Word: appellants
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite Piet Mondrian, not all Dutch artists are squares. The most noted American abstract expressionist, Willem de Kooning, is Rotterdam Dutch, and his opposite number in Europe, Karel Appel, is Amsterdam Dutch. Last week Appel both enthralled and infuriated the home town with a major retrospective at Amsterdam's Municipal Museum. Appel himself stayed in his house in Paris. "I can't stand Holland," Appel confided fiercely, "for more than two or three days...
Boff & Grunt. His frankness interlarded with frenzy and his open face barred with a villainous black mustache, Appel happily plays the abstract-expressionist role. Painting, he says, "is a battle! Boff goes the paint! It explodes! It's an adventure! It's destroying what I've done before!" At the easel, he swirls, smears and stabs with tubes in mid-squeeze, a palette knife, his hands and, occasionally, a brush, grunting as he works. In a few hours, the picture is done: a wet, gaudy mass of color violently heaped and stirred. Sometimes it is a brutally...
Brought up near the Amsterdam docks, Appel worked as a youth in his father's : barber shop, early decided against so niggling and polite a trade. Painting was his only care, and to pursue it, he lived in hunger and rags, moving often and taking to the road for long stretches. The poor Belgian miners to whose grandfathers the young Van Gogh had ministered as a tortured divinity student were amazed when the ragged Appel appeared to paint them in his turn, in their turn ministered to him, sharing what they had with the hot-eyed and hungry traveler...
Asked to do a mural in the coffee room of the Municipal Museum, Appel responded by blobbing all four walls and the ceiling with brilliant colors, thus placing the coffee sippers within a napping tent of a picture. "How could a person paint that happy and be Dutch?" wondered an admiring American. The next year Appel left Holland. Now, married to a Dutch model, sought after by collectors, he prospers mightily in Paris, has been accepted as an officer in good standing in the hierarchy of international expressionism. His work hangs in Manhattan's Museum of Modern...
Because most of them are still wet, the pictures in Appel's latest Amsterdam show hang high out of reach of inquiring fingers. To demonstrate their wetness last week, the museum curator, who admires the artist, thrust one thumb into an inch-thick gob of red. "Appel doesn't mind," he reassured his visitor, smiling...