Karel Appel - Circus

Year: 1978 Edition: 78 / 200 Technique: Lithography Signed: signed and numbered (on the front in the middle). Condition: Very good Image size: 84.5 x 60 cm. Frame size: 118 x 93 cm. The frame is 6 cm wide and 2.5 cm deep. The lithograph is floating framed in a silver-colored wooden frame in a recessed passe-partout. The frame does have some user damage, see photos. Karel Appel (Amsterdam, 25 April 1921 – Zurich, 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter and sculptor in modern art from the second half of the twentieth century, who can be considered an Expressionist. He made his breakthrough with his membership of the Cobra group. Biography Appel was born in the Dapperstraat in Amsterdam, in a working-class neighborhood. As a child he was called 'Kik'. His father was the son of a milkman and had a barbershop, where people met. 1940–1945 World War II From a young age, Appel knew he wanted to become a painter, but his parents preferred him to work in the barbershop. He had to work for his father for a few years. In 1942, he went to study painting at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Dissatisfied with this career choice, his parents put him out on the street. Appel followed this education until 1944. At the academy he learned about art history, about which he had learned little at home. He trained in traditional drawing and painting. To make his studies possible, Appel received a grant from the Department of Public Information and Arts (DVK). According to Adriaan Venema, Appel regularly contacted the national socialist Ed Gerdes, head of the Architecture, Visual Arts and Applied Arts department of the Department of Public Information and Arts, to obtain this grant, from whom he often asked for extra support, which he did not always receive. In retrospect, Appel was accused of going to study during the German occupation, while the Germans were pursuing a very repressive policy against the so-called Entartete Kunst in their own country and within the Netherlands mainly against artists of Jewish descent. Appel himself stated that he had never collaborated with the Germans, that he would have liked a grant, but that he had only attended the academy to learn to paint well. Appel therefore did not feel connected to the Germans. Art was a matter of the heart and political preferences interested him little. Other artists were more principled during the war and refused, for example, to become a member of the Kultuurkamer, which meant that they were not allowed to work, sell and had to do without an income. During his time at the Rijksakademie, Appel met Corneille. He met Constant a little later. An intense friendship developed between them that would last for many years. After the war, Appel travelled with Constant to Liège and Paris. The two exhibited together. At the beginning of the Hunger Winter, Appel fled his home – he no longer lived with his parents – for fear of being arrested by the German occupiers because of his refusal to work in Germany. During the winter he wandered through the Netherlands, in the direction of his brother who lived near Hengelo. Painting was hardly possible during that period, although he did draw a few portraits of starving people. After the war, Appel returned to Amsterdam weakened, where he had a brief relationship with Truusje, who soon died of tuberculosis. There were few who saw anything in Appel at the time. Exceptions were the art critic H. Klinkenberg, who wrote a positive article about Appel, and the wealthy Liège collector Ernest van Zuylen, who bought art by Appel every year. 1946–1956 Cobra In 1946, Appel had his first solo exhibition in Het Beerenhuis in Groningen. Later, he took part in the exhibition Young Painters in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. During this period, he was mainly influenced by the art of Picasso, Matisse and Jean Dubuffet. The latter in particular made raw works with materials other than just paint. Appel began sculpting in 1947, after consulting sculptor Carel Kneulman. However, Appel's contemporaries did not call his products sculptures. Appel collected all kinds of waste, even dismantled the wooden shutters of his windows and the hook of the hoist beam of his attic room. From that wood, a broomstick and a vacuum cleaner hose he made the work Drift op Zolder. With red and black paint he applied the shape of a head and eyes. During this period Appel lived together with Tony Sluyter. On 16 July 1948, the artists Karel Appel, Corneille and Constant, together with Anton Rooskens, Theo Wolvecamp, who called himself Theo Wolvé, and Jan Nieuwenhuys, Constant's brother, founded the Experimental Group in Holland. Tjeerd Hansma was also present at the foundation, but this maverick and fighter left the group. The Belgian writer Hugo Claus joined later. The first publication of the group contained a strongly left-wing manifesto by Constant. Appel did not feel part of it, he was only interested in art; "l'art pour l'art". When Appel made a series of paintings called Kampong bloed, in response to the police actions of the Netherlands in Indonesia, he was more interested in human indignation about the suffering of the individual than in expressing a Marxist point of view. In November 1948, several members of the Experimental Group attended an international conference on avant-garde art in Paris, which had been organized by French and Belgian surrealist colleagues. Constant read a translation of his manifesto, which, however, did not appeal to the public. Among others, the Belgian Christian Dotremont found the French approach too sectarian. Several Danish, Dutch and Belgian artists withdrew from the congress and founded the group Cobra. 'CoBrA' is an abbreviation of Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. Meanwhile, the work of the Experimental Group was poorly received in the Netherlands. A Christian monthly, "Op den uitkijk", wrote that they would be better off paving the Kalverstraat with their work, or throwing it in the IJ, than bringing it to the attention of the bourgeois Dutch people. Nevertheless, De Bijenkorf exhibited the work of Appel, Corneille and Constant, where it was seen by the architect Aldo van Eyck, among others. However, the director of the Stedelijk Museum, Willem Sandberg, had (as yet) "no room" to exhibit art by the Experimental Group. In Denmark, the work of Cobra was received favourably by the press. When Appel travelled to Copenhagen, he enjoyed the friendly atmosphere there. To the surprise of the members, Cobra did get an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1949. The exhibition became a scandal. Disappointed, Appel settled in Paris in 1950. He later said that the constant insults had driven him out of the Netherlands. The same exhibition as in the Stedelijk Museum was then shown in Paris and was much better received there than in Amsterdam. In Paris, Hugo Claus introduced Appel to Michel Tapié, who subsequently organised several exhibitions of Appel's work. In 1953, Appel was given a solo exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1954, he received the UNESCO Prize at the Venice Biennale. Appel was still not accepted in the Netherlands. He did receive a commission from the city of Amsterdam to make a mural for the canteen of the city hall (the current hotel The Grand), but this led to a commotion. After protests from the civil servants, the work entitled Vragende kinderen (Questioning Children), then called the Twistappel (Twist Apple), was covered with wallpaper for ten years. The civil servants found the painting barbaric, cruel and violent. In late 1950, Appel and Hugo Claus jointly produced a set of illustrated poems, De blijde en onvoorziene week, which people could receive by pre-subscription. It turned out that there were only three subscribers. The booklet was published in 200 copies, copied and coloured in by hand. Claus wrote about this in 1968: "It was our 'policy' to produce such a booklet in one afternoon. With minimal encouragement, we would have produced fifty a year." But that encouragement was lacking, given the number of subscribers. A copy of this edition is one of the highlights of the Special Collections of the Royal Library in The Hague. After the break-up of Cobra, Karel Appel began to paint with increasingly thicker paint, impasto. His work became increasingly wild and seemingly less controlled. Appel's international breakthrough began around 1953, when his work was shown at the São Paulo Biennial. In 1954, Appel had solo exhibitions in Paris and New York. He made numerous murals for public buildings. In 1955, he made an 80-meter-long mural for the National Energy Manifestation 1955. 1957–2006: International breakthrough From 1957 onwards, Appel travelled regularly to New York. There he painted portraits of jazz musicians, among other things. He developed his own style, independent of others. During this period he increasingly moved in the direction of abstract art, although he himself continued to deny this. The title of a work such as Composition seems to indicate this. In the late sixties, Appel moved to the Château de Molesmes, near Auxerre. In the meantime, Appel was increasingly internationally appreciated. In 1968, there was finally a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Exhibitions followed in the Kunsthalle in Basel, in Brussels (1969), and in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (1970). A traveling exhibition through Canada and the United States followed in 1972. Around 1990, Appel had four studios, in New York, Connecticut, Monaco and Mercatale Valdarno (Tuscany).[1] He used the studio in New York in particular to experiment with his painting. He worked out the experiments from New York in his other studios. Because of the different light in Tuscany, for example, work with the same themes was created there with a completely unique character. On the occasion of an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, he told Rudi Fuchs, then director of the museum, about his work. Before he started, he would look at the canvas for a long time, but once he started painting, he could hardly keep up with his impulses to apply paint. He gave the impression of working like a man possessed, although he did take a lot of time to mix the paint in the right color. When the canvas was almost finished, he worked more slowly, eventually making only a single touch or even leaving out the last improvements. Appel always worked on one painting at a time. Shortly before his death in 2006, Appel completed a stamp for TPG Post. The stamp with a value of 39 cents was issued in September 2006 on the occasion of an exhibition about visual artists and stamps entitled Art to send. Karel Appel was buried in private at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Statements Appel made many winged statements, which provoked considerable resistance among the general public in the years following the Second World War: • I just mess around a bit. I lay it on really thick these days, I throw the paint on with brushes and putty knives and bare hands, sometimes I throw whole pots on it at once. To the magazine Vrij Nederland in response to the film by Jan Vrijman. This statement gave rise to the creation of the verb "aanappelen" in Bargoens, meaning "to proceed with indifferent arbitrariness" or "to do whatever". The word probably fell into disuse later when Appel was generally accepted as an artist.[2] • I paint like a barbarian in these barbaric times. • Over the years I have learned how to apply oil paint to canvas. I can now do whatever I want with paint. But it is still a struggle, still a fight. At the moment I am still in chaos. But it is my nature to make chaos positive. That is the spirit of our time today. We always live in terrible chaos, and who can make chaos positive? Only the artist. Monaco, 1986. • Tais-toi et sois belle. Shut up and be beautiful, to Sonja Barend. • I also use more paint!!, after Appel pocketed a large part of the proceeds from a Cobra group exhibition. The painting style of Karel Appel Appel never painted abstractly, even according to himself, although his work approaches that strongly. There are always recognizable figures to be discovered; people, animals or suns for example. During the Cobra period, from 1948 onwards, Appel painted simple shapes with strong contour lines, filled with bright colours. His work belongs to Modern art and the painting style is abstract expressionism. Subjects were friendly innocent child creatures and fantasy animals. He was influenced by the way people with a mental disability draw and paint, something that could be called revolutionary at the time. Appel's work gave rise to comments such as "I can do that too". Appel supplemented the style of children's drawings with the style of African masks. Later, Appel abandoned the coherence of form and colour. He worked with mostly black contour lines to indicate figures. He often used unmixed paint for these contours, squeezed directly from the tube. But he seemed to pay little attention to the contours and the colour he applied to shape the figures. The colours spread outside the contour and the colour of the background often penetrates the figure. According to art historian Willemijn Stokvis, Appel threw himself into the paint with total dedication during his painting career, in order to let a primal scream resound from it. This approach is completely opposite to the working method of Appel's world-famous Dutch contemporary Mondrian. "Both represent two poles of the history of modern art, in which they relate as the utmost control to the erupting spontaneity. Both searched for the primal source of creation, a search that may well form the basis for an important part of modern art. Mondrian searched for the primal formula on which the construction of the cosmos rests; of Appel one can say that he tried to awaken the creative urge within himself with which that universe would have been made," according to Willemijn Stokvis. Appel's work is usually built up in multiple layers, which gives the work depth and relief. On an almost monochromatic, but carefully painted background, he painted his subjects in at least two stages. According to himself, he often turned the work upside down or looked at the work between his legs. This is a well-known way to check whether the composition of a work is balanced. Appel often made different versions based on the same theme. For example, he made several works with the title of the controversial mural in Amsterdam, Vragende kinderen (Questioning Children). These were not only paintings, but also works of art consisting of a wooden relief, painted in primary and secondary colours. Appel continued to make series with the same theme throughout his life. At the end of the 1970s, for example, he made a series Face in Landscape, with which he wanted to express that man and nature form a unity. Apple's drive is evident in his statement: To me, a life without inspiration is the lowest, most basest thing there is.