Toi et Moi. You and Me. by Karel Appel, b.1921

Karel Appel, b.1921
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Toi et Moi. You and Me.

Original lithograph in colours. c. 1960. Signed in pencil. Numbered in pencil from the edition of 200. Inscribed with the title in pencil. Probably printed at the studio of Pons, Paris c.1960.

Superb rich impression with brilliant colours. On pale cream wove Arches paper. Excellent condition. Full margins. Drawn almost to full sheet size. Sheet: 29 3/4 x 21 3/4ins (754x550mm).

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A very fine and rare example of the most powerful abstract-expressionist period of Appel’s work in lithography in the period around 1960. The range of brilliant powerful colour, rich brushwork and the visual drama created by the overprinting and the highlights of open paper, show Appel’s creative use of lithography at its finest.

Karel Appel was one the most important and inventive artists of the European abstract-expressionist movement in the years shortly after the War. This movement built on ideas from painters like Pollock and De Kooning in the USA and linked them to the essentially European characteristics which were being developed in the general move towards an ‘art-informel - informal art’ which was taking place in Europe, especially in Holland and in France. The abstract-expressionist group of painters, principally Jorn, Corneille, Constant and Appel called themselves ‘Cobra’ (a name taken from the cities in which they had been living - Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). They were seeking to create a free-flowing, strongly colourist, and above all intensely expressive style which was to be a counterpoint to the spare analytical ‘constructivism’ of ideas developing from for example Malevich or Mondrian.

Appel was perhaps the most richly inventive and ‘painterly’ of the artists in the Cobra group. From very early on he was interested in the medium of lithography, above all enjoying the way in which it allowed him to use a strongly colourist treatment but with the colours themselves retaining a separate and individual role even when juxtaposed and overprinted without blending in the way that they do in oil paint. The lithographs which he made in the period up to the early 1960’s (before he turned to using flat areas of colour and eventually to screenprint - or acrylic in his painting) include some of the most exciting graphic imagery of the European abstract-expressionist style.