Lot Essay
Cats the size of Benghal tigers. Women and children with balloon like heads and rainbow-coloured birds from some far-away paradise island. Painted with a shock of primary colours and delineated without consideration for perspective as a maze of black outlines, the characters merge into one another to form a jig-saw frieze. We are faced here with a kindergarten vision of a magic world, pictured with naive honesty and unfettered imagination.
But this is of course no mere child's daub. Karel Appel was thirty years old when he painted Femmes, Enfants, Animaux in 1951 and at the height of his creative powers. Dutch by birth, he was then a leading member of the soon-to-be-disbanded CoBrA group, an international association of artists formed in 1948. They had banded together under the common belief that post-war art had become shackled by academic technique and "civilised" notions of beauty. Instead, like Jean Dubuffet, who they knew and admired, Appel and his cohorts celebrated uninihibited creativity and instinctive expression. In this regard, they championed the work of primitive artists and the art of the insane. Above all they sought inspiration in the innocent vision of children, not yet tarnished by the repressive tendencies of Western culture.
The Belgium painter Pierre Alechinsky explained, "CoBrA is a form of art which heads toward childhood, tries to recover folk art and child art for itself with the means available to adults, non-naive means." Thus, while Femmes, Enfants, Animaux echoes the warm world of childhood in its primoridal subject matter, its bold coloration and free distortion of forms, it is nevertheless informed by a highly sophisticated understanding of 20th Century art history, Surrealist automatism, Freudian psychology and existenialist philosopy.
The horrors of the Second World War had irrecoverably tarnished the young generation's attitude towards authority and the establishments that had sanctioned the bloodshed. A call for a fresh beginning was sounded in many political and artistic circles. The symbol for this new society was the child. Childhood was seen as the living possibility, the starting point, a vital force for change both in life and art.
Appel especially viewed children's drawings as the foundation for a rejuvenated art and society. "It was Appel who went furthest in identifying with children; the child was one of the iconographic themes to which he would return throughout the entire course of his work. "Very often people exclaim when they see my work "Look at that! My three-year-old daughter could have done it!" To which I reply: "Yes, that's true, but the difference is I did it and she didn't."" (Jean-Clarence Lambert, Cobra, Paris 1983, p.78).
Femmes, Enfants, Animaux ranks as the largest and most ambitious painting by Appel ever to come to auction. Its monumental scale suggests an attempt by the artist to create a single masterpiece that would encompass the full litany of his revolutionary ideas.
The painting sports a unique provenance. Acquired directly from the artist by Albert Niels in the early 1950's, it has remained in the hands of his family ever since and has never been seen publicly outside his native Belgium.
Niels was a friend and principle patron of the CoBrA artists and Femmes, Enfants, Animaux was a centrepiece in a collection that included major works by Asger Jorn, Constant and Pierre Alechinsky. In 1958, for example, Niels acquired Asger Jorn's Stalingrad: No Man's Land, the latter artist's challenging response to Picasso's Guernica. Today it hangs in the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark. Moreover, Niels also owned Jorn's Lettre a mon fils, 1956/57, which is presently in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London.
But this is of course no mere child's daub. Karel Appel was thirty years old when he painted Femmes, Enfants, Animaux in 1951 and at the height of his creative powers. Dutch by birth, he was then a leading member of the soon-to-be-disbanded CoBrA group, an international association of artists formed in 1948. They had banded together under the common belief that post-war art had become shackled by academic technique and "civilised" notions of beauty. Instead, like Jean Dubuffet, who they knew and admired, Appel and his cohorts celebrated uninihibited creativity and instinctive expression. In this regard, they championed the work of primitive artists and the art of the insane. Above all they sought inspiration in the innocent vision of children, not yet tarnished by the repressive tendencies of Western culture.
The Belgium painter Pierre Alechinsky explained, "CoBrA is a form of art which heads toward childhood, tries to recover folk art and child art for itself with the means available to adults, non-naive means." Thus, while Femmes, Enfants, Animaux echoes the warm world of childhood in its primoridal subject matter, its bold coloration and free distortion of forms, it is nevertheless informed by a highly sophisticated understanding of 20th Century art history, Surrealist automatism, Freudian psychology and existenialist philosopy.
The horrors of the Second World War had irrecoverably tarnished the young generation's attitude towards authority and the establishments that had sanctioned the bloodshed. A call for a fresh beginning was sounded in many political and artistic circles. The symbol for this new society was the child. Childhood was seen as the living possibility, the starting point, a vital force for change both in life and art.
Appel especially viewed children's drawings as the foundation for a rejuvenated art and society. "It was Appel who went furthest in identifying with children; the child was one of the iconographic themes to which he would return throughout the entire course of his work. "Very often people exclaim when they see my work "Look at that! My three-year-old daughter could have done it!" To which I reply: "Yes, that's true, but the difference is I did it and she didn't."" (Jean-Clarence Lambert, Cobra, Paris 1983, p.78).
Femmes, Enfants, Animaux ranks as the largest and most ambitious painting by Appel ever to come to auction. Its monumental scale suggests an attempt by the artist to create a single masterpiece that would encompass the full litany of his revolutionary ideas.
The painting sports a unique provenance. Acquired directly from the artist by Albert Niels in the early 1950's, it has remained in the hands of his family ever since and has never been seen publicly outside his native Belgium.
Niels was a friend and principle patron of the CoBrA artists and Femmes, Enfants, Animaux was a centrepiece in a collection that included major works by Asger Jorn, Constant and Pierre Alechinsky. In 1958, for example, Niels acquired Asger Jorn's Stalingrad: No Man's Land, the latter artist's challenging response to Picasso's Guernica. Today it hangs in the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark. Moreover, Niels also owned Jorn's Lettre a mon fils, 1956/57, which is presently in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London.