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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Karel Appel :: Biography and Books"
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Karel Appel (1921–2006) was a Dutch painter and sculptor of Modern Art and co-founder of Cobra, a European avant-garde movement that focused on abstract expressionism. Appel’s style is childlike, with thick layers of paint slapped on canvas.
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Christiaan Karel Appel (1921–2006) was a Dutch painter and sculptor of Modern Art, who produced more than ten thousand pieces of art. His style is childlike and influenced by the way mental handicapped people make drawings. This was a very revolutionary approach to art in the 1950s, but is now named as abstract expressionism.
Appel slapped the paint on the canvas using brushes a putty-knife and even his hands. He used vivid colors in thick application. Elements in his paintings are usually surrounded by dark thick lines mostly made of unmixed colors directly from the tube. Appel said about himself: ‘I paint as a barbarian in this barbarian age.’
Christiaan Karel Appel was born in 1921 in Amsterdam. As a child, Karel (nicknamed Kik) knew that he wanted to an artist, he was always drawing and his uncle gave him his first painting materials when he was 15 years. However, Appel had to go to work in the barber shop of his parents. In 1939, the conflict between father and son escalated and young Karel ended up being thrown out of his parental home. Three years later, he went to study fine arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam with a state-funded scholarship.
In 1948, Karel Appel travels with Corneille and other members of the Dutch Experimental Group to an international conference in Paris. There, he co-founded together with other North-European artists the group CoBrA (abbreviation of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam). The work of the artists of Cobra consisted of semiabstract paintings with brilliant color, violent brushwork, and distorted human figures. Cobra was important for the development of abstract expressionism.
In 1949, Appel was commissioned to paint a large mural for the cafeteria of the City Hall of Amsterdam. The mural ‘Questioning Children’, was not well received by the employees of the City Hall and after a protest from employees against and the artistic community in favor of the piece of art, it ended up covered with wallpaper for ten years.
Works of the Experimental Group and Cobra were not appreciated in Amsterdam either. An exhibition of Cobra in 1950 in Amsterdam created a controversy. However the same exhibition was surprisingly well received in Copenhagen and Brussels. In 1954 Karel Appel was awarded the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) prize at the Venice Biennale exhibition. Appel won a graphics prize at the Ljubljana Biennial in Yugoslavia in 1957. He was awarded an International Prize for Painting at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959.
Karel Appel’s work was more and more appreciated internationally and in 1968 there was finally a one-man exhibition of Appel in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. By the end of the 20th century, Appel has four studios in New York, in Connecticut, in Monaco and in Toscane and was his art also commonly accepted in the Netherlands. A museum in Amstelveen is now dedicated to work of Cobra and Karel Appel.
Karel Appel died in Zurich on 3 May 2006 and was buried at the famous Père-Lachaise Cemetary in Paris.
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