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Artist or Maker: Karel Appel (b. 1921)

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Description: Personnage
signed and dated 'K. Appel 58' (lower left)
oil on canvas
51 x 38 1/2 in. (130 x 97cm.)
Painted in 1958

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Provenance: Galerie Stadler, Paris.
Mrs. Y. Grubben, Brussels.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's London, 17 October 1991, lot 24.

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Exhibited: Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Appel, November 1958, no. 17.
Bochum, Stadtisches Museum, Karel Appel, 1965, no. 45.
Copenhagen, Charlottenborg, Karel Appel, Udstillingen, 1965, no. 53.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Karel Appel Retrospective, 1965, no. 90.

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Notes: The driving force behind the influential CoBrA group, Karel Appel came to prominence in the 1940s when he developed a raw expressionist style. Explosive and at times chaotic, his paintings are held together by sophisticated colour harmonies and an excellent mastery of the medium. Personnage is from the late 1950s, a time in which Appel used rolling forms and heavy impasto to create essentially abstract works which evoke the figure. Unlike his more stylized work from the 1940s to early 1950s, which are more indebted to the works of children and naïve painters, Appel's late 1950s paintings are more influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning, particularly in the way they straddle abstraction and representation.

Appel's twisting and contorted figures - beautiful but monstrous creatures - are created with an expressive bravado rarely surpassed in 20th Century art. "...I've beaten down the wall of abstraction, surrealism, with my bare fists. It can all be found in my work."" Exhibited numerous times, including his landmark retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1965, Personnage is an important example of his work.

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