Lot 73 D

From the end of the 1940s, Karel Appel orientated himself artistically towards children's drawings. He appropriated the naïve unselfconsciousness and unrestrained fantasy with which children express themselves through painting and took on also the childish imagery. The depictions of all sorts of animals interacting with each other or with human beings belong to the most frequent motifs in his work.
A complex structure of lines, the impact and pastosity of which visualises the underlying excessive painting process, merges on the canvas to a depiction of two beings, of which the lower could be understood as a donkey or a cat, and the upper as the grimacing head of a cat or chicken. The background, in the upper half black and in the lower half orange-brown, allows the white and yellow of the lattice to clearly emerge. The sculptural presence of colour dominates the painting, no detail of the representation helps to clarify the picture's content. The composition originates solely from the imagination and the exuberant creative urge of the artist; it is thus clearly in harmony with the artistic principles of COBRA.
Appel himself commented in retrospect on the efforts that drove him and his artist colleagues: “Cobra was the only really new movement after the war in Europe. A true movement like Dada, Surrealism, Tachism, and so on. All these movements existed before the war and they had nothing new to offer. But the Cobra group started as new, was the first to throw everything we knew overboard and to start again like a child - fresh and new. My work seems very childlike or naïve sometimes, schizophrenic or stupid. But that was important for me. Because for me, the material is the paint itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination. I paint the imagination that I find in the material I paint with.” (Karel Appel, quoted from: COBRA 1948-51, exhib.cat. Kunstverein Hamburg 1982, p.54)