
The CoBrA Group
Started: 1948
Ended: 1951

Important Art and Artists of The CoBrA GroupThe below artworks are the most important in The CoBrA Group - that both overview the major ideas of the movement, and highlight the greatest achievements by each artist in The CoBrA Group. Don't forget to visit the artist overview pages of the artists that interest you. | |
![]() Artwork Images | Questioning Children (1949)Artist: Karel Appel Artwork description & Analysis: As with many of his fellow CoBrA members, Karel Appel took deep inspiration from the violent events of the Second World War. As part of a series of works Appel called his Objets Poubelles (trash objects), he made a relief painting from pieces of discarded wood and a found window shutter that portrays the smiling yet grief-stricken faces of a group of children abandoned after the war. The title has two meanings in its original Dutch - it can alternatively be translated as 'begging children'. The piece's emotive content, its use of found objects and loose, childlike feel offered a distinctive counterbalance to the perceived sterility of conventional Western art shown in the vast majority of museums at the time. As a declared Marxist, one of Appel's missions was to confront national discomfort about recent events head on. Gouache on found wooden objects - Tate Collection, London |
![]() Artwork Images | After Us, Liberty (1949)Artist: Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys (Constant) Artwork description & Analysis: In After Us, Liberty, Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, widely known as Constant, worked in a style that was highly influenced by children's drawing. The mainly black canvas features the heads of bizarre creatures and human-like figures scrawled in oil paint. Constant uses arresting touches of red, white and blue to reference the French tricolor flag and his admiration for its symbolic values of liberty, equality, and brotherhood (hence the 'liberty' of the painting's title). Classical art and its legacy was a particular and enduring enemy for the Dutch artist, and he originally entitled the work To Us, Liberty as a tribute to CoBrA's ethos of creative freedom of expression that broke away from classical norms. He changed the title after becoming disillusioned with the possibility of creating genuinely free art in an unfree society, while still wanting to express his '...hopes for the freedom all men are looking for.' Oil on canvas - Tate Collection, London |
![]() Artwork Images | The Red Ship (1948)Artist: Carl-Henning Pedersen Artwork description & Analysis: In The Red Ship, Carl-Henning Pedersen uses simple, childlike strokes in primary colors to depict a larger than life character in the foreground, a swaying palm and a rocking red ship - all typical Pedersen motifs inspired by symbols from folklore. The self-taught painter cultivated in an intentionally 'naive' style, and worked on his canvasses rapidly and spontaneously - a result of his close study of the distinctive techniques used by fresco painters in medieval Danish churches. Oil on canvas - Collection of Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark |
![]() Artwork Images | Le Museau Rouge (The Red Muzzle) (1949 - 50)Artist: Henry Heerup Artwork description & Analysis: Carved from a block of granite and painted with a simple red 'mouth', Le Museau Rouge was heavily inspired by the ancient runic stones of the Vikings. Like many of Heerup's sculptures, this piece is intentionally ambiguous, sitting somewhere between a reclining female form and a roughly hewn, prehistoric menhir. His sculptural technique was more inspired by the ancient than the modern - his professors at the Royal Danish Academy of Art had been critical of what they viewed as his unsophisticated, outdated carving method inspired by the ancient Egyptians. The simple ornamentation lightly scrawled into the stone to emphasize the physicality of Le Museau Rouge's original granite block is also trademark Heerup, who was constantly determined to stay true to the integrity of his materials by retaining their original shapes. Painted granite - Copenhagen Collection Jean Pollak, Paris |
![]() Artwork Images | Fête Nocturne (Party at Night) (1950)Artist: Cornelius Guillaume Van Beverloo (Corneille) Artwork description & Analysis: In this painting the Dutch artist known by his nickname, Corneille, depicted a nighttime celebration in a riot of color and form. One of Corneille's best-known paintings in his native Holland, Fête Nocturne was a prime example of his ability to take familiar subjects (people celebrating, a landscape) and present them in a fresh, energetic way - so achieving the CoBrA's stated desire to create art that everyone could connect with. The curved forms used to loosely depict human heads and playful, letter-like marks to render faces in Fête Nocturne were especially reminiscent of the work of Swiss Expressionist Paul Klee. Corneille, who described himself as "a painter of joy", often portrayed moments of togetherness in an intentionally childlike style. The artist spent a considerable amount of time in various regions of Africa just before and during the CoBrA years. He described experiencing a "sensation of marvelous accord with the universe" while living among indigenous people there that proved highly influential on the tone and developed symbolist forms he would later quote in paintings such as this. Oil on canvas - Collection of the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam |
![]() Artwork Images | Les Transformes (1950)Artist: Jean-Michel Atlan and Christian Dotremont Artwork description & Analysis: The drawings that make up Les Transformes collection present the forms of letters and words in a playful style that dances around the page use a broad range of colors and often involve spontaneously painted characters alongside the words. Algerian artist Jean-Michel Atlan and Belgian artist, poet, and essayist Christian Dotremont painted one of several series of these peintres mots (word paintings) in a flurry of collaborative activity in what became known as 'The CoBrA House' on the Rue de Marais in Brussels. Dotremont had particularly close ties with the Surrealists, and these works had grown out of his responses to the earlier group's Peintres-poesies. These collaborative pieces embody one of CoBrA's key precepts - their belief that the final creative product and a democratic process were more important than any one ego. "It required a rapport between artist and writer," Dotremont described, "sometimes the writer took the first step, another time the painter did...we gave each other inspiration and released each other's fantasies." Mixed media on paper - Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York |
![]() Artwork Images | On The Silent Myth: Opus 4B (1952)Artist: Asger Jorn Artwork description & Analysis: The fourth in a series of seven paintings and prints completed during the CoBrA years, this lithograph print is typical of Danish artist Asger Jorn's distinctive, spontaneous style, here executed in a limited palette of green, black, blue and white. Strange, scribbled characters with multiple eyes, lizard-like creatures and his trademark 'wheel of life' in the scene's 'sky' all combine to create a heady vision of the mythical world of Jorn's construction. The techniques used to create On The Silent Myth were heavily influenced by the automatic works of the Surrealists (especially Andre Masson), which Jorn had seen while living in Paris in the 1930s, as well as by his longstanding interest in traditional folkloric art. Jorn thought that "the relation between visual art and the narration of myth must be silent", hence the series' title. He also saw the seven works as the culmination of all he had learned as an artist up to this point, calling it "the settlement with my past life". Lithograph - Donation Jorn, Silkeborg |
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