Karel Appel, 85; Painter Helped Found Expressionist Art Group
Karel Appel, 85, a founder of an influential art group known for its spontaneous expressionism, died at his home in Zurich, Switzerland, Dutch media reported.
The circumstances of his May 3 death were not immediately known, but he reportedly had a heart ailment.
A native of Amsterdam, Appel studied at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and was influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. He joined a group of artists called the Dutch Experimental Group, then linked up in 1949 with Danish and Belgian artists to form CoBrA, drawn from the names of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.
The group later exhibited in Paris, alongside such artists as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Appel’s work appeared in the world’s largest museums of modern art, but his murals also decorated restaurants and cafeterias in public and private buildings around the world.
In the 1950s, he became involved with jazz musicians and painted the portraits of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan.
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