Karel Appel

Karel Appel (1921–2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet whose violent colour and child-like figuration helped define the CoBrA group, the post-war European avant-garde named for the home cities of its founders Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. He worked across painting, ceramics, stage design, and tapestry over a career of six decades.

Christiaan Karel Appel was born on 25 April 1921 in Amsterdam. His father Jan Appel ran a barber shop in the Dapperbuurt neighbourhood and his mother Johanna Chevalier was of Huguenot descent. The family expected Karel to join the family business, but an uncle paid for his first paint set when he was fourteen.

He studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam from 1940 to 1943, and after the war joined Constant Nieuwenhuys and Corneille in the Dutch Experimental Group, which in 1948 merged with Belgian and Danish artists to form CoBrA. His 1949 mural Questioning Children in Amsterdam city hall caused a public scandal and was covered over for ten years.

He moved to Paris in 1950 and from 1957 divided his time between New York, Monaco, Tuscany, and Connecticut. Major retrospectives travelled to the Stedelijk Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. He published the poetry collection Psychopathological Notebook in 1950 and designed sets for opera and ballet from the 1980s. He died in Zürich on 3 May 2006.

His name Karel derives from the Germanic karl meaning "free man." Karel is a Dutch and Czech masculine name corresponding to the English Charles.