Floating Flower Passion

A member of the international avant-garde group CoBrA, founded in Paris in 1948, Karel Appel is well known for the whimsical style of his expressionist paintings. Considered the European counterparts of the American Abstract Expressionists, Appel and other members of CoBrA privileged spontaneity in an intuitive, almost child-like approach to painting. Appel’s use of flat fields of color to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the painted surface, as seen in "Floating Flower Passion", suggestively evokes the metaphysical dimensions of art as a free creative impulse. His graphic oeuvre grew out of his first experiments with etching and serigraphy in the early 1950s. Although this lithograph retains a simplicity of form characteristic of Appel’s earlier compositions, the controlled outlines separating the fields of color grant the image an at once finished and yet ethereal quality. The subjects of Floating Flower Passion doubtless allude to the famed still-lifes painted by seventeenth-century Dutch artists and to the flowers’ enduring associations with Dutch identity and pride.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and Patricia Ortega-Miranda.