Karel Appel: Works on Paper - Hardcover

Jean-Clarence Lambert is a poet, essayist, art critic, and French translator.

The Left-Hand Way

PARIS, SPRING 1977
I am talking with Karel Appel in his vast studio in Saint-Germain-des Pres, an old printing-house reconverted by a good friend, the architect Rietveld. This studio stocks the work Appel has done over the years. Paintings, relief works, sculptures spill over one another, on the gallery that runs under the glass roof and forms an inner balcony, and up against the wall on the ground floor, all the way to the shelves at the far end that hold paint cans by the dozen. A whole section of the studio, under the balcony, is specially reserved for wood reliefs. They’re made like so many jigsaw pieces, each piece numbered, and are assembled by an assistant before Appel gives them the final touch of life—that is, color. Another corner is given over to ever-increasing piles of lithographs. Opposite them stand huge metal cases with large flat drawers—for gouaches, drawings, collages. The center of the studio is left free. That’s the working area, the ring, with two massive easels under the gaze of projectors, as in an operating room or a cinema studio—the kind of projector that creates high noon at midnight. Color has been dripped all over the place, and one would like to linger on the patterns and stains; but the eye is easily distracted. Everywhere, the typical Appel abundance, disorder, profusion. The New York studio is just as packed with Appel’s productions, and the same goes for the Chateau de Molesme in Burgundy.

—You’ve been turning out work nonstop since the end of World War II, since the Liberation. That makes for a little over thirty years’ uninterrupted work. I know you don’t keep archives or a catalogue, but have you any idea how many works you’ve produced up to now?

—I’m not sure. Hard to say. Maybe ten thousand. Maybe more than that. There must be at least four thousand paintings. Three thousand gouaches. Just as many drawings and collages They’ve just found a whole bunch of them up in Amsterdam, early stuff done at art school, nudes I did during the war before I went underground, and my first freestyle attempts inspired by African art. Then there are the sculptures—in bronze, olive wood, painted wood, aluminum. About two hundred, I’d say. And a hundred or so ceramics. I’ve also done a dozen murals, like the one at the Paris UNESCO center, and the glass wall of the new theater in Rotterdam. And four hundred lithographs at the very least, most of them done in Paris, printed by the same man I followed from workshop to workshop till he went into retirement just recently.

Ten thousand different pieces of work. Is that a lot? Too much? In fact, Karel Appel is one of those who, after the traumatic experience of the war, decided they would go the whole hog. His close friend of the Cobra period, the Flemish poet Hugo Claus, put it this way: “I just can’t help producing a lot. I reserve the right to produce what suits me at any given moment. And I keep what I like.”

This was already in some sense to come out fighting for the Affluent Society values of abundance and productivity that were to mark the second half of the twentieth century. The big difference is that in place of the manipulated consumer, we have (to continue with this poor vocabulary) an imprescriptible producer. Hugo Claus again: “I refuse to let myself be restricted to any one genre, any one climate, any one theme.” These words are directly applicable to Karel Appel, who in his work has always gone from one discipline to another, mixing techniques and styles, with no concern for anyone or anything. In his case, indiscipline might be a better word than discipline: painting without rules, drawing without models, art without school or museum.

Nothing is less suited to a dialogue with Appel’s work than the usual apparatus of aesthetic analysis. Concepts and principles simply cannot grasp this apparently disordered, indeed incoherent, world, with neither top nor bottom, and no fixed structure. Exploded in all directions; imploded also, implosion being, according to recent physics, the swift and brutal irruption of a fluid (a flux) into an enclosure (say, a form) where the pressure is lower than outside, so that it collapses inward. This is a pretty good description of Appel’s technique when he feels himself “an integral part of nature,” as in his recent Faces-Places.

It is a world involved in a never-ending series of metamorphoses and transmutations that respect no class, human or animal. After Wolfflin, it’s Linne’s turn to get a shock, and the historian with them. It is possible to reject the past also to such an extent—the past, that is, the heritage of centuries and styles (at least their museumification), and admit only a projective experience of the present? To be, for Appel, is not to have been. Being is what is about to be, what will be. Hamlet swallows his question.

What we have here is an art—in the old sense of “manner,” an accumulation of life in the hand—that, contrary to Western logic, but in conformity with Chinese logic and the logic of dreams (if the word “logic” can still apply), avoids antithesis and polarizations. It prefers alternation and complementariness, the dialogue and union of what we call contraries, but which an artist like Appel no longer feels as such.

Take, for example, right and left. I haven’t picked this antagonism in order to get the kind of facile effect that is the stock in trade of art criticism. Karel Appel is right-handed like everybody else. He’s no exception to that lateralization we all know and which is, in point of fact, anti-natural, for it has no physiological motivation: left and right are not perceptions, but concepts projected into human space and applied to the body. Nothing else—but this nothing has far-reaching consequences.

Appel isn’t even ambidextrous like Leonardo, or Holbein, or Charlie Chaplin counting banknotes, or Pierre Alechinsky with his “mirror drawing.” Yet when he paints, he uses his left hand. When he paints, that is, when he squeezes the tube of paint, when he slams the oily paste onto the canvas, when he starts working at it with his hand and his fingers, when he hits out like a boxer at an invisible opponent whom he materializes by his very attacks. Yes, for Appel the colorist, color is a “southpaw” affair.

For a right-handerin a world of right-handers such as ours to prefer the left hand is a serious affair: a fundamental, not to say ontological choice. The effects are to be seen throughout Appel’s work, in what appears to be a more or less conscious decision going back to the time when Appel broke with the Western tradition as it was taught the young painter at the Amsterdam School of Art. But need we fix a date? Wasn’t it written into Appel’s artistic genes?

With this aesthetic break went an ethical one; in fact they can hardly be distinguished. Appel’s generation, born with World War II, grew up rejecting a civilization that had found no better solution to its conflicts than carnage and apocalypse. Cobra was the forthright expression of this refusal.

To privilege the left hand implies a rejection of the general Manichean system by which the positive values of willpower and conscience are reserved for the right hand, while the left is burdened with all the negative connotations, reinforced by centuries of symbolism. This means that when, like Appel, one is inclined to action and production, to give free rein, as it were, to the left hand is to accept one’s negativity—not in order to bring about the destruction of art, but rather to invoke its powers of regeneration. A...