration brought renewal, the feeling of spring after winter, of new life after a shackled sleep. ‘When spring comes, children – like hunted dangerous animals – always know where to steal a piece of chalk to anoint dead concrete walls or streets of lifeless asphalt with their living language’ (A. Jorn, quoted in Cobra, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels 2008, p. 155).In the end, Cobra would soon be consumed by its own furious energy. ‘The simultaneity was as powerful as a railway catastrophe,’ Dotremont recalled. ‘A short sharp shock. And we, we did not know anymore whether it was Copenhagen, or Brussels, or Amsterdam. We did not know anymore whether we were painters or writers. This lasted exactly a thousand days and a thousand nights. This, for a railway catastrophe, was enormous. In the end, Alechinsky collapsed … We went too far, Jorn departed for the sanatorium, as did I. If we had continued for another month, at that rate, there would not have been any survivors’ (C. Dotremont, ‘Archive Cobra’, 1963, reproduced in Cobra, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels 2008, pp. 14-15). Yet Cobra undoubtedly laid its mark on the lives of its members, whether they went on to pursue other ideological struggles like Asger Jorn in the Situationist International, veered into entirely new territories like Enrico Baj, or, like Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky, went on to develop the Cobra idiom into sustained, ambitious bodies of work. Their boldness and vitality resounded throughout the world: the lifeblood of Cobra can be traced through Dubuffet’s primitivist Art Brut in France, the performances of the Japanese Gutai group, the gestural passions of Abstract Expressionism in New York, and even the vivid image-channelling of Jean-Michel Basquiat. While the Cobra artists may not have rebirthed society through art, their ethos of vibrant, spontaneous and joyful experiment is very much alive.
Karel Appel (1921-2006)

Composition

Details
Karel Appel (1921-2006)
Composition
signed and dated 'ck.appel '54' (lower left)
oil on canvas
133 x 110cm.
Painted in 1954
Provenance
Studio Paul Facchetti, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1958.
Literature
F. van den Berg, 'Appel krachtpatser met mes en troffel in Amsterdam', in Het Vrije Volk, 16 December 1955 (illustrated).
J.v.d.S, 'Karel Appel', in De Groene Amsterdammer, vol. LXXIX, no. 51, 17 December 1955, p. 14 (illustrated, p. 14).
Exhibited
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, De V Generaties, 1955-1956.
Special Notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. “ ! ”: Lot is imported from outside the EU. For each Lot the Buyer’s Premium is calculated as 37.75% of the Hammer Price up to a value of €30,000, plus 31.7% of the Hammer Price between €30,001 and €1,200,000, plus 22.02% of any amount in excess of €1,200,000.
Further Details
This work is registered in the Archive of the Karel Appel Foundation.

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Lot Essay

Painted in 1954, and held in the same collection since 1958, Karel Appel’s Untitled quivers with raw painterly vitality. From thick, molten terrains of impasto, rendered in bright primary colours against a maelstrom of white and grey, a primitive humanoid form writhes into being. Created three years after the disbandment of Cobra – the revolutionary artistic movement co-founded by Appel – the work combines the visceral dynamism of the group’s early years with the liberated, expressionistic language developed in its wake. 1954 was a pivotal year for Appel. Having travelled extensively throughout North and South America, as well as Europe, he began to take his place on the global stage, receiving the UNESCO Prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale and making his American solo debut at Martha Jackson Gallery. The following year he featured in the seminal group exhibition The New Decade at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which placed him alongside artists such as Francis Bacon, Pierre Soulages and Jean Dubuffet. Drawing inspiration from Art Informel, as well as children’s drawings and folk art, Appel sought to channel the energy of post-war Europe into a new visual language: one in which figurative, bestial and abstract forms were brought together in howling, primal discord. ‘The human figure comes to the fore in the pictures of the middle and late 1950s’, writes Alfred Frankenstein. ‘… What immediately seizes one’s attention is the great whirlpool of their eyes’ (A. Frankenstein, Karel Appel, New York 1980, p. 13). With its gaping black sockets peering out from the surrounding painterly furore, the present work is a fitting embodiment of this statement.

Appel’s intensely physical approach to his materials – variously likened to a battle or a boxing match – was the product of an innate sculptural sensibility. His early assemblages, created with materials salvaged from the streets of Amsterdam, fuelled his approach to pigment, which frequently piled up on the canvas in grainy, half-formed protrusions. In 1950, Appel had moved to Paris, where he had immersed himself in the city’s vibrant cultural scene. He greatly admired Picasso and Dubuffet and, after his work was spotted by the influential critic Michel Tapié, became associated with the thriving Art Informel movement. Though he rejected comparison with Abstract Expressionism, his work was nonetheless underpinned by a deep emotional resonance. The colour blue, in particular – which dominates the present work – held great significance for Appel as a vehicle for introspection. ‘In modern art, I feel closest to Van Gogh’, he wrote. ‘… 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).

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