Karel Appel

Christiaan Karel Appel (; 25 April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.

Childhood Christiaan Karel Appel was born on 25 April 1921 in his parents' house at Dapperstraat 7 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. As a child he was often called 'Kik'. On the ground floor his father, Jan Appel, had a barbershop. His mother, born Johanna Chevallier, was a descendant of French Huguenots. Karel Appel had three brothers. Appel used this very intensively; his 1949 fresco 'Questioning Children' in Amsterdam City Hall caused controversy and was covered up for ten years.

As a result of this controversy and other negative Dutch reactions to CoBrA, Appel moved to Paris in 1950 and developed his international reputation by travelling to Mexico, the United States, Yugoslavia, and Brazil. He also lived in New York City and Florence. His first American gallery exhibition took place in 1954 at the Martha Jackson Gallery. In America he also painted portraits of prominent jazz musicians, including Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. The following year his painting Child and Beast II (1951) was included 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 newcomers like Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Pierre Soulages. He is particularly noted for his mural work. After 1990 he became much more popular in the Netherlands; he had several big shows in Amsterdam and Bruxelles, organized by director Rudy Fuchs. Also, the CoBrA-museum in Amstelveen organized several shows featuring his work. He became the most famous Dutch CoBrA artist.

Appel's work has been exhibited in a number of galleries, including the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, Galerie Lelong in Paris, Galerie Ulysses in Vienna, and Gallery LL in Amsterdam. He also had multiple exhibitions of his works in the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, Netherlands. His estate is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler and Almine Rech.

From 16 January–16 May 2016 the Kunstmuseum Den Haag exhibited Karel Appel: A Retrospective of Appel’s paintings, sculptures, and drawings. From 18 June–18 September 2016, The Phillips Collection exhibited Karel Appel: A Gesture of Color Paintings and Sculptures, 1947–2004, with works from Appel’s long career. In 2016-2017 there were also exhibits of Appel’s works in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Death

Appel died on 3 May 2006 in his home in Zürich, Switzerland. He suffered from a heart ailment. He was buried on 16 May 2006 at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.

Years before his death, Appel established the Karel Appel Foundation, whose purpose is "to preserve [Appel's] artworks, to promote public awareness and knowledge of Karel Appel's oeuvre, and to supervise publication of the Oeuvre Catalogue of the paintings, the works on paper, and the sculptures."

In 2002 a number of Appel's works went missing on the way to his foundation, an event that was not to be resolved before his death. However, in 2012 the works were found in a disused UK warehouse and returned to the foundation.

In the wake of his death, the Foundation (based in Amsterdam) functions as his official estate in addition to its primary service as an image archive. The U.S. copyright representative for the Karel Appel Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.

Gallery

Tributes

"Karel Appel" is the name of a song by art-rock band Poem Rocket from the 2000 record "Psychogeography".

Public collections

Among the public collections holding works by Karel Appel are: Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, The Netherlands Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., US Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venice Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Palais Tokyo), Paris Museum Ludwig, Cologne Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Stanford University Museum of Art, Stanford Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam Tate Modern, London The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gallery Delaive, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY, US Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, Texas McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, Knoxville, Tennessee