Karel Appel: Start Again Like A Child

With these words, Dutch artist Karel Appel (1921 — 2006) captured the founding impulse of CoBrA, the avant-garde collective he helped establish in 1948 alongside artists from Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), and Amsterdam (A). Formed in the wake of World War II, CoBrA rejected both sterile abstraction and conventional realism in favor of something more gestural, spontaneous, and deliberately unschooled — a practice rooted in expressive freedom and instinctive mark-making. Though the group disbanded in 1951 — Appel had already relocated to New York the year prior — he carried CoBrA’s spirit with him throughout his career.