Cobra artists bite back at art house

By Chandra Johan

JAKARTA (JP): Childlike drawings, many thumbing their nose at artistic fundamentals, adorn the walls of the Erasmus Huis cultural center.

Unclear forms and brushstrokes sloshed one on top of the other form Karel Appel's The Lovers (1954). In another work by this Dutch artist from the same year, File with five lithographs, a blue animal, possibly a dog, is depicted in a similarly naive style.

The same irreverent greeting awaits viewers in other works.

Artist Lucebert lets his hand wander wherever it likes, his intuition following his heart as free as a bird. In Striptease, Constant Nieuwenhuys draws a crude representation of male genitalia.

These are among works, dating from 1947 to 1977, in the graphics exhibition Cobra, the name of an artistic group which emerged in post-World War II Europe and the acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam from the artists' countries of origins.

Displaying a small collection from the Stadelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the exhibition is open through March 23. The Museum is represented by its curator for its traveling exhibitions, Petra Timmer.

Appel, Cornelis Corneille and Nieuwenhuys established Cobra in Paris in 1948 as an experimental group seeking new forms of elemental expression. They were joined by other artists from Denmark and Belgium.

Following World War II, various styles of free expression dominated paintings of Europe and the United States. Cobra is considered the first instance of a post-World War II revolt against the "establishment" of art world conventions.

Arts and architecture followed the dominant De Stijl movement, demanding "absolute artistic purity", which developed from around 1917 to 1931.

Timmer writes in the exhibition catalog that works of Cobra artists were not just a reaction to the cool, geometrical abstract art of that time.

"It went much further; it was a reaction against authoritarian control and expressed a desire for a new society."

She argues that while the world wanted a return to normality after the war, including in the Netherlands which had been occupied by the Nazis, the Cobra artists "found it impossible to refrain from expressing the horrors that had taken place not so very long before".

Appel and the other Cobra artists, feeling that bourgeois society and its art lacked blood, wanted to start afresh.

All in one

Most of the painters associated with the Cobra group employed some sort of subject or figuration, usually derived from folk art, children's art, prehistoric or primitive art. Subjects often depicted were fairy-tales and sagas, monsters, human and animal figures.

"Sometimes a painting is no longer a construction of colors and lines, but an animal ..., a scream, a person or all of these rolled into one," Cobra wrote in its manifesto in 1948.

The unifying principle among these divergent artists was their doctrine of complete freedom of abstract expressive forms, with accent on brushstrokes.

They had great respect for the French artists Dubuffet and Futrier, although the directions of Cobra's free expressions were comparatively more violent, colorful, dynamic and seemingly chaotic.

Cobra artists also differed widely among themselves. The works of the Dane Asger Jorn and Appel are more violent in their wild synthesis of forms and brilliant colors. Belgians Pierre Alechinsky and Lucebert look more controlled.

Although Nieuwenhuys and Corneille seemed to prefer to play with children's images, the former displayed inconsistency in his style. Appel consistently painted figures and portraits with linear and colorful enthusiasm, as in The Lovers.

Whereas Apel establishes a certain control through his representation of an explicit face or figure, Jorn smears, slashes and drips what seems like pots of black, white and green paint.

The French critic Michel Tapie described the wild tendency of postwar artists like Cobra as un art autre, or another art.

In this art, as defined by Tapie, the essence is creation, with no desire for, nor preconceptions of control, geometric or otherwise. It is painting that begins with the brush and a blank canvas which might go anywhere.

In etchings like The Loner's Promenade (1953), Jorn's extreme character is still obvious, although not as mad as his Wiedersehen am Tedesufer (1958), for instance.

Alechinsky, by comparison, particularly in his earlier works of the 1950s, displays a sense of order deriving from the microcosmic organism. But his etchings show magical forms of creatures.

Appel's statements strengthened the image among the Dutch public that Cobra's works were ridiculous, crazy or funny.

"I just mess about a bit," he once said. "Nowadays I lay it on really thick, I slosh the paint on with brushes and filling- knives and with my bare hands, I sometimes throw whole pots at the canvas all at the same time".

Although the Cobra group is now defunct, its spirit has spread across Europe.

The expressionism of the Cobra group is more widely accepted today and belongs among modern classics. Some artists following in the Cobra movement's steps are rich and famous, have an international circle of clients and their works hang in museums and galleries around the world.