Cobra Art 1948-1951

COBRA Art Movement 

COBRA (or CoBrA) was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), Amsterdam (A).

  COBRA, Expressionist group of painters whose name is derived from the first letters of the three northern European cities—Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam—that were the homes of its members. The first of the group’s two large exhibitions, organized by the Danish painter Asger Jorn, was held in 1949 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the second exhibition was held in 1951 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Liège, Belgium. COBRA included among its members Karel Appel, Corneille (Cornelis Guillaume van Beverloo), Constant (Nieuwenhuis), Pierre Alechinsky, Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk), and Jean Atlan.

   Influenced by poetry, film, folk art, children’s art, and primitive art, the semiabstract canvases by these artists display brilliant colour and spontaneous, violent brushwork that is akin to American Action painting. The human figure, treated in a wildly distorted, Expressionistic manner, is a frequent motif in their art. COBRA had a great impact on the development of subsequent European Abstract Expressionism. 

   Their working method was based on spontaneity and experiment, and they drew their inspiration in particular from children’s drawings, from primitive art forms and from the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró.

                                                             Le Bruit de la Chute, 1974-75

Participants in COBRA included ( only a part ) :

 Else Alfelt (1910–1974)

 Jean-MichelAtlan (1913–1960)

 Ejler Bille (1910–2004)

 Pol Bury (1922–2005)

 Jacques Calonne (born 1930)

 Hugo Claus (1929–2008)