When Karel Appel was still making wooden sculptures, like this ‘Windmill’, nobody would give a cent for the work of the young artist.
It was shortly after World War II. Karel Appel (1921-2006) had completed his education at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam under the German occupation. He had returned weakened from the province, having fled to avoid working as a laborer in Nazi Germany. Painting materials were scarce and expensive.
“The mutually tearing colors”
The poor barber’s son Appel gathered remnants of wood and even demolished the wooden shutters from his windows. This is how he began constructing his first sculptures in 1947. No gouge or mallet was involved. Appel limited himself to hammer, brush and a few colors of paint: mainly red, yellow and blue. The colors were already bright and contrasting, characteristic of his later work. “The mutually embracing and mutually tearing colors,” his friend Lucebert would later write about the collection of painted waste in his attic room. From wood, a broomstick and a vacuum cleaner hose, Appel made for example the work Drift in the Attic.
Only an art collector from Belgium saw something in his early work.
Only after the unification of an international group of artists into the CoBrA group (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) in 1948 did the first recognition from the formal art world come. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam especially exhibited Appel’s work and provided him with large commissions. Yet the wooden sculptures from his early years remained in his own possession his entire life, unsold.
Having died as a multimillionaire (with an estimated fortune of 30 million euros) Appel donated the wooden sculptures from his ‘poor’ experimental period to the Stedelijk as a thank you. One work can be seen there now: Windmill, a construction of rough pieces of tree trunk and sawn-off pieces of broomstick and a branch.
“Everything was celebrated”
Art historians classify Appel’s work as expressionism. According to the curators of the Stedelijk, this abstract movement arose from the need for a new beginning. “Everything in art, music and ideas that was forbidden under Nazism and fascism was celebrated. Figurative art reflected too visibly on its own time.” About CoBrA: “Their art connected to pre-war modernism, especially expressionism with its fascination for non-European cultures.”
Now Appel’s “Windmill” doesn’t directly evoke associations with African masks or Polynesian wood carving. Rather, you see Appel experimenting with color planes. He spontaneously brings forms together. The “Windmill” is therefore much closer to another fascination of Appel: children’s drawings. Just as the Dutch public would condescendingly say about Appel’s paintings for a very long time: “My child could do that too,” you could say of the primitive mill: “A child would also hammer something like this together.” I myself find it a beautiful work, a ‘primal Appel’.
Two little owls and other works
Other wooden works by Appel that the Stedelijk owns are the beautiful Two Little Owls, whose bird heads are no more than yellow spots with two blue circles as eyes. The rough wood grain was transformed by Appel into a red and blue feather coat.
Other works by Appel in wood from the Stedelijk are:
+ Figure
The Windmill was on display in 2023 in the exhibition Yesterday-Today at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
