Karel Appel, (born April 25, 1921, Amsterdam, Neth.—died May 3, 2006, Zürich, Switz.), Dutch painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. He attended Amsterdam’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts (1940–43) and was cofounder (1948) of the COBRA (Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam) group of northern European Expressionists. In 1950 he moved to Paris; by the 1960s he had settled in New York City, and he later lived in Italy and Switzerland. An exponent of expressive abstraction, he developed a painting style characterized by thick layering of pigment, violent colour and brushwork, and crude, reductive figures. His figurative sculptures were executed in metal and wood. He painted portraits of jazz musicians and a number of public works, including a mural in the Paris UNESCO building.
