Karel Appel
Camille, 1953
Oil paint on canvas
The T. Edward and Tullah Hanley Memorial Gift to the People of Denver and the Area, 1970.171

height: 56 1/2 in, 143.5100 cm; width: 43 1/4 in, 109.8550 cm

BR, K. Appel

Modern and Contemporary Art

Modern and Contemporary Art

Karel Appel Camille 1953 Oil paint on canvas 56 1/2 x 43 1/4 inches The T. Edward and Tullah Hanley Memorial Gift to the People of Denver and the Area, 1970.171 “To observe Karel Appel in the act of painting is to witness one of the great boxing matches of modern times. He is merciless. He beats, cuffs, and assaults the canvas wildly from all directions at once, and one feels he is scarcely aware of the image being built up on the surface of that canvas as a result of the attack.” -Alfred Frankenstein (1) Within a profusion of violent colors, one can find a head, eyes, arms, and fingers, but an accurate description of what he saw was not Appel’s intention in Camille. Just five years earlier, he’d declared war on social realism and geometric abstraction. In the chaos of post-war Europe, many artists felt the desire to break from the past. Appel’s particular need was to create new images of man. Born in the Netherlands, where he’d studied academic art in Amsterdam before the war, Appel organized a group of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (CoBrA) and they published a manifesto in Paris, declaring that their art would be “no longer merely a construction of color and lines, but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all together,” and their inspiration would come from the art of prehistory, children, Eskimos, and Vikings.

• "Focus: The Figure"--Denver Art Museum, 8/9/2008 - 2/2011