The CoBrA group was a short-lived but highly influential artist collective formed in Paris. Named for the three northern European cities that its founders originated from - Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam - its approximately thirty members became known for their vigorously spontaneous, rebellious style of painting that was heavily inspired by the art of children and the mentally ill. With their intuitive methods, loose, gestural marks and strong colors, CoBrA artists have used of some of the techniques of New York School style of the same era. Yet CoBrA art is more political, and is more sensitive to the huge devastation of the European cities and people after World War II. Their democratic approach to viewing and making was inspired and further expanded what we now call Outsider Art (work made by untrained artists, especially children and the mentally ill) as a serious movement in its own right.
Officially formed in a Parisian café on November 8th, 1948 in a meeting organized by Asger Jorn, CoBrA artists came from three countries - Denmark, Belgium, and Holland - that had been isolated from each other for years under Nazi rule. The group of painters, sculptors, and poets had an unusually large number of founding members, generally agreed to be: Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Karel Appel, Cornelius Guillaume Van Beverloo (known as Corneille), Christian Dotremont, Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys (Constant) and Henry Heerup.
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.
Questioning Children was actually the title given to two artworks by Appel, the other was a highly controversial mural painted in Amsterdam's town hall. The mural version was heavily criticized for making the civil servants who saw it every day uncomfortable by brutally reminding them of a war they had no desire to remember, and was thus covered with wallpaper for ten years after its creation.
Appel's distinctive use of found objects in what he called a 'primitivist' style had a strong influence on artists working later in the century, from the Ameri-Indian inspired sculptures of Jimmie Durham to the neo-expressionist paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
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.'
After Us, Liberty is a key example of Constant's desire to express his political affiliations through his work - ideas that he later built on through his work with the highly politicized Situationist International group. It laid the foundations for contemporary artists whose paintings have a strong sense of their own politics, including the highly charged work of African American artist Nina Chanel Abney, which deals with controversies surrounding police brutality and William Powhida's drawings that reflect on the state of modern US democracy.
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.
Pedersen's paintings all had an intensely close relationship with his poetry - both were solidly grounded in the mysterious world of the ancient Gods of the north and revealed the Danish artist's fascination with what he called "fantasy art."
Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
