Oiseau de L'Aube. The Dawn Bird. by Karel Appel, b.1921

Karel Appel, b.1921
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Oiseau de L'Aube. The Dawn Bird.

Original lithograph in nine colours. 1959. Signed and dated in pencil. Numbered in pencil from the edition of 120. Drawn and printed at the studio of Wolfensberger, Zurich. Issued by L'Oeuvre Gravée, Paris and Geneva, 1959. Rare.
Bibliography: L'Oeuvre Gravée - Liste des Gravures no 242.

Excellent rich impression with unfaded colours. On pale cream wove Johannot paper. Excellent condition. Full untrimmed sheet. Image drawn virtually to the full sheet
size. Sheet: 22 1/4 x 30 ins. (565x760mm).

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An important and rare example of the first period of Appel’s work in lithography in the 1950’s.

Karel Appel was one of the most inventive and ‘expressionist’ of the artists who were at the centre of the development of the ‘Art Informel’ abstract movement in European art in the 1950’s, the movement which was a parallel to Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Appel was born in Holland, and it was there that he became one of the central figures in the development of the ‘Cobra’ group, with Jorn, Corneille and Alechinsky. Like his friends he was influenced by the ideas of De Kooning, and when he and the other Cobra painters moved their studios to Paris at the beginning of the 1950’s, it was this form of free flowing, strongly colourist and richly expressive style which he developed. He stated that one of the central purposes of his art was to create a visual expression of the ‘tangible sensuous experience’ of actually applying colour and pigment to canvas or paper.

Appel learned the technique of lithography very early in his life, and it started to be a major creative medium for him at the end of the 1940’s. With the opening-up of the major lithography studios in Paris at that time, and especially throughout the 1950’s, he became greatly interested in the way that variations in colour and stroke, and sequences of printing in the inks, could be used to create a totally different atmosphere of expressive colour and form. By the end of the 1950’s he was drawing some of his most powerful works in lithography, and ‘Oiseau de l’Aube’ is an outstanding example of his creative energy and emotion at this date.

Appel’s prints of the early period are now very rarely to be found.