Collecting 101

1.

In the beginning...

CoBrA was born in 1948 at a meeting in the Café Notre-Dame, Paris. There, founding members Karel Appel, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Corneille, Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn and Joseph Noiret signed a manifesto titled La cause était entendue (The Case Was Heard). Dotremont, a Belgian painter, coined the group’s name, an acronym of the founders’ home cities of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.

CoBrA was an amalgamation of the Dutch collective Reflex, the Danish group Høst and the Belgian Revolutionary Surrealist Group and spanned disciplines including painting, sculpture and graphic art. The movement was prolific in its short lifespan; staging two major museum shows and publishing manifestos and its eponymous magazine CoBrA.

The group’s utopian spirit proved infectious and it soon outgrew the origin cities of its namesake, expanding in scope and influence across Europe.

2.

Founding Principles

In the immediate wake of World War Two, society was fragile, but beginning to heal. It was in this backdrop that a CoBrA, a non-conformist avant-garde collective formed, seizing the opportunity for artistic rebirth. Their focus was largely cooperative; instead of museums and galleries, they sought other means of critical and political engagement that blended the conceptual motifs of Surrealism, Marxism and modernism.

Its ideology sought to reform society by transcending conventions and creating a better world, using art as a vehicle for communication, change and renewal. They sought to unite post-war Europe, eschewing the idea that the artist was an individualistic force, and could instead be an actively engaged member of society.

They were adamantly opposed to the stagnant, rational formalities of western civilisation and The Academy. Instead, the artists prioritised spontaneity and impulse that conveyed both the inhumanity of the preceding years and a sense of optimism for the years ahead.

They sought to break away from naturalism and abstraction. At the core of their ethos was a sense of unfettered experimentation, dissolving any boundary between liberated thought and the act of creativity.

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3.

Influences

With this devotion to free expression came a critique of Western principles. For CoBrA, abstraction was dehumanising and naturalism restrictive. Instead, they looked to Nordic myth and folkloric traditions and evoked the fantasy worlds in the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró.

Importantly, they also drew inspiration from the creativity and worldview of children, in which imagination could roam free and the mind unburdened by preconceptions.

CoBrA’s organic mode of experimentation rejected art forms and movements that were restricted, from the ultra-civilised Renaissance to the hard geometry of Piet Mondrian. In a similar vein to the Surrealists, they were interested in an interplay between the conscious and the unconscious mind, and creativity that existed outside of the traditional canon. The results were exuberant, spontaneous and unbridled – as Dotremont put it, ‘Creation before theory.’

The group was also revolutionary in its approach to attribution. Doing away with the notion of a single artist as a lone genius, they largely rejected the strictures of authorship and specialisation, instead favouring a culture of collaboration.

4.

Style

The CoBrA artists were experimenters in theory and practice. This meant a pure and pan-disciplinary approach to media. Although painting played a key role, the movement also spanned most media in the toolbox of art, from sculptures to ceramics, prints to poetry, as well as assemblage works that referenced Surrealist automatism.

Their painting style was characterised by high-octane, high-colour compositions. Their subject matter often involved fantastic animals, plants and the human figure, though the latter was distorted and merely alluded to; humanity was rendered instead through pure expression.

Members of the group often made use of primary colours and gestural brushstrokes, characteristics that have their roots in early German Expressionism.

The unifying aesthetic of CoBrA artists can be summed up in their notion of 'desire unbound', which also has its origins in Surrealist thought. The group used the term to stress the importance of unrestricted pleasure, intuition, spontaneity and improvisation in the creative process.

5.

Legacy

Though CoBrA was only formally active for three years, the movement’s output and ideology had a lasting impact on art throughout the 20th century and beyond.

In their lifetime, CoBrA held two major exhibitions. The first, in 1949, took place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; it was met with a polarised reception but was pivotal in placing CoBrA in the global spotlight. In 1951, the group’s farewell show was staged at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Liege, Belgium, and featured all the major members, as well as notable friends of the group including Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró who Pierre Alechinsky, an early member, wittily referred to as 'a few squatters'.

Ultimately, the group would dissolve with the same poetic intensity that first united it. As both Jorn and Dotremont suffered from tuberculosis, and amid internal group conflicts, Pierre Alechinsky took to the back cover of the Palais des Beaux-Arts exhibition catalogue to publish the decree: Mourir en beauté (Die in beauty).

Major works from the CoBrA movement can be found in notable international collections including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, the Kunsthalle van Emden and the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1995, The CoBrA Museum of Modern Art opened in Amstelveen, Netherlands, further cementing the legacy and importance of the movement.

The market for CoBrA works also remains robust. In 2006, Bruun Rasmussen – Part of the Bonhams Network sold one of Asger Jorn’s monumental masterpieces – the vibrant 1958 oil painting Tristesse Blanche – for DKK 8.3 million (€1.1 million).