Karel Appel’s art has always been dedicated to breaking barriers.
A young artist who had just completed a conservative academic training at the Royal Academy of Amsterdam, he became one of the founders of the Cobra movement — a group of Dutch, Belgian and Danish artists who revolted against the geometric tradition of pre-war modernism through a raw and violent primitivism, forming a counterpoint to the birth of Abstract Expressionism in the United States.
Inspired, like Dubuffet, by the art of so-called “primitive” peoples, children and the insane, Appel rapidly secured a major place among the most forceful post-war Expressionist painters, working in a spontaneous and automatist style built from dense, blazing pigments and swirling elementary forms that sometimes evoke prehistoric creatures or mask-like faces. Appel’s impulsive energy also drove him beyond the limits of the painted canvas to produce immense wall murals and monumental sculptures in wood and metal, splashed with vivid, dramatic color.
Over the years, even as artistic revolution had itself become an established tradition, Appel’s art softened and grew more lyrical in spirit, without losing any of the vibrancy of its color or the dynamic intensity of its forms. The frontal assault gave way to a more expansive impulse — a desire to build bridges between artistic mediums (for more than a decade he has been experimenting with mixed electronic music), between national and cultural traditions (in recent years Appel has traveled extensively in Nepal and other regions of Southeast Asia, absorbing subtle elements of their artistic traditions and their synthetic, unifying spirit).
It is therefore particularly fitting that the suite of lithographs produced for Editions Press should be titled The Happy Meeting. It is equally characteristic that Appel created these six prints over three days of intense, concentrated activity at the Editions Press workshop in San Francisco during the winter of 1973–1974, and that in doing so he did not confine himself to the traditional lithographic techniques to which he had largely limited himself in his previous ventures into the medium.
Like many major artists who have found at Editions Press a unique combination of highly skilled craftsmen and an informal atmosphere open to new ideas, Appel seized the opportunity to experiment with ambitious new concepts or to capture fortunate “accidents” and see how far they might take him.
The six lithographs in this portfolio thus represent Appel’s first use of gold and silver leaf grounds, onto which the lithographic images were painstakingly “collaged” — cut out and fixed onto each individual print. This process lends a lush, sensuous opulence to images as bold and blazing as Woman with Golden Eye, Child Jumping on Blue Hat or Flying Hat Meets Sleeping Dog. His She is Back Again incorporates two and even three embossed “terraces” pressed into the surface of the print to create fluid forms and relief rhythms that sometimes echo, sometimes oppose the forms defined by line and color — another first for Appel. Waiting for the Second Kiss is, it is true, a conventional and direct lithograph, but like most of the others in this series, it contains nearly a dozen different colors.
The prints reveal an equivalent diversity of styles and shades of expression. Woman with Golden Eye demonstrates Appel’s deeply personal way of allowing a single line to wander, drift and intertwine with itself until it suggests an image anyone can recognize — without it necessarily being what it purports to be — for in Appel’s work, as in children’s art, one often suspects that the title comes after the fact, after the image itself, and that we are free to read into it whatever we wish.
In Come Back Pussy Cat — as in most of his other prints — a bold black line wanders through zones of vibrant color with ragged, free contours, which are in a sense also lines that have flattened themselves into shapes. All seem animated by their own movement, conveying a sensation of immense energy and spontaneous generation; yet they ultimately gather together — as much in the viewer’s imagination as on the printed sheet — to form images as ambiguous and evocative as they are superficially bold and powerful.
“When I used red in my earlier paintings, it usually meant blood and violence,” Appel recently remarked. “Today it is more likely to represent light or sky.” This may well be true, and certainly the first impression that strikes the viewer of these lithographs is one of apparently unbridled fantasy and good humor. But on closer inspection, one wonders whether everything is truly as carefree as it seems in this world of childlike innocence and delight. Why is the boy jumping on the hat? Why this insistence on “faces” and figures that seem somehow isolated from one another, both pictorially and psychically? Why, in a portfolio titled The Happy Meeting, does one find so many themes of separation — Come Back Pussy Cat, Waiting for the Second Kiss, She is Back Again — made all the more unsettling by the small crouching figure at left that appears decidedly unhappy? Beneath the gaiety and charm of these prints, it seems to me that Appel powerfully suggests the darker, more tragic currents that underlie innocence and encounter alike — and it is precisely this that gives his work its strange, disquieting and disarming power.
— Thomas Albright
Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle
A suite of six original color lithographs with collage and embossing was produced by Karel Appel at Editions Press, San Francisco, between February and September 1974.
