The title is deliberately absurd. “Bedized” is a rare English archaism meaning “adorned excessively, decked out with ornament” — while “pudding” evokes the childlike drawing, the soft and shapeless thing. Together they form a wilfully nonsensical title, in the Dada tradition, that says something essential about Appel’s approach at this time: he refuses the explanatory title, the commentary, the declared intention. The work is there — violent and joyful — and it owes no justification to anyone.
These heads come from everywhere and nowhere: from the children’s art Appel always claimed as an influence, from African and Oceanic masks, from the frescoes he painted during the CoBrA years, from his own accumulated gesture over thirty years. These are not portraits. They are archetypes — primitive, comic, menacing, tender. “I paint like a barbarian in a barbarian age,” he said. Bedized Pudding is one of the most accomplished demonstrations of what that phrase means in practice: an energy that needs no explanation, a color that strikes before it lets itself be looked at.
