André de Neuville, Liège
Campo Auction House, Antwerp
Acquired directly from 💞the above by the ♛present owner in 1977

“Painting is a tangible, sensual experiencing, intensely moved by the joy and the tragedy of man. A spatial experiencing, fed by instinct, becomes a living shape. The atmosphere I inhale and make tangible by my paint is an expression of my era.” Karel Appel, ‘A Statement’, 1950, cited in: Exhibition catalogue, Bristol, Arnolfini Gallery, Karel Appel Paintings 1980-85, 1986, p. 13.

Painted in 1951, the bold, untamed palette and primitive animal forms that crowd the picture plane of Deux oiseaux sur fond de fleurs combine in an archetypal image that dates from the zenith of Appel’s involvement at the centre the CoBrA movement. In 1951, shortly after his move to Paris, the second and final major exhibition of CoBrA art took place in Liège, and it was in that city and for that exhibition that the present work was painted. The early 1950s constitute a pivotal moment in Appel’s artistic development in which new stimuli and impetus spawned experimental stylistic changes in Appel’s work, changes that led to the mastery of his mature style that the present𝔉 work candidly documents.

Primary among the new influences on Appel’s work was his move to Paris in 1950, a relocation that had the profoundest impact on his emboldened artistic vision and charted a new stellar phase of creativity. “Although Amsterdam is the city of my children, Paris is the city where I developed. I learned more there than anywhere else.” (Cited in Michel Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years 1937-1957, Paris 1988, p. 411). 

Deux oiseaux sur fond de fleurs evinces the powerful iconography of protest that is characteristic of the best works of his CoBrA period. Like many of his generation, Appel’s art grew out of a direct response to the existential horror and all-pervasive physical and moral decay of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Embracing a new kind of Primitive Expressionism and consciously avoiding the trappings of Western thought or ideology, Appel and the other artists of the CoBrA movement sought out the primal expressions of primitive cultures, the naïve visions of children and the psychotic visions of the mentally insane. In Deux oiseaux sur fond de fleurs the powerfully graphic forms conjure the essential ꦑvitality of the beasts that emerge from the fierce energy of his brushwork in an extraordinarily intense and vibrant expression that hovers between abstraction and figuration. To the left of the composition the figure of a fly emerges from the bold, sweeping integrated forms and a less distinct animal form vies with floral forms to generating the impression that the canvas is tightly packed with living forms.

Although Appel had sought a childlike naivety in his earlier work, it was only on his return to Paris in 1950 that he was truly released from the burden of all his artistic teachings. This was in part due to the similar mindsets and aims of various contemporaries in France who had already set an anti-style precedent, not least the master of Art Brut Jean Dubuffet: “Dubuffet gave us the stimulus to break away, to conquer a new expression, a new dimension, a new space” (Karel Appel in Exhibition Catalogue, Osaka, The National Museum of Art, Appel, 1989, p. 12.) However, the exp🦹ressed aims of Dubuffet were very different from those of Appel; Dubuffet’s anti-cultural art was based more on psychotic art than that of children, although he admired both as both were untrained and unh💯ampered by the baggage of academic teaching, prescribed style and discipline. This raw element also appealed to Appel, however his interest in children as subject matter and their art as a medium was deliberate and politicised. Appel sought to capture not only the fresh and subjective vision of the child in his work but also to tap into a certain innocence that was, to Appel, a necessary balm in a world so drastically scarred by the turmoil of the second world war. The innocence of the subject matter and the implied innocence of the style in which it is rendered serve as a foil to the modern world, a plimsoll line against which to measure civilisation’s fall from grace.

While earlier works, including the scandalous Vragande Kinderen (Inquiring Children), a mural for Amsterdam City Hall, had a raw element to them, the execution was nonetheless tightly controlled. It is only in the paintings executed around 1951 that Appel commences his completely unfettered engagement with his materials. By 1951 his painterly practice had begun to develop in such a way that the immediacy and spontaneity of painting, the pure freedom involved within the subconscious act of painting itself, became paramount. Deux oiseaux sur fond de fleurs bears witness to Appel’s realisation that the most powerful and surprising expressions did not derive from premeditation but from a spontaneous and unconscious interaction with the material of paint. “What counts for me is impulse, energy, speed, action. That’s when the really unexpected things happen; the true expressive image that rises undefinably out of the mass of matter, speed, colour” (Cited in T. Brakeley, Ed., Karel Appel, New York 1980, p. 164). In Deux oiseaux sur fond de fleurs we clearly sense a newfound freedom in the application of paint which subscribes to the element of chance; the instinctual, intuitive brushstrokes lay bare Appel’s working process, demonstrating the mystical relationship between artist and material in an unrestrained and intoxicating visi✱on.