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Artist Index
Karel Appel's La Promenade (1950) Childhood Christiaan Karel Appel was born on 25 April 1921[1] in his parents' house at Dapperstraat 7 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. On the ground floor, his father, Jan Appel, had a barber shop. His mother, born Johanna Chevalier, was a descendant of French Huguenots. Karel Appel had three brothers.[2] At fourteen, Appel produced his first real painting, on canvas, a still life of a fruit basket. For his fifteenth birthday, his wealthy uncle Karel Chevalier gave him a paint set and an easel. An avid amateur painter himself, Chevalier gave his namesake some lessons in painting.[3] Career He studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam during the German Occupation from 1940 to 1943 and met there the young painter Corneille and, some years later, Constant; they became close friends for years. His parents didn't agree this choice for becoming an artist, so he had to leave his home; this was also necessary because he needed to hide himself for the German police as a young man,to avoid that he was picked up and send to Germany to work in the weapon industry. 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. He joined the Experimentele Groep in Holland together with the young Dutch painters Anton Rooskens, Theo Wolvecamp and Jan Nieuwenhuys. Later the Belgian writer Hugo Claus joined the group. Karel Appel (1921-2006), Farmer with Donkey and Bucket (1950) In 1948 Appel joined CoBrA (from:Copenhagen, Bruxelles, Amsterdam) together with the Dutch artists Corneille, Constant and Jan Nieuwenhuys (see also Aart Kemink) and with the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont. The new art of the Cobra-group was not popular in the Netherlands, but in Denmark it found in that period a warm and broad welcome. The Danish artists started already in 1939 to make spontaneous art and had discovered their sources partly in Danish and Nordic mythology. It was also in Denmark that the Cobra artists started cooperating by painting the insides of houses collectively, which encouraged and intensified the exchange of the typical 'childish' and spontaneous picture language in the CoBra group. Appel used this source very intensively; his 1949 fresco 'Questioning Children' in the Amsterdam City Hall caused controversy and was covered up for ten years.
Karel Appel 'Big Head', 1957, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin As a result of this controversy and other negative Dutch reactions on Cobra Appel moved to Paris in 1950 and he developed his international reputation travelling to Mexico, the USA, Yugoslavia and Brazil. He is particularly noted for his mural work and lived between New York and Florence. After 1990 he became much more popular in the Netherlands; he had several big shows in Amsterdam and in Bruxelles, organized by director Rudy Fuchs. Also the Cobra-museum in Amstelveen organized several shows with his work. He became the most famous Dutch artist of Cobra.
Karel Appel 'Clown', 1954, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin Death Appel died on 3 May 2006 in his home in Zürich, Switzerland. He suffered from a heart ailment.[4] He was buried on 16 May 2006 at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.[5] Years before his death, Appel established the Karel Appel Foundation, whose purpose is "to preserve [Appel's] artworks, to promote public awareness and knowledge of Karel Appel's oeuvre and to supervise publication of the Oeuvre Catalogue of the paintings, the works on paper and the sculptures.".[6] In the wake of his death, the Foundation (based in Amsterdam) functions as his official Estate, in addition to its primary service as an image archive. The U.S. copyright representative for the Karel Appel Foundation is the Artists Rights Society[7] Bibliography * Appel, Karel: Psychopathological Notebook. Drawings and Gouaches 1948–1950. Bern - Berlin: Verlag Gachnang & Springer, 1999. ISBN 978-3-906127-57-6
1. ^ (Dutch) Houts, Cathérine van (2003). Karel Appel : de biografie. Amsterdam: Olympus. pp. 13. ISBN 9789025419134. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License Artist Index ==--==--==
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