Karel Appel

Karel Appel (April 25, 1921 – May 3, 2006) was a Dutch painter and sculptor. He was one of the early founders of the European avantgarde movement COBRA in 1948. Later Appel lived and worked in Paris and in the U.S. His painting art is mainly colorful and gestural.

Quotes of Karel Appel

chronologically arranged, after the date of Karel Appel's quotes

My work is in a complete transformation. Lately, in my studio in Amsterdam, 'beings' re-emerge more and more, but I have repainted all the canvases that I have brought with me [from Amsterdam to Paris]. It is matter itself. On the canvas, no discovery, no personal drama, no submission to a rhythm.. ..freed from 'Victory Boogiewoogie' [title of the last work of Piet Mondrian, 1944], bepop, bepop, we free ourselves from rhythm, we are not there yet, but it is coming.. .Now I paint stains, bigger stains, colours endlessly reapplied one upon the other, I scrape and I put down new stains of colour unto nothing remains but one great plane, concentrated and linked at the same time, suddenly a vivid red or yellow and the canvas and being merge.
- Quote in a letter of Karel Appel from Paris to Aldo van Eyck, October 1950; as quoted in (MR1-85); Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 99

I don't paint, I hit.
- quote circa 1958; from the movie 'De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel', Jan Vrijman; as quoted in De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN Nijmegen, 1998

I paint like a barbarian in this barbarous time.
in Dutch: Ik schilder als een barbaar in deze barbaarse tijd.
- quote, c. 1960; from the documentary De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel, by Dutch filmer Jan Vrijman, 1962

Of course, I painted before Cobra, as afterwards. Each one of us [CoBrA-artists] had his own personality. Cobra is only a very short period of my life. It was like a crossroads. We crossed paths and each continued on his way.. ..We [artists] are not born to form groups. A group that lasted for too long would destroy the creative activity of its members.
- Quote of Appel in an interview with fr:Michel Ragon, 1963; as quoted in; Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 105
- fr:Michel Ragon asked Appel: 'Without Cobra, would you have been what you are today?'

Now we'll start the song of the wild man who lives on the mountain top, who does not want to be seen
let us now start that song without words, without music, come on..
(let's not do anything for at least ten minutes)
That's the spirit, there he comes, the song of the inner voice, the song of the primitive man
- a poem of Karel Appel, 1981; from Karel Appel. The Colourful Stranger. Poems and Drawings (Karel Appel. De kleurige onbekende. Gedichten en tekeningen), Amsterdam, 1986

I'm able to paint so nice and thick with those big splodges that stay upright because I mix my own paint. I use the formula that the seventeenth-century painters used and I've added one or two things myself. A very important element is stand oil. I once got hold of a whole barrel full and I'm still using it. There are pots of it in all my studios, in New York, in Connecticut, in Monaco, and in Tuscany. [the oil had been found when an old paint shop closed down, in a] stock that had been there since the seventeenth century.. .I mix my oil paint with it, and I throw in a lot of eggs and some concentrated turpentine. It's as thick as homemade mayonnaise. When it dries it is as tough and hard as rubber.
- Quote from an interview in 'Elsevier', 22 December, 1990; translated and quoted by Frank van der Ploeg, in 'The Low Countries'. Jaargang 12 (2004)

I have painted like an ape. The ape phase is in all my work. My first lick of paint is the ape phase, from that I grow towards a more intellectual phase, involving the lines, the rhythm. From that phase I grow towards mankind, for that is where the power of my imagination lies. It no longer has anything to do with reality, even though the world is present in it - for we recognize people, animals, plants, you name it.
- quote of Karel Appel: from the conversation with Rudy Fuchs in 1990; as quoted in 'The Low Countries', Jaargang 12(2004) on DBNL (Dutch Librairy online)

..at least fifty [gouaches painted in complete dark], one after another. Then I made a light, a candle, and I picked them up and turned them around, as I couldn't see a top or a bottom. I finished them off as I felt fit, a bit more white or a red spot [in his studio in Amsterdam, in 1947
- Quote from a talk in 1990 with Rudi Fuchs; in 'Appel, about growing older'; as quoted by Frank van der Ploeg, in 'The Low Countries'. Jaargang 12(2004)

When you get older as a painter and you've got the opportunities, the talent and the good fortune and have been provided with everything for getting old, then it's fantastic, because the same brushstroke that you put down is more mature and more poignant than it was when you were young.
- Quote from a 1995 interview with Rudi Fuchs; in 'Appel, about growing older'; as quoted by Frank van der Ploeg, in 'The Low Countries'. Jaargang 12(2004)

Willem de Kooning, they say, lost his memory. He lost his worldly memory. He lost the names of the people, he lost their faces.. .This is one of the reasons he paints as a real painter.
..And his painting is like the wind, like a breeze blowing the paint across the canvas, so unreal, so loose and far away from the worldly life.
He is like an angel who floats for a little while on this planet and touches with his wings the canvas.
That is what he used to do, what he is doing now for the last hears. He is the only painter who paints like that.. ..like the wind, like the ocean, like the light, like the sunlight, like the moonlight, far away from everything, without any image..
- quotes from Appel's poem '..and now I want to talk about Willem de Kooning, February 1990

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. Sometimes my works look very childish, or childlike, schizophrenic or stupid, you know. But that was the good thing for me. Because, for me, the material is the paint itself. The paint expresses itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go on to paint it.
- Quoted in: 'Karel Appel, Dutch Expressionist Painter, Dies at 85', by Margalit Fox, in 'Art & Design', New York Times May 9, 2006
- Quote of an oral history in 'Contemporary Artists' - Karel Appel describes the wild artistic urgency that gave rise to the Cobra artist-group

'Karel Appel's excerpt', c. 1953

Quotes from: 'Karel Appel, excerpt', c. 1953, in Karel Appel, Painter, eds. Hugo Claus, Harry N. Abrams - New York, 1962; as quoted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, eds. Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz, University of California Press, 1996, p. 209

My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast.

To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.

It's like this - you are in front of your canvas, you hand holds the paint, ready, raised. The canvas waits, waits, empty and white - but all the time it knows what it wants. So - what does it want, anyway? My hand comes near, my eyes begin to transform the waiting canvas; and when - with my hands holding the paint and my eyes seeing the forms - I touch the canvas, it trembles, it comes to life.

The struggle begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand, forms. New apparitions stalk the earth.

'Karel Appel defines his painting', interview 1968

Quotes from 'Karel Appel defines his painting', interview by Adam Saulnier, broadcast date 24 October, 1968; source : ORTF - Collection: L'Amour De L'Art -

..people always talk about painting, because basically painting does not talk.

To keep it short and simple.. ..you take the subject, that is for example the wood, and the colour, the paint. You compose the subject, the realistic subject, you make a fantastic shape. For example, here, this is some wood, this is a table with a top and wooden flowers, you know, therefore I paint a [flowery] table, for example..
- explaining his way of imagination

..because I live in Paris, but just outside Paris at the start of Yonne, I have a barn, a very, very big barn.. ..right near Auxerre, a barn forty meters long, six meters wide and fifteen meters high, and I do all my work there.. it's like a large street, you know.
- describing the location outside Paris, where he makes his large relief compositions

..I believe, they always say to me that I'm an expressionist, I don't know why, because perhaps the technique is [not understood] and the colour is strong.. .But for some years, I work, I feel much more of, of the space, that is: magic is spacious if you like. Because for me man is an infinitely creative space. And because of that I am always looking to expand my work, you know, to find space.
- explaining his need for large sizes

'Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990)

Quotes from: Karel Appel – the complete sculptures, eds. Harry de Visser / Roland Hagenberg, Edition Lafayette, New York 1990

The wastelands belong to my youth [c. 1930's]. When I was young I played in the outskirts of the city - watching the cranes at the harbour. There was no law but garbage, grass and wildflowers like boys and girls, rough, hot and sexual and full of hidden pleasures. Life and death are overlapping in the wastelands like in my paintings.
- pp. 75-77 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)
- Appel's quote is referring to his youth in Amsterdam, in the outskirts and the ports of the Dutch city

You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture.. .The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions.
- pp. 75-77 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)
- Appel is referring to the Italian movie-maker Pasolini

One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real 'objet trouvé'; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience.
- p. 79 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression.
- p. 85 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

Our civilization is in a continuous state of self-repair. Maybe you have undergone surgery once. In former times you might have died. Today everybody can live on and on; everything around us is repaired, even the spirit. Look at the young artists. They only paint the facade and not the things hidden behind it. I don't say that life is lost its originality. I show straightforwardly the state of repair of civilization.
- p. 85 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)
- Appel is referring to his sculpture 'State of liberty'

As an artist you have to fight and survive the wilderness to keep your creative freedom. Creativity is very fragile. It's like a leaf in the fall; it hangs and when it drops you don't know where it's drifting.
- p. 91 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, The 'Leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.
- p. 93 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)
- Appel's quote is referring to his sculpture 'Monument for Walt Whitman', dedicated to the American poet

As I said, in the Fifties I had the 'angst' (= Dutch for 'fear') to survive materialistically. In the city Paris it was a battle. I painted with a knife and called the results 'human landscapes', abstract landscapes with human faces here and there. Today I can do without fight or struggle; every brushstroke now is ready, goes by itself: la peinture depouillé you could say. I discovered that in Picasso's late paintings. You look very closely but there is nothing anymore. He painted here and there a little bit; it is not finished, but once you step back you see a fantastic image, life by itself. I'm not fighting anymore; I'm floating, surfing on the wind.
- p. 95 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

'Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990) not-paged

Quotes from: Karel Appel – the complete sculptures, eds. Harry de Visser / Roland Hagenberg, Edition Lafayette, New York 1990, not-paged

The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.

Through play, we renew contact with childhood - My art is childlike.

[artists are people] who employ matter between birth and death. Matter is something to use, not possess.

Knowledge isolates phenomena and things to observe with.. ..nothing is isolatable or can be removed from its environment. Anything which becomes isolated ceases to exist. It is like the violent refusal of someone to play a game in which everyone cheats.

The experience of the moment is what's important, and somehow the image, the 'thing' is left over.

My brush-strokes start in nothing and they end in nothing, and in-between you find the image.
- Quote from 'The eye of the beholder', Carlo McCormick

Every day I have to be awake to escape.. .The whole world is sleepy. It is a real fight to be awake, to see everything new, for the first time in your life.
- Quote from 'The eye of the beholder', Carlo McCormick

There exists an insanity that touches on a higher level, by knowledge or instinct. That insanity of life I try to put in my painting. It has nothing to do with any morals or laws. It is there and it is insane.
- in 'The eye of the beholder', Carlo McCormick

All the absurdity and hope are the stimulants to create. You make art to find a little hole to go on. You go through the whole to find the world again, and the absurdity is that still, somehow it is the same.. .Hopelessness and hope are the same. It's a very thin line you don't see any more. I don't believe in that line between hopelessness and hope today.
- in 'The eye of the beholder', Carlo McCormick

'Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

Quotes from: Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, , Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text - based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel: 1992), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009

At the very moment when my ego is unprooted [uprooted?] and freed of intellectual activities and values, the realization of what is still unknown and uncreated, the silent 'non-form' unity emerges, appearing as childish schizophrenia. The indefinable beginning takes form
- 1969 - from CF,32; p. 45

Something appears midway between order and chaos, these forms, these expressions occupy a middle position.
- 1973 - from CF,35; p. 67

A war is raging within me that burns everything. So I can begin again.
- quote 1982 - from CF, 48; p. 83

Theories / are things.. .Absence and nonexistence / of theories are things.
- quote 1983 - from CF, 63; p. 55

The true artist has no style. Style is an exterior decorative element. The true artist as servant of his matter, transcends it with an absolute freedom.
- quote, 1984 - from ATV', 188; p. 49

If the stroke of the brush is so important, it is because it expresses precisely what is not there.
- quote 1985 - from CF, 44; p. 69

a sky of clouds completely 'out of the blue'.. .I'm looking, reflecting, and when it suddenly happens: hey, the clouds, and what clouds! [in interview with nl:Ischa Meyer, c. 1988]
- quote c. 1988 - from ('RM'), 157; p. 41

Theories
Are the things and neither idealism
nor religions, nor histories
nor slogans.
The complexity of things themselves, that's what
theories are.. .The thing exists without showing itself,
entirely, it
does nor appear, theory is the
thing.
- CF 63; p. 111

It is a question of expressing, at base,
the essence of the tree.. .What does not appear
in what does appear, in short.
What remains hidden, concealed,
withdraws into what appears.
- ATV 13; p. 121

I am afraid of a new barbarism which is killing
man's freedom.
- ATV 179; p. 151

In poetic creation there is no
question of overcoming matter, as the
idle aesthetic proclaimed
by so many people would have it – but to free matter.
- ATV 187; p. 151

If I had not become a painter,
I would surely have become a clown..
.. because I make people laugh..
..Faces deformed
by suffering, humour or work.
Often crazy. They then became imaginary,
when I adorned them with movements
free colours depending on the head. The
colour too become clown-like
- AF, 73; p. 161

Pollock.. .I also feel
like an erupting volcano.
- ATV, 187; p. 167

The brushstroke, in painting, is purely and
simply what it is – rhythm,
color, matter.
- ATV, 187; p. 175

The mill is a tool for the wind
the mill is like a human being
that escapes
- ATV, 47; p. 183

('My three year old daughter can do as much'.) Yes, it is true, but the difference is that I do it.
- MR1, 51; p. 197

The only control that I excercize [in painting] is to not throw too much paint next to the canvas.
- MR1, 177; p. 215

[Karel Appel called out to 'his Night':] You, Beauty! And since I have to account for a body, I have handed this torture over to the executioner
- CF,28; p. 219

Quotes about Karel Appel

Quotes sorted alphabetically by author

Born in a district of Amsterdam, from his youth the artist [Appel] came into contact, according to Peter Bellew, with the sculpture of Dutch New Guinea, a good example of which is to be found in the collection of the Colonial Museum (today the Tropenmuseum) [300 meters from his parental house]. Appel himself told Simon Vinkenoog that all his work was popular, in that it came from the people, adding that it wasn't "folk" popular, but more the kind of popular found in an industrial, incipiently consumerist society, with high waste levels, like the Amsterdam of his youth, a popularity from which neither violence nor a certain degree of chaos are exempt.
- Quote of Valeriano Bozal – in B'09: Bulletin. Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, no. 5, 2010, pp. 255-300

Karel Appel had been deeply interested in the paintings and drawings of the mentally ill since his discovery of Dubuffet's Art brut. As he explained years later, he had had access to this type of work in Holland, Belgium and Paris. However, it was the 1950 exhibition [September 1950, exhibition of Art, inaugurated at the Centre Psychiatrique Sainte-Anne, Paris] that opened his eyes definitively and enabled him to shake off European classicism.. .[But] what I want to point up here is that, although the Sainte-Anne exhibition was crucial for his understanding of such paintings, he had already made his own excursions into 'psychopathological art'[before].
- Valeriano Bozal – in B’09: Bulletin. Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, no. 5, 2010, pp. 255-300 (+ note 15: 'Conversation entre Donald..' 1997, p. 22)

[Appel's paintings] assert themselves with a certain brutality that leaves little room for doubt.. .Appel exists.. .Appel's paintings exist, they are made of colour-paste. His painting is absolutely materialist.
- Quote of Dotremont, c. 1950; in the 'Preface' of his monograph on Appel, intended for the Cobra library); as quoted in Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 103

Violence allows Appel to lose 'nothing' of the 'whole'; to stop his painting only after all the leaps of the act have crossed it.
- Dotremont, 1958; in La jeune Ecole de Paris, Jean-Clarence Lambert; Le Musée de Poche, Paris, 1958; as quoted in (MR1, 127); Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 103

[Appel] has to shatter, to infringe. It is his deployment. He is a solitary man with a staggering health. He leaves dreaming to matter.
- Dotremont c. 1962, in 'L'oeil' (nr. 96) (MR1-28); as quoted in Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 103

[Appel] is a classical painter who lives much less in the 'madding' crowd and far more in the quiet of his studios.
- Quote of Rudi Fuchs 1991, Exhibition curated by R. H. Fuchs and F. W. Kaiser, p. 102; as quoted by Valeriano Bozal – in B’09: Bulletin. Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, no. 5, 2010, pp. 255-300 (+ note 5)

[Appel's painting] 'Hip, Hip, Hourra!' (1949) is one of the finest works he produced in this period. The figures stand out from the black background surface.. ..in a lively movement and colouring I would go so far as to call sumptuous.. ..'Hip, Hip, Hourra!' is as flat as a kaleidoscope. It is a coloured drawing on black, a dark box with colours stuck on like butterflies in a glass case.. ..[Fuchs compares it with a slightly later painting 'Volons ensemble']: This work is definitely not a set of figures that have settled quietly in a painting; what we have is a confusion of more or less figurative movement: a composition without quietude. In 'Volons ensemble' Appel created in 1950 the model for a structure that would be fundamental for the rest of his oeuvre.
- Rudi Fuchs 1991, p. 104; as quoted by Valeriano Bozal – in B'09: Bulletin. Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, no. 5, 2010, pp. 255-300 + note 12,13)

..by adding and more adding, you soon get such an accumulation of colour material that the painting eventually acquires a heavy, febrile surface. The danger is of such a thick, abundant, heavy surface seeming dull and sluggish to the eye, because in that case it would lose the mobility, which, for Appel, is the essential quality of all surfaces. Painting blinds painting, like mud and clay blocks a pool. A painting's entire choreography, caught in tension, can collapse in an instant. And it's in that instant when Appel the draughtsman gets to work, and the open play of the lines of the drawing is the right medium to blow new life into the painting.
- Rudi Fuchs 1991, p. 106; as quoted by Valeriano Bozal – in B’09: Bulletin. Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, no. 5, 2010, pp. 255-300 (note 14)

Now you know what red does: / Red likes to walk in the green grass. / You now know what yellow knows: / The sun shines because no one's fond on dying. / As for blue: the blue sky seems black / to the kid who welcomes nothing.
- poem-lines of Lucebert, c. 1950; as quoted in Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 219
- excerpt from a poem by Dutch poet Lucebert on Appel's painting 'Questioning children', c. 1949 (Lucebert joined with Appel in the Dutch 'Experimental Group', 1948 - just before CoBrA

Occasion is a good word: it speaks of an 'offered case'. The painter also lives on such plundering. Karel Appel is touched by a circumstance, and make paintings out of his feeling. Appel's work touches in turn those that encounter it, and they leap at the occasion to reflect on it. Art and thinking live on these, jostling.
- Quote of Jean-Francois Lyotard (1990), in Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, eds. by Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret, Leuven University Press, 2009, p. 27

..Appel does not hesitate to expose his colour to rubbish. More than any other this work returns 'aesthetic discourse to its precariousness: how could it articulate coloured things that so clearly result from a 'gesture' and are free from any finality. It is not the gesture of the painter, it is the gesture of painting, or painting as gesture that Appel opposes to thought.
- Jean-Francois Lyotard (1990), in Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, eds. by Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret, Leuven University Press, 2009, p. 27

The painter is the first dancer of his work. Appel understands the appeal to disturb the finished work as he is in the process of making it. He drops his canvas, his paper, puts down his brush – that is to say, he resigns himself to the deposition of the gesture, as one gives in to fatigue by taking a break. He will soon begin performing again..
- Jean-Francois Lyotard (1990), in Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, eds. by Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret, Leuven University Press, 2009, p. 47

The body trained to deal with worries and with itself falls apart. A contradictory body rises from it, a will to see shows itself what can only be seen at night. Who sees then? Through the sacrificed body Black sees itself red, it listens to its vibrating tones, which the day never hears. The magnetic hand and shoulder hastily throws illuminations on the canvas. At this instant of gesture, the unknown storms, and the body breaks apart.
- Jean-Francois Lyotard (1990), in Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, eds. by Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret, Leuven University Press, 2009, p. 221
- The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard tried to describe Appel's 'method' of creating

It is painting and sculpture [of Karel Appel] at its best. It is close to the heart, animalistic, idealistic, and thoroughly experimental.
- Quote of Klaus Ottmann, 2016; in exhibition-catalog 'Karel Appel: A Gesture of Color - Paintings and Sculptures, 1947–2004', Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. - ISBN 978-3-944874-48-7 p. 6

But Appel is more an assembler than a sculptor. Although now and then he carves wood or models plaster his works are mainly assemblages. He recycles objets trouvés which appeal to him in some way or which invite reuse. An increasingly wide range of industrial leftovers is incorporated in the assemblages from the early Nineties.
- Frank van der Ploeg; in 'The Low Countries'. Jaargang 12 (2004)

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Karel Appel

Gallery of works

Karel Appel, 1949: 'Questioning Children' - gouache on three dimensional wooden construction; - quote (in poem-lines) on Appel's painting 'Questioning Children' by Dutch poet Lucebert, c. 1949: 'Now you know what red does: Red likes to walk in the green grass. You now know what yellow knows: The sun shines because no one's fond on dying. As for blue: the blue sky seems black to the kid who welcomes nothing'

Karel Appel, 1949: 'Questioning Children' - gouache on three dimensional wooden construction; - quote (in poem-lines) on Appel's painting 'Questioning Children' by Dutch poet Lucebert, c. 1949: 'Now you know what red does: Red likes to walk in the green grass. You now know what yellow knows: The sun shines because no one's fond on dying. As for blue: the blue sky seems black to the kid who welcomes nothing'
Karel Appel, 1950: 'The Elephant', original in cast in 1950 (the later version in painted bronze in this photo is made in 1989)
Karel Appel, 1951: 'Het Oerbeest / The Primeval, oil-painting; location unknown; - quote of Karel Appel, 1953: 'The struggle [painting] begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand, forms. New apparitions stalk the earth'
photo, 1959 of Karel Appel with his painting (1954), on the background; - quote of Karel Appel, 1958: 'I don't paint, I hit'
Karel Appel, 1955: Karel Appel is making a painting on the wall of an exposition-building in Rotterdam - photo, 19 April 1955 by Joop van Bilsen / Anefo - National Dutch Archive
Karel Appel, 1955: Karel Appel is painting on the wall of an exposition-building in Rotterdam - photo, 19 April 1955 by Joop van Bilsen / Anefo - National Dutch Archive
Karel Appel, 1957: colored stained glass window in the Kruiskerk-church, Geleen, The Netherlands; demolished in 1997
Karel Appel, 1958: 'Wall-decoration'
Karel Appel, 1963: 'untitled', stained glass in concrete; location: Rotterdam, (Hofplein)/The Netherlands
photo of Karel Appel, June 1965: in front of his recent painting then, 'Deux Figures'; location: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Karel Appel: 'untitled', wooden sculpture, at exhibition in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1965
photo of Karel Appel (left) and Willem de Kooning (right) in conversation, September 1968; - quote of Karel Appel about De Kooning, 1990: 'And his painting is like the wind, like a breeze blowing the paint across the canvas, so unreal, so loose and far away from the worldly life'
Karel Appel, 1969: 'No title', a ceramic wall-decoration; location at Campus Woudestein, Rotterdam; photo by Timelezz
Karel Apppel, 1979: Appel at the left, with cap & Rudolf Bikkers (right), in the studio's of Editions Canada, London, Ontario, Canada, photo by BabyBikk
photo of Karel Appel in 1982, with one of his works, in the exhibition 'Works on Paper', Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Netherlands
Karel Appel, undated: bronze sculpture, in front of 'Cobra museum' in Amstelveen, The Netherlands, photo by Oxyman
Karel Appel, c. 1984: silkscreen by E.A. (epreuve d'artist), Collection Gelderland; licensed by Coda museum
Karel Appel, 1993: 'Frog with Umbrella', original sculpture in wood: 1993; the later and bigger version on this photo is in painted bronze; location: Spui square in The Hague - The Netherlands, c. 2008
Karel Appel, 2001: 'Looking through the open window', sculpture in bronze - partly painted over; location: Utrecht, The Netherlands
Karel Appel, 2005: 'Portrait of Rudi Fuchs, painting on canvas with neon-tubes; location: van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands