Beach Life

In the early 1950s, Karel Appel joined an international network of postwar artists centered in Paris around the critic and curator Michel Tapié. Through exhibitions and publications, Tapié introduced the recent innovations of American action painting to European artists already focused on gestural brushwork, child-like imagery, and the pure materiality of paint. It was via Tapié, in 1954, that Appel met the New York dealer Martha Jackson, whose gallery in New York provided fecund meeting ground for artists on either side of the Atlantic; Appel exhibited there and traveled with Jackson to the U.S. for the first time in 1957.

Whereas his work of the late 1940s and early ‘50s centered around simple, totemic figures, Appel’s compositions made in New York featured curling skeins and more gestural passages of paint. Beach Life likely dates to the summer of 1957, when Appel spent time on Long Island and befriended Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, influential figures in Abstract Expressionism.

In this canvas, light blues splash at the edges against neutral grounds of gray and white and streaks of dark azure stretch across the center. Balancing these open passages, wiry arabesques swirl and roil across the surface. Seen from a distance, these tangled shapes come to resemble swimming figures, as with the horizontal cavorter in a freestyle stroke at top and another at right extending their arm upwards through the waves.

Here, Appel deployed his signature technique of those years, squeezing paint directly from the tube onto the canvas before mixing and moving the oil with his fingers. This painterly process amounted to something like an improvised dance across the canvas. In Beach Life, the lapping waves of Long Island meet another rhythm, the syncopation of New York jazz, a pivotal influence for Appel at the time. The urban environment provided as equal a sense of possibility as its nearby shorelines: "In New York I learned about unfinished space for the first time. New York itself is never finished. Things are continuously being broken, built up, and demolished."[1]

[1] "Karel Appel in Conversation with Rudi Fuchs," in Karel Appel: Retrospective, ed. Gerard H. Meulensteen, Vincent Polaković, and Gabrielle Wimmer (Bratislava: Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, 2005), p. 23.