Lot Essay
Raw colour is the first thing to strike the eye when looking at La Femme Assise. The sporadic bursts of primary colour, sometimes pure and controlled within the black lines, sometimes mixed to create brown, grey, ochre and stripes, lead the eye up and down the various shapes of the composition
La Femme Assise reflects Appel's preoccupation with children's drawings, folk and primitive art which strongly influenced the CoBrA Group. In an interview directed by Richard Graburn, Appel revealed his disenchantment with the rational and analytical views of the Paris School: "The CoBrA group started new and first of all we threw away all these things we had known and started afresh, like a child - fresh and new."
Appel does achieve a child-like naivety in this picture, and like children who have not learned how to copy accurately, he uses complex foreshortening and modelling techniques to recreate a monumental figure. The forms do not suggest a seated woman, and yet the recognisable symbols and shapes are those which one associates with the female sex.
The disembodied and re-constructed figure bears striking similarities with certain primitive creations, such as totem poles, where human and animal attributes are combined to create a symbol of identity and power. As in the African mask, the human features are exaggerated and distorted to look more fierce and terrifying, and the colours and stripes are reminicent of war paint. All these attributions are used to obtain a psychological advantage over others, to reinforce the hierarchy through fear.
"I torture matter to extract expression from it... I fight with the paint," explained Appel in an interview with Edy de Wilde, emphasising his instinctive, semi-automatic process. This, he insisted, was inspired partly by the pigment itself, and partly by the need to rebuild confidence in one's own strength, so necessary in post-war Europe.
La Femme Assise reflects Appel's preoccupation with children's drawings, folk and primitive art which strongly influenced the CoBrA Group. In an interview directed by Richard Graburn, Appel revealed his disenchantment with the rational and analytical views of the Paris School: "The CoBrA group started new and first of all we threw away all these things we had known and started afresh, like a child - fresh and new."
Appel does achieve a child-like naivety in this picture, and like children who have not learned how to copy accurately, he uses complex foreshortening and modelling techniques to recreate a monumental figure. The forms do not suggest a seated woman, and yet the recognisable symbols and shapes are those which one associates with the female sex.
The disembodied and re-constructed figure bears striking similarities with certain primitive creations, such as totem poles, where human and animal attributes are combined to create a symbol of identity and power. As in the African mask, the human features are exaggerated and distorted to look more fierce and terrifying, and the colours and stripes are reminicent of war paint. All these attributions are used to obtain a psychological advantage over others, to reinforce the hierarchy through fear.
"I torture matter to extract expression from it... I fight with the paint," explained Appel in an interview with Edy de Wilde, emphasising his instinctive, semi-automatic process. This, he insisted, was inspired partly by the pigment itself, and partly by the need to rebuild confidence in one's own strength, so necessary in post-war Europe.