NOT BORED! writes:

Karl Appel, 1921–2006
Philippe Dagen

Born in Amsterdam in 1921, Karel Appel received his first lessons in painting from one of his uncles in 1936. From 1940 to 1943, he was a student at Amsterdam's Academy of Beaux Arts, where he became friends with another student one year younger than him, Corneille van Beverloo, who was already called [just] Corneille. In 1946, the two friends found themselves in Liege, hometown of Corneille. Then they showed their work together in Amsterdam in 1948. It was then that they met another Amsteldamois, born in 1920: Constant Nieuwenhuis, surnamed Constant.

Together, on 16 July 1948, they founded the Dutch Experimental Group. In common they had youth, their refusal of all academicism and their taste for Matisse, Picasso and Miro. Several weeks later, they were in Paris, in the company of the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont and the Danish painter Asger Jorn. On 8 November, in a cafe near Notre Dame, they drafted a manifesto of rupture, [entitled] The cause being agreed. Several days later, Dotremont came up with the name of the emerging group: CO for Copenhagen, BR for Brussels, [and] A for Amsterdam. Thus, COBRA. Appel was thus one of the founders of this essential post-war movement.

And, more than any other, he devoted his life to painting: simplified figurative forms, the archaicsm and allusion traced by a systematic and powerful design, colors of a paroxysmal intensity, scattered and dynamic compositions, the horror of "good painting," the pleasure of experimentation. The first emblematic canvases from COBRA, in 1949, carried his signature or that of Constant.

That same year, Appel had two principal motifs: animals and children. The first were extravagant, disporportionate, comical: horses shewn into giraffes, dog-pigs, owl-penguins. The coats and plumes were bright yellow, purple, lawn green. The children had heads shaped like trapezoids cut out from planks. The titles specified: Children who demand. They were inspired by the poverty and ruins of the post-war period. For the restaurant of Amsterdam's Hotel de Ville, the management of which passed to him, Appel created a mural and monumental version of his subject. It provokes such a scandal that the municipal council ordered that it be covered up. The exhibition organized at the Stedelijk Museum in November 1949, which opened with his great canvas [entitled] Men and animals, provoked the same kind of hostile reaction.

The following year, while the COBRA group had already lost its unity and collective ardor, Appel established himself in Paris, where, the preceding year, he had shown his work at the Colette Allendy Gallery and where he forged links with the critic Michael Tapie. Thanks to him, [Appel] showed his work in the following years in Paris and New York. In 1954, he received a prize at the Venice Biennale and, that same year, was invited by Jorn to the International Conference of Ceramics at Albisola [Italy]. That is to say, his international recognition was on course.

He changed nothing in his subjects nor in his style. Birds, real or imaginary animals, frolicked among colored clouds, sometimes joined by feminine figures. The designs remained simple, thrown in black upon the canvas and often submerged by the flow of colors, sometimes a moving supplenesss, other times in a thicker manner that, in relief, conserved the traces of the gestures of the painter. Of the canvases executed in this [latter] manner, one sometimes said that they revived Expressionism.

But this revival would only be stylistic, because Appel -- unlike Constant and Jorn -- held himself distant from political and historical subjects. While his two old friends made contact with [Guy] Debord at the moment that they, with Debord, founded the Situationist International, Appel did not: he worked on the windows for the Church of Zaandam, in the Netherlands, using the [biblical] theme of Genesis.

From 1961 on, while his exhibitions and commissions grew, he experimented with other supports than canvas: trunks of olive wood, then -- from 1964 to 1965 -- huge reliefs in wood or polyester. In the United States in 1971, he created his first monumental sculptures in aluminum. He also continued to develop his painting, to practice etching, but also, as in 1976 in a shantytown in Lima, to work on the walls with the help of the inhabitants of the neighborhood.

In 1985, in his Remarks in Liberty, he affirmed his desire for constant renewal: "I remain available to record the perpetual metamorphoses of the world," he declared. "The eye must remain vigilant [a l'ecoute], like a radar. The street is my studio, my life; the town is my battery of energy."

Up to his last years, despite cardiac difficulties that prevented him from working standing-up, he remained loyal to this profession of faith and continued to paint in the spirit that had been his since 1948.

[Published in the 7 May 2006 issue of Le Monde. Translated from the French by NOT BORED!]