A scene in Jan Vrijman’s 1962 documentary The Reality of Karel Appel gives an energetic glimpse into the practice of the Dutch painter who co-founded the legendary European avant-garde movement Cobra. Set to a soundtrack of jagged experimental music and jazz, Karel Appel attacks a large canvas with performative gusto, filling it with thick, gestural daubs of color. Though the clip affirms certain tropes of the swashbuckling modernist, Appel was far from a one-note painter. 

“There’s a recent discovery that he often used drawings as a starting point for his painting,” says Franz W. Kaiser, the CEO of the Karel Appel Foundation, which “contradicts the idea that he was always doing spontaneous work.” 

The artists of Cobra—their name an amalgam of their home cities, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam—might have only been active from 1948 to 1951, but the footprint they collectively left on the European art world was significant. Pushing a radical painting agenda, partly influenced by children’s and outsider art, they blurred the lines between naive and studied, figurative and abstract. Although short-lived, Cobra would provide a conceptual and aesthetic roadmap for Appel, who left his native Amsterdam in 1950 to move to Paris.

Appel’s debut exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery came in 1954, but it was only in 1957 that he traveled to New York. While visiting his friends Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline in Long Island, he spent several days in Jackson Pollock’s former studio at the invitation of his widow, Lee Krasner. It was a fitting welcome for an artist whose work many consider as being in conversation with the Abstract Expressionists. “Pollock had died the year before but you can really see a very clear influence in his style,” Kaiser says, describing this period as “the most abstract of Appel’s whole career.”

As the broader post-war art landscape evolved, so did Appel’s painterly approach. “You must remember that in the mid-1960s you had Pop art, you had conceptual art, painting was considered outdated,” Kaiser explains. In response, the artist’s output came to resemble a kind of “Cobra Pop,” a sleeker take on the typical themes he had developed as a young artist in Amsterdam and Paris.

The selection of pieces at Independent will offer an abbreviated survey of Appel’s varied body of work and his continuous movement between methodologies of painting. Flying Birds from 1959 is a pure burst of frenetic abstraction, while Happy Birthday to You, made in 1963, foregrounds a wide-eyed figure, both childlike and unsettling, upon a red background augmented with plastic toys. An untitled work on paper from 1958 plays with ethereal forms in soft shades of watercolor. A decade and a half later, the cartoonish composition of People in Landscape no.2 (1972), was rendered in bold, flat expanses of acrylic with elements of wood relief, another experimental direction. 

“From the Cobra time on and throughout his whole career,” Appel was an artist who tracked “back and forth” between abstraction and figuration, Kaiser says, in a tireless search for renewal. “This was for him a way not to get stuck, not to repeat himself. That was what he was most afraid of.”