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Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
KAREL APPEL Laughing Frog and His Friends in the Golden Age.
Color screenprint with gold and silver mylar collage on Rives, 1975. 1030x1790 mm; 40 1/2x70 1/2 inches (sheet), full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 47/120 in pencil, lower right. Published by Editions Press, San Francisco. A very good impression of this monumental print with vibrant colors.
Appel (1921-2006) was a Dutch-born artist who grew up and studied in Amsterdam before living and working in various cities abroad such as Paris, New York and Rome, eventually settling in Switzerland. His father was a barber and despite the expectation for him to follow a similar career path, Appel fostered an early interest in art, completing his first canvas at the age of only fourteen. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944, and in 1946 had his first solo show in Groningen; the same year he also participated in a young painters show at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. During this time, Appel was fostering relationships with like-minded, experimental European artists who were searching for an appropriate artistic response to the atrocities of the war. In 1946, Appel visited Denmark and spent time with a group of Danish artists who, in an attempt to return to a more naïve moment in time, explored a deeply felt connection with folk art and its perceived mythical quality. Appel was a member of the avant-garde collective called the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep, and shortly thereafter established CoBrA.
CoBrA was a Marxist-sympathizing international art group, disbanded after just 2 years, formed in the Café Notre-Dame, Paris, on November 8, 1948. The moniker is an acronym of the cities from where the founding members hailed: Copenhagen (Asger Jorn), Brussels (Christian Dotremont) and Amsterdam (Constant Nieuwenhuys and Appel). This group of young artists bore witness to what the "civilized" world was capable of and, horrified by what they encountered, rejected Western art and culture to seek inspiration elsewhere; they drew from nontraditional forms such as outsider art, folk and tribal art, and childrens' art. They worked spontaneously and with bright, bold colors, and valued creativity and experimentation with techniques, application and materials. CoBrA artists shared stylistic traits with various earlier German Expressionist groups, such as Der Blaue Reiter, and adopted philosophical tenets from Surrealism. CoBrA has been described as Northern Europe's brand of Abstract Expressionism, the American art movement which developed out of New York City in the 1940s around artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell.
