Karel Appel (1921-2006)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY OF A DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN COLLECTOR
Karel Appel (1921-2006)

Tête Bleue (Blue Head)

Details
Karel Appel (1921-2006)
Tête Bleue (Blue Head)
signed and dated 'ck. appel '53' (upper left)
oil on canvas
115.5 x 89cm.
Painted in 1953
Provenance
Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich.
Esther Robles Gallery, Los Angeles.
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.
David Anderson Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
Exhibited
Basel, Kunsthalle Basel, Appel, Mathieu, Moreni, Riopelle, 1959, no. 6.
San Francisco, San Francisco Art Museum, Karel Appel. West Coast Exhibition, 1961-1962, no. 21 (illustrated, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum; Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum; Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Art Museum; Seattle, Seattle Art Musem; La Jolla, La Jolla Art Museum.
New York, Stephen Hahn Gallery, Karel Appel. Paintings 1951-1956, 1962 (illustrated).
New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Karel Appel: The Early Fifties – Paintings, Gouaches, Drawings, Ceramics 1950-1956. Works from The Martha Jackson Gallery Collection, including recent acquisitions, 1973 (illustrated, unpaged).
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. ! Lot is imported from outside the EU. For each lot the buyer’s premium is calculated as 37.75% of the hammer price up to a value of €150,000 plus 31.7% of the hammer price between €150,001 and €2,000,000, plus 22.02% of any amount in excess of €2,000,000.
Further details
This work is registered in the Archive of the Karel Appel Foundation.

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Lisa Snijders
Lisa Snijders

Lot Essay

Karel Appel’s riveting painting, Tête Bleue (Blue Head), depicts a single child, a corporality of lapis and navy. The bodily forms are coloured with washes of goldenrod and burnt sienna, set against a background of rose and creamy white; atop, Appel has inscribed a lattice of black marks. The painting is vividly unrestrained: heavy and thick black lines forcefully streak the canvas while the figure’s probing stare penetrates the viewer’s sphere. Characteristic of Appel’s practice, Tête Bleue is governed by a tumult of sophisticated chromatic harmonies and robust lines, what art critic Alfred Frankenstein referred to as the ‘infinity of textural effects’ (A. Frankenstein, Karel Appel, New York 1980, p. 13). Devoted to chromatic juxtapositions, Appel understood blue to be the most introspective of colours, and it allowed the artist to summon the whole spectrum of emotion: ‘In modern art, I feel closest to Van Gogh, to the vehemence of his emotions and to his revolutionary spirit. When he paints the blue of the sky, this isn’t the blue that the eye sees; it’s bluer than the blue of the sky, it’s the blue of his emotion. He, too, showed us something of life’s secret’ (K. Appel, quoted in Appel, exh. cat., Osaka, The National Museum of Art, 1989, p. 12).

Appel co-founded the influential artist group CoBrA, but by 1953, its frenetic energy had been exhausted. Seeking new inspiration, he moved to Paris, the centre of the European art world. Appel was particularly enthusiastic about Jean Dubuffet, whose work he had first seen exhibited years earlier at the Galerie Drouin in Paris, and he felt an affinity for Dubuffet’s embrace of the primitive and naïve. ‘[Dubuffet’s] strength,’ remarked Appel, ‘lay in the primitiveness of his figures and portraits as well as the simplicity of his expression. We [sic] were especially inspired by the drawings done by children… Dubuffet gave us the stimulus to break away, to conquer a new expression, a new dimension, a new space’ K. Appel, quoted in Appel, exh. cat., Osaka, The National Museum of Art, 1989, p. 12). Indeed, children were a recurrent subject for Appel, as was the visualization of a childlike state, embodied in Tête Bleue through the wildly expressionistic composition. The lyrical portrait is a confrontation, at once innocent and unsettling, an homage to spontaneity and momentum in a bold, new formal language.

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