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CoBrA

"CoBrA", an acronym derived from the initials of the city names Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, is the name of a group of artists whose founder-members came from those cities for a group of artists. CoBrA was co-founded by Asger Jorn, Constant, Christian Dotremont, Joseph Noiret, Karel Appel and Corneille in a small Paris café on 8 November 1948. Other artists, including Pierre Alechinsky, Eugène Brands, Lucebert and Anton Rooskens later joined the group. Its members worked with stylistic devices similar to those espoused by Informel to signalize their rejection of Surrealism and the revival of Expressionism. They took stylistic elements from naïve vernacular art and subject matter from children's drawings with abstract figurative color and configurations of forms. The CoBrA aesthetic ideology opposed bourgeois society and its constraints. Spontaneity and the rejection of conventional notions of aesthetics were to be the salient feature of their works. Viewing themselves as a group of political activists and encouraged by Asger Jorn, the members of CoBrA published ten issues of CoBra, an international magazine. Two large-scale exhibitions (in 1949 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 1951 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Liège) represented the breakthrough for the group. The public, however, did not always view CoBrA in a positive light; at the Liège exhibition there were even riots. When a mural by Karel Appel was unveiled in the canteen of the Amsterdam Stadhuis, the protests were so vehement that the work was not shown for ten years. The CoBrA group of artists disbanded in 1951 after Jorn and Dotremont fell ill.