£813
Contemporary & Post-War Art | Prints & Multiples | 635
Auction: Contemporary & Post-War Art | Prints & Multiples
Lithograph, E.A., signed and editioned in pencil to margin
Karel Appel was a leading member of 20th century Europe’s avant-garde. Born in the Netherlands in 1921, he began painting in his early teens, later studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam during the German occupation in the 1940s.
His work was heavily influenced by the earlier notorious art establishment disruptors Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jean Dubuffet and the impact of his own art was to cause similar scandal in the eyes of the public and press. Highly regarded now for his paintings, murals, sculpture and poetry, Appel is famously synonymous with the CoBrA Group, which he joined in 1948. CoBrA was a faction of experimental cross-disciplinary artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. Their work shocked and bemused Dutch society but found a warm welcome in Denmark. Typically, the group’s visual language was playful, spontaneous and deliberately child-like.
Appel’s career was truly international, with time spent travelling to Mexico, Brazil and Yugoslavia, as well as living for periods in Paris, Florence and New York. He was exhibited extensively in the latter city in the 1950s, including in the influential exhibition ‘The New Decade’ at the Museum of Modern Art which featured the work of twenty-two European painters and sculptors including Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Pierre Soulages.
Lyon & Turnbull are delighted to offer this wonderful work dating from the 1970s. It is a classic example of the artist’s typical iconography, which often included representations of the human form and animal kingdom in idiosyncratic style. It shows the absorption of the work of forebears including Paul Klee and Joan Miro, as well as referencing the unselfconscious purity and freedom of folk and children’s art. His approach to painting was impetuous and instinctive – often involving squeezing paint directly from the tube and using his fingers, a palette knife and occasionally a brush to manipulate his materials. The results, as here, take on a life of their own. The colours are joyful, the imagery playful, and yet an underlying chaos and unnerving absurdity is also present.
The creatures Appel created in these acrylic works of the 1970s were sometimes later realised as sculptures or limited edition lithographic prints. The work offered here for sale relates closely, with some small differences, to the lithograph ‘I am an Animal’, printed in an edition of 100 in 1971. It could reasonably be posited that this work is potentially the original on which the lithograph is based, and consequently an image the artist esteemed highly enough to be serialised into print form.