The dynamic pictorial panorama of the second half of the 20 th century had a lot of protagonists, but very few of them reached such prominence as Karel Appel's had

As many others artists of its generation, Appel suffered the tragedy of the World War Two, which had a considerable influence -in a conscious or unconscious way- in all his artistic oeuvre . A native from Amsterdam , Appel was forced to leave the city to avoid be arrested by the occupying Nazis in 1944. Shortly afterwards, he returned to the Dutch capital to take part in an exhibition of young artists in the Stedelijk Museum .

THE NUDE BRUSHSTROKE

"The nude brushstroke, that's what I search" , Appel said in his first years. With his emaciated figures and bright -often disturbing- colours, Appel´s paintings were not well accepted by a criticism still used to the geometric abstraction of his countryman Pietr Mondrian.

Nevertheless, Appel's interests and his eagerness to recover the primitivism as engine of the artistic expression were shared by many of his young contemporaries, and in 1948, when he was only 27 years old, Appel take part of the founder group of an artistic movement that played a highly important role in the artistic evolution in Europe in the second half of the 20 th Century: The Cobra Group.

AN ANIMAL, A NIGHT, A SCREAM, A HUMAN BEING, A WHOLE." THE COBRA GROUP

Founded in 1948 as an answer to the geometric abstraction, the Cobra Group (named with the first letters of the native cities of its members - Copenhagen , Brussels and Amsterdam- ) had such famous members as PIERRE ALECHINSKY (1927), AGER JORN (1914-1973), CORNEILLE (Cornelis van Beverloo, 1922) or Appel himself. Their art were characterized by spontaneous, vitalistic and impulsive brushstrokes, demanding a complete artistic freedom. The same Appel declared that " I paint like a lout in this lout times" . The huge mural created in 1949 in the Amsterdam City Hall caused an enormous controversy and was covered up for nearly a decade.

In the early 50s, Appel reached the zenith of his Art, with his devious pictures of human beings and animals of vivid colours, violent foreshortenings and no evidence of perspective.

LAST YEARS

Nevertheless, in the following years Appel developed his painting into the figuration or even the abstraction. In the late sixties, he dealt with artistic fields such as the sculpture or the illustration. However, he never abandoned the human figure as a reference in his creations.

Karel Appel died on the 3 rd of May 2006, and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris , along with other famous artists as Oscar Wilde, Theodore Gericault and Jim Morrison.