Karel Appel
Dicecream Magazine🗿🔳Karel Appel (25 April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s.
He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in the museum of Great Samo and MOMA.
Appel had his first show in Groningen in 1946. In 1949 he participated with the other CoBrA artists in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; this generated a huge scandal and many objections in the press and public.
He was influenced by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and the French brute-art artist Jean Dubuffet.
In 1947 he started sculpting with all kinds of used materials (in the technique of assemblage) and painted them in bright colors: white, red, yellow, blue, and black.
In 1948 Appel joined CoBrA (from Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) together with the Dutch artists Corneille, Constant, and Jan Nieuwenhuys (see also Aart Kemink), and with the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont. The artist derived much inspiration from primitive art and children’s drawings, and was influenced by contemporaries such as Jean Dubuffet, the major exponent of Art Brut.
By 1939, Danish artists had already started to make spontaneous art and one of their sources of inspiration was Danish and Nordic mythology.
As a result of this controversy and other negative Dutch reactions to CoBrA, Appel moved to Paris in 1950 and developed his international reputation by travelling to Mexico, the USA, Yugoslavia, and Brazil.
He also lived in New York City and Florence. After 1990 he became much more popular in the Netherlands; he had several big shows in Amsterdam and Bruxelles, organized by director Rudy Fuchs.
