NEW YORK — Karel Appel’s paintings are instantly recognizable. Bold and colorful, they are full of life and detailed with exuberant swirls of color and abstracted images. The Dutch artist (1921-2006) often listened to jazz when painting, and his artworks reflect inspiration by this music as well as folk art and children’s art. His works, while complex, have a whimsical and imaginative quality to them.
Born in Amsterdam, Appel studied art there from 1940 to 1943 and had his first solo show in the city in 1946. His early influences included Picasso and Matisse and later on, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Miro and Paul Klee. According to the Guggenheim Museum, he was a member of the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep (Dutch Experimental Group) in the late 1940s and created the CoBrA group (active 1948–51) with painters from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, hence the group’s name. The post-war era in Europe and America in the 1940s and 50s saw an evolution in the visual language among artists, and CoBrA artworks became known for their expressive and striking compositions. Brush strokes were expressions of creative spontaneity and improvisation.
While Appel’s works are abstract, they are firmly rooted in representational art. “Hoping to recapture the impulse and spontaneity of youth, he sought to achieve a childlike freshness and energy in his work by rendering his subjects in a deliberately awkward, naive fashion, with no attempt at modeling or perspectival illusionism,” says the Guggenheim’s website.
Large heads often populated his canvases. A 1967 painting, Head With Flower, attained $85,000 plus the buyer’s premium in April 2021 at Concept Art Gallery. The painting was displayed in one of several exhibitions he had at the groundbreaking Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City. Appel had moved to Paris by the time the gallery was showing his work, but he visited the United States often.
When it comes to Karel Appel, collectors believe that more heads are better than one. Appel paintings with multiple images of heads command strong prices at auction. At the peak of his fame, he painted works such as Quatre Tete (Four Heads), a 1958 oil on canvas that brought $90,000 plus the buyer’s premium in May 2017 at Rago Arts and Auction Center.
His deep affection for childhood comes across clearly in his artworks. In a recorded interview with Arthur Hanlon in 1972, he summed up his painterly style, saying, “Sometimes my work looks very childish, or child-like, schizophrenic or stupid, you know … In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go to paint it.”
His most celebrated paintings feature energetic blending of colors, such as in a 1974 oil on canvas, Personnage on Red, which made $66,196 plus the buyer’s premium in November 2021 at A.H. Wilkens Auctions & Appraisals.
Imaginative animals were a favorite motif of Appel’s, from household pets such as cats, dogs and birds to snakes, elephants and crocodiles. His subjects come alive on the canvas, most notably in City-Cow, a 1973 acrylic painting that sold for $143,525 plus the buyer’s premium in May 2022 at Tajan. A departure from his usual style of swirling whorls of color, this painting instead features swaths of hues that confidently claim their own spaces on the canvas: fire engine reds, sunny yellows, twilight sky blues and purples, and sunset orange.
In the 1980s, Appel expanded his focus to window painting. He embraced this medium in this decade though he originally began work in stained glass back in the late 1950s; he is said to have first used stained glass in a church commission depicting the story of Genesis in six windows in the Kruis Church in Geleen, the Netherlands.
Appel played with the effects of light in his window paintings and created window designs for a number of religious buildings. In 1982, he accepted a commission of four stained glass windows for Temple Sholom in Chicago. Appel’s were installed in the sanctuary and featured scenes from the life of David taken from stories in the Old Testament. A set of gouache on paper drawings that served as studies for these windows – David the Shepherd, David the Psalmist, David the Warrior and David the Anointed King – sold together for $48,000 plus the buyer’s premium in June 2020 at Heritage Auctions.
Karel Appel’s approach pushed the boundaries of art, and his vision continues to attract new admirers and collectors. He ignored what others regarded as rules for making art and created from his heart. In doing so, he unleashed a wellspring of creativity that charms and compels the attention of audiences.