"I paint like a barbarian in this barbarous time.", Karel Appel, De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel, 1962
Karel Appel (Christiaan Karel Appel, April 25, 1921 – May 3, 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, poet, and one of the founding members of the postwar European avant-garde movement CoBrA. Born in Amsterdam, he began painting at fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in the early 1940s, where he was influenced by Picasso, Matisse, and the brut and primitive sources later associated with Jean Dubuffet. In 1948, with the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, the Danish painter Asger Jorn, and the Dutch artists Constant, Corneille, and others, he co-founded CoBrA, the acronym made from the initials of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, a movement organized around a deliberately raw, childlike, and primitive painting practice that rejected the rationalism and geometric abstraction of postwar European modernism.
He won the UNESCO Prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale and was commissioned in 1956 to execute a mural for the restaurant of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His career extended across more than six decades into painting, sculpture in painted assemblage, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, poetry, and stage design, and his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are held in essentially every major collection of postwar European art, including the Stedelijk Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.