Karel Appel

Biography

The mural “Questioning Children” was finished on 14 March 1949, in the canteen of Amsterdam City Hall. A committee of the city council had approved the sketch, but the finished work so outraged the staff that it was covered with paper wallpaper for ten years. Officials called it barbaric and cruel.

Appel was born on 25 April 1921 in a house on Dapperstraat in Amsterdam. His father kept a barbershop on the ground floor, his mother came from a family of French Huguenots, and there were four sons in all. He painted his first real picture, a still life with a basket of fruit, at fourteen. An uncle, himself an amateur painter, gave him paints and an easel for his fifteenth birthday and a few lessons. After school Karel worked for his father, and his parents wanted to see him a barber. He nevertheless enrolled at the Rijksakademie, the state academy of fine arts in Amsterdam. By some accounts he studied from 1940 to 1943, by others from 1942 to 1944. His parents, unhappy with his choice, put him out of the house. At the academy he met Corneille and later Constant; the friendship lasted many years. In the winter of 1944, the Hunger Winter, he hid from the Germans so as not to be sent to work in Germany, and wandered across the country to his brother near Hengelo. He could hardly paint, but he drew portraits of starving people.

In 1946 Appel had his first solo exhibition, in Groningen, and then took part in the show “Young Painters” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He looked to Picasso, Matisse and especially Jean Dubuffet. From 1947 he began making objects from rubbish and scrap wood: he took apart his own shutters and the hook of the beam in his attic, and painted the pieces red and black.

On 16 July 1948 Appel, Corneille, Constant, Anton Rooskens, Theo Wolvecamp and Jan Nieuwenhuys founded the Experimental Group in Holland. The Belgian writer Hugo Claus joined later. Constant’s manifesto leaned to the left, while Appel, by his own account, thought only of art. The series of paintings “Kampong Blood” was a response to the Netherlands’ colonial war in Indonesia, but what concerned him was not political slogans but the suffering of the individual. In November 1948 members of the group travelled to Paris for a conference on avant-garde art, walked out of it together with Danish and Belgian artists and founded CoBrA, named from the first letters of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. In Denmark it was received warmly; there the artists first began painting the walls of houses together. It seems to me that the children’s drawings Appel took as his model gave him the language in which “Questioning Children” is written. In 1948–1949 he made this subject three times as a wooden relief as well: pieces of wood nailed to an old window frame, with gouache over them. The Dutch word “vragende” means both “questioning” and “begging”. The CoBrA exhibition at the Stedelijk in 1949 also ended in scandal.

In 1950 Appel left for Paris. He said later that endless abuse had driven him out of the Netherlands. In Paris Hugo Claus introduced him to the critic Michel Tapié, who organised several exhibitions for him. In 1952 Appel left CoBrA and joined the French Informel movement. His paint grew thicker and his manner rougher. International recognition came in the 1950s: in 1954 he was awarded the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale and a prize at the graphic arts biennial in Ljubljana, and had solo exhibitions in Paris and New York. In 1959 he received a major prize at the São Paulo Biennial, and in 1960 the Guggenheim International Award for “Woman with Bouquet”, painted two years earlier; he was thirty-nine, the youngest artist ever to receive it.

From 1957 he travelled regularly to New York and painted portraits of jazz musicians, among them Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. There were commissions: an eighty-metre mural for an exhibition in Rotterdam (1955), murals for the Stedelijk, six windows for the Paaskerk in Zaandam (1957), and a wall painting for UNESCO in Paris (1958). In 1964 Appel bought a château near Auxerre and lived there, then in Florence, New York and Zurich. He travelled to Mexico, the United States, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Japan and China. From the 1970s he turned more and more to sculpture in wood, aluminium and polyurethane, colourful and bright. He also designed sets for the theatre, wrote poetry and composed music. His solo exhibition at the Stedelijk did not take place until 1968, and from the 1990s he was taken seriously in his own country as well: Rudi Fuchs organised large exhibitions of his work in Amsterdam and Brussels.

Appel died on 3 May 2006 at his home in Zurich. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The foundation he established in 1999 looks after his legacy and is preparing a catalogue of his works.