Dutch painter Karel Appel dies

This is a video about Karel Appel.

An older entry, from my ModBlog cache, 5 May 2006:

Dutch painter Karel Appel has died.

One of his many subjects was Dutch nature reserve Naardermeer.

Appel became known as a member of Cobra, post 1945 ‘expressionist’ artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam; including Constant.

Usually, Appel’s paintings did not refer directly to anything specific happening.

However, in 1953 he painted: ‘The condemned. Homage to Rosenberg‘.

This painting is in Van Abbe museum in Eindhoven now.

It referred to the killing of the Rosenberg couple in the United States after a Cold War witch trial.

Karel Appel also did drawings and sculpture.

From the Google cache of Dear Kitty ModBlog:

8/1/05 at 7:12PM

Mood: Looking Playing: Painter man, by Creation

The Dutch Cobra movement painter, Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, died this Monday, 85 years old, in Utrecht in The Netherlands.

Nieuwenhuys, often known as just Constant, had been ill for a long time.

In the Paris café Notre Dame, visual artists and authors Constant, Corneille and Karel Appel (Amsterdam), Asger Jorn (Copenhagen in Denmark), Joseph Noiret and Christian Dotremont (Brussels in Belgium), on 8 November 1948 signed the manifesto ‘La Cause était entendue’ (We got a deal).

This was the start of the vanguardist “expressionist” artists’ group CoBrA; named after the first letters of the three capital cities’ names.

Constant was the main theorist of the movement, writing on artists and society.

Later, in the jaren 1960s, his New Babylon architecture plan would play a role in the Dutch Provo movement.

On June 19, 1953, in a hideous example of US anti-communist hysteria, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed, accused of spying for the Soviet Union. They had two young children, six-year-old Robert and 10-year-old Michael: here.

David Greenglass, one of the last surviving major figures from the notorious espionage case that led to the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953, has died at the age of 92: here.

The release of grand jury testimony by the star witness in the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg more than 60 years ago points once more, and even more persuasively, to the frameup character of the prosecution that led to their executions in June 1953: here.

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