Lot Essay
"Art is an expression of man and his nature ... Like a bird singing according to its nature, like a hungry child that cries." (Karel Appel cited in Karel Appel, A. Frankenstein, New York 1980, p. 60)
Painted in 1952 shortly after the final demise of the CoBrA movement Les enfants et l'oiseau (Children and Bird) is a joyous and colourful work whose subject matter is mirrored by the manner of its execution. Depicting two excited children seemingly inciting a bird to fly, the painting's subject matter and the intuitive freeform way in which its images are created, convey an atmosphere that speaks eloquently of the unfettered freedom of childhood and of the potential for flight. Painted as if through the eyes of a child and using children as a metaphor of his own creativity, Appel attempts to create a raw vision of the joyous world of childhood and its seemingly infinite potential.
For Appel, as for most of his fellow CoBrA artists, the child's view of the world represented an innoncence and a vitality that, after years of War, held perhaps the only hope for creative renewal and development. Seeking in folk art, primitive art and above all the art of children an aesthetic uncorrupted by Western tradition, Appel sought to attain the same rawness of approach in his own work. In doing so he developed a wholly intuitive approach that led him to revelling in the material nature of his paint. "Sometimes my work looks very childish or child-like, schizophrenic or stupid", he once said , "but, that was a good thing for me, because for me the material is the paint itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go to paint it." (In an interview with Alan Hanlon, New York, 1972)
In Les enfants et l'oiseau colours squeezed straight from the paint tube are thickly and garishly clashed together in excited sweeps of heavy impasto that almost magically form the crude but imposing personages in the painting. Emphasised by a cool grey surround that undoubtedly represents the drabness and deadness of the street and the urban surroundings, Appel's figures scream with both colour and life.
Painted in 1952 shortly after the final demise of the CoBrA movement Les enfants et l'oiseau (Children and Bird) is a joyous and colourful work whose subject matter is mirrored by the manner of its execution. Depicting two excited children seemingly inciting a bird to fly, the painting's subject matter and the intuitive freeform way in which its images are created, convey an atmosphere that speaks eloquently of the unfettered freedom of childhood and of the potential for flight. Painted as if through the eyes of a child and using children as a metaphor of his own creativity, Appel attempts to create a raw vision of the joyous world of childhood and its seemingly infinite potential.
For Appel, as for most of his fellow CoBrA artists, the child's view of the world represented an innoncence and a vitality that, after years of War, held perhaps the only hope for creative renewal and development. Seeking in folk art, primitive art and above all the art of children an aesthetic uncorrupted by Western tradition, Appel sought to attain the same rawness of approach in his own work. In doing so he developed a wholly intuitive approach that led him to revelling in the material nature of his paint. "Sometimes my work looks very childish or child-like, schizophrenic or stupid", he once said , "but, that was a good thing for me, because for me the material is the paint itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go to paint it." (In an interview with Alan Hanlon, New York, 1972)
In Les enfants et l'oiseau colours squeezed straight from the paint tube are thickly and garishly clashed together in excited sweeps of heavy impasto that almost magically form the crude but imposing personages in the painting. Emphasised by a cool grey surround that undoubtedly represents the drabness and deadness of the street and the urban surroundings, Appel's figures scream with both colour and life.