APPEL, KAREL

born April 25, 1921, Amsterdam, Neth. Dutch painter of turbulent, colourful, semiabstract compositions, a cofounder (194849) of the Cobra group of northern European Expressionists. Appel attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam (194043), and helped found the Reflex group, the Dutch precursor of Cobra, in 1948. He moved to Paris in 1950 and, finally, by the 1960s, had settled in New York City. Partly in reaction against what they perceived as the sterile academicism of the de Stijl movement, the Cobra artists assimilated a variety of more impulsive influences, including folk art, children's art, and l'art brut (raw art) of Jean Dubuffet. They exploited the spontaneity and intensity of the contemporary American Action painting while maintaining a degree of representation. Appel's style is characterized by thick layering of pigment, violent brushwork, and a crude, reductive figuration. He first visited the United States in 1957, where he painted portraits of prominent jazz musicians, including Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. His public works include a mural in the UNESCO building in Paris. His figurative sculptures in wood and metal share with the paintings a brutal, imaginative expressionism.