The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe: Reanimating Art 2020006228, 2020006229, 9781138490840, 9781351034500

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The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948–1951). Although the name stood for the organizers’ home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra’s experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history. Karen Kurczynski is Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Cover image: Karel Appel, Mens en dieren (People and Animals), 1949. Oil on canvas, 351.6 ´ 358.5 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the feld of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research. Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America Edited by Oscar E. Vázquez The Australian Art Field Practices, Policies, Institutions Edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, and Tamara Winikoff Lower Niger Bronzes Philip M. Peek Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia Edited by Francesco Freddolini and Marco Musillo The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe Reanimating Art Karen Kurczynski Emilio Sanchez in New York and Latin America Victor Deupi Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France John Finlay Picturing Courtiers and Nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck Self Representation by Early Modern Elites John Peacock For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge -Research-in-Art-History/book-series/RRAH

The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe Reanimating Art

Karen Kurczynski

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Karen Kurczynski to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kurczynski, Karen, author. Title: The Cobra movement in postwar Europe: reanimating art / Karen Kurczynski. Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020006228 (print) | LCCN 2020006229 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138490840 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351034500 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cobra (Association) | Art and society–Europe–History– 20th century. Classifcation: LCC N6494.C5 K87 2020 (print) | LCC N6494.C5 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006228 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006229 ISBN: 978-1-138-49084-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-03450-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Bill, Tal, and Layla

Contents

List of fgures List of plates Acknowledgments Introduction: Reanimating Art

ix xiii xv 1

Becoming Cobra 4 A Many-Headed Beast 26 Reframing Cobra 31 Notes 33 1

Human Animals

37

Symbolic Savagery in Paris 47 Living Abstraction in Denmark 49 Primal Energy in Amsterdam 56 Animal Magnetism in Brussels 58 The Beastly Visions of Jorn and Constant 65 Becoming Animal 71 Material Evolution 74 Notes 75 2

Surrealism into Cobra

79

Belgian Surrealism and the Material Imagination 87 Revolutionary Surrealism and Communism 97 Refex and Experimentalism 108 Cobra, Surrealism, and Informel: Flexible Ties 115 The Imaginists and Surrealism at Mid-Century 123 A Toast to Cobra 126 Notes 126 3

War, Memory, and Renewal Vandercam’s Photographs: Life Among the Ruins 143 Appel’s “Questioning Children”: Innocence Accuses 155

134

viii

Contents Tajiri’s “Warriors”: Sentinels for Peace 166 The Value of Experimental Art 175 Notes 175

4

Expression for All

180

The Identity Politics of Expression 188 Expression and Intersubjectivity 191 Else Alfelt: Gender, Affect, and Expression 196 Wolvecamp, Rooskens, and Corneille: Expression and Primitivism 207 Ernest and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Minoritarian Humanism 217 Universality Through Struggle 228 Notes 230 5

Coda: New Networks

237

Notes 244 Bibliography Index

247 266

Figures

0.1

0.2 0.3

0.4

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0.6

0.7

Asger Jorn and P. V. Glob, Mockup cover of “Olddansk Kunst,” 1950, featuring photograph by Lennart Larsen of Bronze Age objects found at Fårdal, Viborg, Denmark. Photograph by Lars Bay. Museum Jorn Archives, Silkeborg. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Pol Bury, Front cover of Cobra 2, 1949. Linocut, 30.8 × 46 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Høst and Cobra artists visiting the Copenhagen zoo, 1948. L–R: Constant, Vibeke Alfelt, Ejler Bille, Corneille, Knud Nielsen, Tony Appel, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba with arms around Wonga Mancoba and Kari Alfelt, Karel Appel, Erik Ortvad, Ernest Mancoba, Else Alfelt, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Agnete Therkildsen, and Ortvad’s son. © Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark Carl-Henning Pedersen (wall) and Klaus Jorn (door), Wall mural, August, 1949, now destroyed. Bregnerød, Denmark. Photograph by Robert Dahlmann Olsen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Aldo van Eyck, Poets’ Cage for the frst Cobra “International Exhibition of Experimental Art,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1949. Lower left to top: Gerrit Kouwenaar, Bert Schierbeek, Lucebert, Jan Elburg, and Karl-Otto Götz. Word paintings by Lucebert. Photograph by Mrs. E. Kokkoris-Syriër, courtesy of the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen Aldo van Eyck installation, “International Exhibition of Experimental Artists,” 1949, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Photograph by Serge Vandercam, courtesy of the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. Works by Madeleine SzemereKemeny (left wall), Corneille (painted box), Anton Rooskens (back wall), and granite sculptures by Henry Heerup. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels Henry Heerup, Den jyske nisse (The Gnome from Jutland), n.d. Painted granite, 50 × 55 × 45 cm. Museum Jorn, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA

9 17

21

22

23

24 25

x 1.1

1.2

1.3 1.4 1.5

1.6

1.7

1.8

1.9 2.1 2.2

2.3

2.4

Figures Asger Jorn, Guldsvinet (Golden Swine), 1950. Oil on canvas, 50 x 100 cm. Photograph by Lars Bay. Museum Jorn, Denmark. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Asger Jorn, double-page spread from Guldhorn og Lykkehjul / Les Cornes D’Or et la Roue de la Fortune (The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune) (Copenhagen, 1957), n.p. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Egill Jacobsen, Rød Maske (Red Masks), 1943. Oil on canvas, 85 × 65 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Painted rock carvings reproduced in P. V. Glob, “Helleristninger og magi,” Helhesten 1, no. 2 (1941): 61 Karel Appel, Composition with Animal Figures, 1951. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 141 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Pierre Alechinsky and Reinhoud, Jesus Lapin (Jesus Rabbit), 1950. Bones and shells assembled by Alechinsky in an oval cup made by Reinhoud, 39 × 25 × 8 cm. Archives Pierre Alechinsky. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Pierre Alechinsky, Saint Michel Terrasse par le Dragon (Saint Michael Floored by the Dragon), 1951, from the series Les Ateliers du Marais. Aquatint, 6 × 4 in. Collection Pierre and Micky Alechinsky, Bougival, France. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Reinhoud, Good Grief, 1974. Welded copper on lithographic stone base, 41.9 × 60 × 22.9 cm. 16-1/2 × 23-1/2 × 9 in. Private Collection Los Angeles. Photograph by Joshua White. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Constant, Fauna, 1949. Oil on linen, 74.9 cm × 85 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Raoul Ubac, Cobra, 1950. Engraved slate, 30.5 × 20.5 cm, produced for the cover of Cobra 7. Collection Pierre and Micky Alechinsky. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Cover of Refex 2 (1949), featuring Jacques Doucet, Untitled, 1949 woodcut, private collection, the Netherlands. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Le Surrealisme en 947: Patalogue Offciel de L’Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme (Surrealism in 947: Offcial Patalogue of the International Exhibition of Surrealism), pamphlet cover. Paris, 1947. 24 cm. Fluid Archives Karl-Otto Götz, Zwei Figuren (Two Figures), 1946. Gouache on paper, 25 × 37.5 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

38

45 54 55

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59

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65 68 92

95

103

107

Figures 3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4 3.5

3.6

3.7

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

Serge Vandercam, Mer du Nord, Nieuport (North Sea, Nieuwpoort), 1948. Gelatin silver print, 7.2 × 23.9 cm. Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels Pierre Alechinsky, Le Poète Assassinee (The Poet Assassinated), 1948. Linocut, reproduced in Pierre Alechinsky, Fêtes et trouble-fête (Brussels: Galerie Apollo, 1948), frontispiece. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Serge Vandercam, Nieuwpoort, 1948. Gelatin silver print, 15-15/16 x 15-7/8 in. (40.5 × 40.3 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fund of the 1980s purchase. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels Serge Vandercam, Les crochets (Hooks), 1952. Photograph, 31.5 × 26.5 cm. Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels Karel Appel, Vragende Kinderen (Questioning Children), 1949. Tempera wall mural, Hotel The Grand (former Amsterdam City Hall). Originally published in Aldo Van Ecyk, Een appèl aan de verbeelding (Amsterdam, 1950). Image courtesy of the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Sabine Weiss, Shinkichi Tajiri with a “One-day sculpture” on the banks of the Seine, Paris, 1950. Photograph © Sabine Weiss. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Shinkichi Tajiri, Warrior, 1949. Plaster, 135 in. high, exhibited in the “International Exhibition of Experimental Art,” Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1949. No longer extant. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Else Alfelt, detail of wall mural, 1944, Pudserum (Pillow Room), Hjortøgade Kindergarden, Copenhagen. Photograph by the author. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA. Lotti van der Gaag, Untitled, 1952. Charcoal on paper, 23 × 37 cm. Ambassade Hotel Collection, Amsterdam. Svavar Guðnason, Sankt Hans drøm (Midsummer Night’s Dream), 1945. Oil on canvas, 97.6 × 130.1 cm. Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Photo: Niels Fabaek Else Alfelt, Komposition, bjergtinder (Composition, Mountain Peaks), 1943. Oil on canvas, 60 × 74.5 cm. Vejle Kunstmuseum, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Freedom fghter behind a barricade at Holmens Bro, Copenhagen, May 4, 1945. 5 Aar: Besættelsen i billeder, ed. Ernst Mentze (Copenhagen: Berlingske Forlag, 1945), fgure 410 Theo Wolvecamp, Explosie (Explosion), 1948. Oil on canvas, 70 × 80 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam

xi

135

142

145 148

161

169

170 197 201 203 204 206 208

xii 4.7

4.8

4.9

4.10

4.11

5.1

Figures Anton Rooskens, Hommage à Lautreamont (Homage to Lautreamont), 1947, Ink on paper, 53.5 × 40.5 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Corneille, Les Rhythmes Joyeux de la Ville (The Joyous Rhythms of the City), 1949. Oil on canvas, 62.5 × 52.5 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Cobra 1 (1949), 20–1. Carl-Henning Pedersen, untitled color lithograph, at left, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Owl, 1938, plaster (now destroyed), at lower right. Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Maske: Krigens udbrud (Mask: Outbreak of War), 1939. Plaster, 36.5 × 28.5 × 13.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Den lille nænsomme (The Little Careful One), 1951. Plaster, 32 × 26.5 × 25.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Pierre Alechinsky and Christian Dotremont, Notre pensee II (Our Thought II), 1971–1983. India ink on paper, glued to canvas. 205 × 218 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / SABAM, Brussels

210

212

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223

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Plates

Color Plates are located between pages 179 and 180 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

Jean-Michel Atlan, Untitled, 1951. Oil on hardboard, 81 × 65 cm (32 × 26 in.). Private Collection, Paris. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Ejler Bille, Komposition, 1934. Oil on canvas, 67 × 74 cm. Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Denmark. Photograph by Ole Bjørn Petersen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Egill Jacobsen, Ophobning (Accumulation), 1938. Oil on canvas, 80 × 65.5 cm. SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen. SMK Photo/Jacob Schou-Hansen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Asger Jorn, Legetøjsbillede (Toy Picture), 1945. Oil on canvas, 74 cm × 99 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Asger Jorn and Christian Dotremont, Je Lève, Tu Lèves, Nous Rêvons (I Rise, You Rise, We Dream), 1948. Collection Pierre and Micky Alechinsky, Bougival, France. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA / SABAM, Brussels Carl-Henning Pedersen, Fugle i Landskab (Birds in a Landscape), 1944. Oil on canvas. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands, on long-term loan from Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Pierre Alechinsky, Central Park, 1965. Acrylic with marginal drawings in India ink on paper mounted on canvas, 63.8 × 76" (162 × 193 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Asger Jorn, Ørnens ret (The Eagle’s Right) II, 1951. Oil on masonite. 74.5 × 60 cm. Museum Jorn. Photograph by Lars Bay. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Constant, Animaux (Animals), 1949. Oil on linen, 85.2 × 70.5 cm. Collection ABN AMRO Bank, on loan to Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Asger Jorn and Christian Dotremont, Il y a Plus de Choses Dans la Terre d’un Tableau Que dans le Ciel de la Théorie Esthétique (There Are More Things in the Earth of a Painting Than in the Heaven of Aesthetic Theory), “Peinturemot” (Word-painting), 1948. Oil and pencil on canvas, 99 × 129 cm. Former Ernest van Zuylen Collection, Liege. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA / SABAM, Brussels

xiv

Plates

11.

Eugène Brands, Untitled mask, 1948. Mixed media: papier mâché and colored egg-shell with snake skin, height 25 in. Golda and Meyer Marks Cobra Collection, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale Eugène Brands, Neergeschreven Drift (Passion Written Down) II, 1949. Oil on canvas, 485 × 112 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Eugène Brands, Neergeschreven Drift (Passion Written Down) I, 1949. Oil on canvas, 112 × 112 cm. Private collection Anders Österlin, Imaginary Red, 1950. Oil on canvas, 60.7 × 68.2 cm. Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden Max Walter Svanberg, Porslinskvinnorna ur den Spröda Butiken Som Ar Mitt Hjärta (Porcelain Women out of the Brittle Shop That Is My Heart), 1961. Gouache and watercolor, 69 × 83 cm. Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden Karel Appel, Vragende Kinderen (Questioning Children), 1949. Assemblage, found and painted wood and nails. 105 × 67 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Karel Appel, Vragende Kinderen (Questioning Children), 1949. Tempera wall mural, Hotel The Grand (former Amsterdam City Hall). Image courtesy of the Karel Appel Foundation. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Shinkichi Tajiri, Wounded Knee 1890, 1953. Iron and paint, 103 cm high. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven (NL)/Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht (NL). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Asger Jorn, Såret vilddyr II (Wounded Wild Animal II), 1951. Oil on masonite, 100 × 82 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Lars Bay. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Constant (artist) and Gerrit Kouwenaar (writer), Goede Morgen Haan (Good Morning Rooster), 1949. Ink and oil crayon on paper (printed with handcolored illustrations), 25 × 17.5 cm. Amsterdam: Experimentele Groep in Holland. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. Photo: Henni van Beek. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Else Alfelt, Blaanende Fjell-Verden (Blue Mountain World), 1948. 126 × 126 cm. Oil on plywood. Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA Corneille, Black Girl in Room, 1951. Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 54 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Ernest Mancoba, Composition, 1940. Oil on canvas. 59 × 50 cm (23.2 × 19.7 in). Collection Wendy Fisher, A4 Foundation, Cape Town Ernest Mancoba, Untitled, 1958. Oil on canvas, Fundaçao Sindika Dokolo in Luanda, Angola Herbert Gentry, Among Others and With Friends, 2000. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 in. Estate of Herbert Gentry

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

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Acknowledgments

This book builds on two decades of research in Europe, the United States, and South Africa. My frst book, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (Routledge, 2014) was the product of my PhD dissertation completed in 2005 with my advisor Professor Robert Lubar and the guidance of Professors Linda Nochlin and Robert Storr at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. My project was inspired by the teaching of Professor Benjamin Buchloh at Columbia University. The extensive research for that book and the subsequent related publications and exhibitions I curated created the groundwork for this project. I again express gratitude for everyone who has helped me with my research on Asger Jorn along the way. I decided to write a book on Cobra after curating the exhibitions Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival (Silkeborg, Denmark: Museum Jorn, 2014) and Human Animals: The Art of Cobra (NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 2017), which opened at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in fall 2016. For inviting me to co-curate Expo Jorn, I thank Jacob Thage, director of the Museum Jorn. I am also grateful to my co-curator Karen Friis Herbsleb of Expo Jorn; director emeritus of the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum Troels Andersen; Dorthe Aagesen and Helle Brøns, co-curators of the complementary exhibition Asger Jorn: Restless Rebel at the Statens Museum for Kunst; the entire Museum Jorn staff who has worked so generously with me for many years, and all the contributors and designers of the Expo Jorn exhibition and catalog. I am grateful to Cobra scholar Willemijn Stokvis in particular for sharing her expertise and advice at numerous stages of my research. I extend my profound gratitude to Pierre and Micky Alechinsky, who generously shared their insights into Cobra as well as the monumental later work of Pierre Alechinsky in Bougival. I am thankful to Bonnie Clearwater, director of the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and senior curator Barbara Buhler Lynes for making our exhibition Human Animals: The Art of Cobra a success, and for publishing a fantastic Golda and Meyer Marks Cobra Collection catalog. Thanks to director Irvin Lippman of the former Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale for inviting me to curate the Human Animals exhibition, and to curator Rachel Talent Ivers for research assistance. I also thank Diana Blanco and the entire museum staff at NSUAM for the beautiful installation in Florida. Linda Marks and Berenice Fisher provided invaluable insight and support for the exhibition as well. Special thanks to Brenda Zwart for collaborating on her research into the Marks Collection at NSUAM and more recently the Ambassade Collection in Amsterdam. I also thank Marion Lefebre, Kristen Accola, and Marlène Brody for making their collections and expertise available for research. I am grateful to the staff of the Carnegie Museum; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Arizona

xvi Acknowledgments State University Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Professor Peter Kalb and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University; the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and curator Karen Butler at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in Saint Louis for research assistance. For the University of Massachusetts installation of Human Animals: The Art of Cobra and the related exhibition Cobra: Contemporary Legacy, I extend profound gratitude to the staff of the University Museum of Contemporary Art, including director Loretta Yarlow, Lyle Denit, Jennifer Lind, Eva Fierst, and Betsey Wolfson. I am also grateful to Emily Devoe, Rebecca Han, Maria Bastos-Stanek, and Annie Sollinger who produced a fantastic brochure. I thank the artists who generously shared their time and work in the Contemporary Legacy exhibition, including Tal R, Nicole Eisenman, Albert Oehlen, Axel Heil, and above all Jacqueline de Jong who brought the work to life in Amherst. I thank everyone who participated in the related conference, including Ruth Baumeister, Karen Koehler, Daniel Kojo Schrade, Mary Ann Rose, McKenzie Wark, Gregory Williams, Hilde de Bruijn, and Frazer Ward. I am also grateful to all the Five College departments and programs who co-sponsored the conference, in particular the UMASS History of Art and Architecture Department; the College of Humanities and Fine Arts; Barton Byg and the German and Scandinavian Studies Department, the Studio Art Department for hosting Jacqueline de Jong, and the Massachusetts Review. My gratitude extends to the Consulates General of the Netherlands and Denmark for supporting the exhibition. Thanks to CRVPT (Connecticut River Valley Poet’s Theater) for their hilarious and thought-provoking interpretation of the Poet’s Cage. Thank you to everyone in the artist’s studios, galleries, museums, educational institutions, and local newspapers who made it all happen and publicized it. This book includes parts of my previous peer-reviewed publications, most importantly “Primitivism, Humanism, and Ambivalence: Cobra and Post-Cobra,” cowritten with Nicola Pezolet for Res (spring/autumn 2011); and “Materialism and Intersubjectivity in Cobra” for Art History (autumn 2016). I thank editors Francesco Pellizi of Res, and Natalie Adamson and Steven Harris of Art History, for the opportunity to develop the ideas that profoundly informed this book. Many catalog texts and international conference presentations have helped me shape my research. I thank those colleagues and editors who assisted with my research and writing: Hal Foster, Sam Ladkin; Monica Kjellman-Chapin; Anna Mecugni; Kirsten Swenson; Rachel Tolano and the Boston University Art Gallery for the Herbert Gentry exhibition; Catherine Dossin and the European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum for my panel on Cobra at the 2015 College Art Association; and Vivien Greene at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Thank you, Alison Gingeras and Blum & Poe Gallery for the ground-breaking 2017 Cobra exhibition and catalog The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy, which connected contemporary U.S. audiences with the work of Cobra. In Europe, many colleagues have provided generous assistance in research and the organization of related conferences and exhibitions over the past several years: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen; Roberto Ohrt and especially Axel Heil for his extensive knowledge of Cobra; Richard Leeman and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art for the Michel Ragon conference; Serge Guilbaut and the Museo Nacional

Acknowledgments

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Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for the conference “Radiaciones: La idea de arte europeo en la Guerra Fría, 1944–1955”; Nicole Fritz, curator of We Love Animals: 400 jahre Tier und Mensch in der Kunst at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg; Esther Schlicht, curator of Wilderness in Art at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; and the staff of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. For research in Scandinavia, I am grateful to Anni Lave Nielsen of the Henry Heerup Museum; Troels Jorn for research assistance and his important role in spearheading the Hjortøgade Kindergarden restoration; former Gyldendal editor Lene Trap-Lind; Flavia Frigeri, Kristian Handberg, and the Louisiana Museum for the “Multiple Modernisms” conference; Lotte Korshøj of the Carl-Henning-Pedersen and Else Alfelt Museum; Mikael Andersen; director Mikkel Bogh and curator Dorthe Aagesen of the Statens Museum for Kunst, for the ground-breaking Sonja Ferlov Mancoba exhibition; Ellef Prestsæter; and Kristoffer Noheden. I am grateful to South African scholar Winnie Sze for a generous and productive exchange of ideas, and the Ernest Mancoba conference at the A4 Foundation in Cape Town. A warm thanks to Tania Ørum in Copenhagen, Benedikt Hjartarson in Reykjavik, and the entire team of editors at the Nordic Avant-Garde Network. I am grateful to Patricia Berman and the “Munch, Modernism, and Modernity” Research Group in Oslo for the “Nordic Surrealism” conference. Thank you to Kerry Greaves for her work on the exhibition War Horses: Helhesten and the Danish Avant-Garde During World War II at NSUAM, the “Women Artists in Scandinavia” conference at the Statens Museum for Kunst in 2019, and for going above and beyond in everything she does. I extend my gratitude to the Fulbright Commission and the U.S. State Department for the opportunity to do primary research and teaching on a Fulbright Teaching and Research Grant at the University of Ghent in fall, 2018. Thank you to professor Steven Jacobs for the invitation, and to Hilde d’Haeyere and Wouter Davidts for their hospitality. I am grateful to the students of the Modern Art in Belgium MA seminar at University of Ghent, the graduate assistants Griet Bonne and Josephine Vandekerckhove, Marit van der Jeugt, Stefanie Bodien, and the staff at the Vandenhove Gallery. For my research in Belgium and the Netherlands, I extend thanks to Joel Vandercam; collector Wouter Schopman and Ireen Wyers at the Ambassade Collection; Masha Chlenova and the organizers of the De Kooning seminar at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis in The Hague; the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam; the Archives et Musée de la Littérature in Brussels; the Archives de l’Art Contemporain at the Musées-Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; director Xavier Canonne and the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi. I am especially grateful to Trudy Nieuwenhuys-Van der Horst for her generous insights and to Giotta and Ryu Tajiri for their assistance and hospitality. Warm thanks to Marie Godet for sharing her ground-breaking research. I extend my gratitude to the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Amstelveen, in particular former director Katja Weitering and curator Hilde de Bruijn for research assistance, informative discussions, and hospitality on numerous occasions. This book benefted from the research support of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the Massachusetts Society of Professors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I appreciate the image assistance of Michael Foldy and the UMASS Digital Scholarship Center. Thanks also to the Five College participants in the Faculty Seminar in 1948 at the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMASS.

xviii Acknowledgments I am truly grateful to the readers of draft chapters, including Kerry Greaves, Stephen Harris, Nico Vicario, and William Kaizen, as well as my peer reviewers. My work was made possible in part by my late father Thaddeus Walter Kurczynski. I truly appreciate the enthusiasm for art and the help I received from my stepmother Margi Gray Kurczynski. Thank you to my mother Elizabeth Kurczynski for her unwavering assistance and profound encouragement. Thanks to my entire family for coming along with me on this journey, and to Bill for perfecting the sourdough.

Introduction Reanimating Art

“I only go into museums to remove the muzzles,” Belgian poet Christian Dotremont proclaimed at the controversial opening of the frst major Cobra exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1949.1 His statement epitomizes the poetic critique of art world institutions in the Cobra movement, whose art and poetry aspired to both animalistic directness and a brutal, polemical joy. The Dutch Cobra poet Lucebert vividly narrates an attack on high culture in a 1948 poem: “9000 jackals swimming to boston / the burubudhur of the bourgeoisie.”2 The Cobra artists considered art a gift (and sometimes a frightening one), not a temple. They hoped that removing the muzzles from art – the framing, the criticism, the elitism, in short, all the excessive mediation – would liberate the creativity of all people. This was the dream of the avant-garde since its inception in the mid-19th century: everyone is an artist, and only the profession of art keeps their inventions from public recognition. Just after the Allied liberation in 1944–1945, European cities were still recovering from a brutal Nazi occupation while people struggled to comprehend the legacy of the Holocaust and the Bomb. Worse even than the mustard gas and grenades of the First World War, this was the most calculated and dehumanizing violence ever to unfold in the space of a few years. The Cobra artists, including founders Christian Dotremont from Brussels, Constant from Amsterdam, Asger Jorn from Copenhagen (thus the acronym “CoBrA”), as well as 40-odd other artists, poets, writers, photographers, and flmmakers mostly from northern Europe, had lived through the German occupations of their home cities and Paris. Building on the earlier avant-garde experiments of the older Danish artists of the Linien and Høst groups, they attempted to rebuild the avant-garde by forming a transnational movement – in other words, one that linked artists as ordinary people from different national and cultural backgrounds, as opposed to the “world leaders” who formed the increasingly infuential international agreements of the period after the First World War. Largely defned by its group exhibitions and eponymous publications – notably the Cobra journal and artist monograph series – in addition to the artists’ manifestoes in various languages, Cobra is not an artistic style but an interdisciplinary social network, with an offcial beginning and end (1948–1951) but also a long afterlife that continues to impact artistic discussions today. In 1948, it was the future of the human animal as a living, creative being, and not art as a specialized activity, that preoccupied Cobra. Dutch artist Constant’s famous statement that “painting is not a construction of colors and lines, but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these together” suggests that the Cobra artists

2

Introduction

were concerned with making painting do more than just sit on a wall.3 In the tradition of the avant-garde, they wanted to pry creativity loose from the specialized profession of art. They tried to reconnect art to the larger circuit of life, at a time when human experience was seemingly reduced by the war and its aftermath to “bare life,” or a mere animal existence.4 Rather than lament the horror of recent events, these artists – almost all in their twenties and eager to make a mark on the world – envisioned a vibrant future. They attempted to reanimate art, not through rituals or exotic totems, but through vivid colors and material intensity. With provocation, humor, and play, they used the animal and mythic symbols found in popular culture as source material. At the same time, they were more likely to describe their works as abstract than representational, because the images in their art works tend to be only partially recognizable. Their subjects remain in fux, and thus open to interpretation. An untitled oil painting of 1951 by French-Algerian painter Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960) exemplifes the way Cobra images appear caught in the process of transforming into something else (Plate 1). The painting hovers between animal and vegetable, defned by a jagged, rootlike network of dark black monstrous forms. Atlan’s friend, critic Michel Ragon, would later describe them as carboniferous roots, a “black skeletal structure” (ossature noire) that spanned his paintings for the next ten years. They present an uncanny life, like the Mediterranean mandrake root, traditionally associated with magic and superstition. Here, they suggest a root system suspended invisibly under a frozen ground, ready to spring to life again once the winter is over. Atlan writes in Cobra that the most valuable expressive forms today are neither abstract nor fgurative, but defned by more fundamental natural forms and transformations. The analysis of the elements essential to the pictorial language: architecture, lighting [les lumières could also mean ‘insight’], color, matter, shows that the picture, whether fgurative or not, organizes itself according to the same fundamental rhythms. The most valuable forms […] participate precisely in these cosmic powers of metamorphosis where the real adventure takes place. (From whence arise forms that are themselves and something other than themselves, birds and cacti, abstraction and new fguration.)5 Speaking in a language typical of the immediate postwar context, Atlan praises painting’s “expressive intensity.” Critics would respond with similar affective responses. One refers to Atlan’s paintings as “primitive, black chaos, a proliferation of elementary signs originating in unformed dreams [that] trouble us and exalt us.”6 Another calls them “canvases tormented by the generation of objects hacked into being.”7 The artist, as well as his critics, compared their uncanny presence to magic. Many artists at the time found inspiration in myths and totems, as witnessed by the interest in “mythmaking” among the American Abstract Expressionists as well as the Danish Cobra artists during the war. The Surrealists thought that a “New Myth” would save Western culture after the liberation. The Cobra artists preferred magic because it was linked to action – to an imaginative power that etymologically linked art (kunst, in Danish) to other activities of making and doing (kunnen).8 Still, they realized it would take a particular alliance of material, imagination, and politics for art to claim any potential to heal society after what people had just lived through.

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3

Atlan’s story is one of the most astonishing of the many harrowing stories of the Cobra artists during the war. Born in Algeria to well-to-do Jewish parents, Atlan moved to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1930. He taught philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet until dismissed due to anti-Semitic laws during the occupation of Paris in 1940. Out of work, he taught himself to paint and wrote poetry. Along with his wife Denise, Atlan was arrested for his participation in the resistance in 1942 and charged with “acts of terrorism.” He only escaped execution by consciously simulating madness, and was placed in Saint-Anne psychiatric hospital until August, 1944. Released, he fought in the battle to liberate Paris still wearing his hospital clothing; his younger brother was killed fghting in Provence. Just three months later, Atlan published his frst volume of poetry and had his frst painting exhibition at Galerie l’Arc-en-Ciel in Paris.9 A year later in 1945, Jean Fautrier exhibited his renowned Otages (“Hostages”) series at Galerie Drouin. Critic Michel Ragon and others would later argue that Atlan’s infuence on the more well-known abstract artists like Fautrier and Wols was overlooked.10 Atlan published his frst statement about painting in 1945, proclaiming that “The time has come to elaborate a new language […] to call up a world of lines and colors […] which does not resemble what one calls reality, but which constitutes, by itself, a reality.”11 His 1951 painting exemplifes Cobra’s attempt to connect painting to the larger realities of lived experience. Michel Ragon later claimed that Atlan “never joined” Cobra; he was older, already established, averse to joining any group, and merely fattered by the Cobra artists’ attention.12 Still, Ragon wrote the volume on Atlan for the Cobra “Artistes libres” series. This set of monographs, conceived by Asger Jorn in 1950, serves as an important document of the movement. Ragon’s disavowal only serves as a reminder that Cobra never kept offcial track of its members. Instead, it served as a provisional and constantly shifting network of poets, artists, writers, and their friends, many of them participating in more than one movement at a time. The complexities of Cobra’s relationship to Surrealism alone require extensive analysis to unravel, as it involves the artists’ relationship not only to various iterations of the international Surrealist movement but also to the lyrical abstract or Informel painting movements that overlapped with postwar Surrealism. Atlan’s work connects all of these contexts, and his studio was a major meeting point for diverse artists and critics with intersecting interests in them. Cobra wanted to animate art as a living force in society, not a “dead” object in a museum but a site of connection among people – especially those excluded from recognition by the art world. Institutions of art tend to treat art as an inanimate luxury commodity, a sign of elite taste, or as a matter of national pride. The Cobra group animated a network of creative actors who brought their experiments into the public sphere in various ways, rethinking not only the object of art, but the exhibition, the flm screening, the public lecture, the artist’s book, and the journal as creative interventions. This meant, on the one hand, reanimating the avant-garde itself as a structure for international experimentation after the isolation, disruption, and traumas of war. On the other, it meant a more fundamental, anthropological investigation of the function of art in modern society. Cobra attempted to reinvent art by channeling the innocent liveliness of children’s art, the willful idiosyncrasy of folk and outsider art, the directness and materiality of pre-modern art, and the communal impact of traditional Medieval, Viking, African, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian art. All of these forms were united by earlier artists

4

Introduction

under the label “primitive.” Even though the term makes some appearances in Cobra writings, many of the artists would reject it and search for new ways to frame their interests that did not mischaracterize other cultures in racial terms. They preferred words like “living art” and “natural art” instead. They considered art a means to access “wonder, admiration, and enthusiasm” in all cultures.13 Very much in the spirit of Cobra, German curator Anselm Franke has proposed the term “animism” as a way of reconsidering art that foregrounds social relationships and reanimates “dead” artifacts. He describes objects as artifacts rather than art works in an attempt to level the cultural playing feld and resist the old colonialist attitudes that for so long led whole cultures to be dismissed as “primitive.”14 The animist, according to 19th-century anthropologist Edward Tylor, projects human qualities onto objects and is “unable” to tell the difference between the living and the nonliving world in Western scientifc terms.15 The problem today is that the rational and functionalist terms of Western technology have themselves have become fetishized. As Franke observes: The facticity and rationality that inhabits the world in which fetishism has been destroyed is replaced by a new fetish, ever more powerful than the previous one: objectivity, a form of knowing that is absolute and non-relational, bracketed off from history and social context.16 The contemporary approach to animism attempts to do justice to non-Western practices that early anthropologists dismissed and recognize their signifcance within postindustrial society. It aims to see beyond the binary divisions of nature and culture, native and anthropologist, pre-modern and modern, mystical and rational, fetishist and scientist, creator and collector that Western culture systematized in order to justify its colonization of the world. Following Marx, the Cobra artists would critique Western domination over the lower classes and the lumpenproletariat within Europe’s own boundaries. They would make visible the ways human and animal, life and nonlife were connected. This approach ties their investigations to what philosophers today call “new materialism,” which explores the agency and impact on human culture of non-human materialities, including animals and non-living objects.17 What is animate and what is inanimate are thrown into question when the artist appears to “magically” transform ordinary materials into threads of connection among people, or between people and other forms of animal and material existence. Cobra redefned painting, as well as sculpture and poetry, photography and flm, by developing new artistic approaches that include spontaneous experimentation, a transformative engagement with history, a new approach to collective art making, a direct expression found in overlooked and marginalized forms of culture, and the material immediacy of visual art and poetic language. These topics will each be explored in specifc chapters of this book. While it is a complicated story – really a collection of intersecting stories – I intend to tell it as straightforwardly as possible. It begins, like all stories, with a birth.

Becoming Cobra Cobra was founded at a bar in Paris in November, 1948, by a group of outsiders who signed a hand-written manifesto in response to a conference held by a group

Introduction

5

of artists and poets who had just left the Surrealist movement. The bar was the Café Notre Dame, a small café on the Left Bank across from Notre Dame Cathedral. Present were Belgian poets Christian Dotremont (1922–1979) and Joseph Noiret (1927–2012), Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914–1973), and the three Dutch painters Constant (Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, 1920–2005), Corneille (Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo, 1922–2010), and Karel Appel (1921–2006). Their short manifesto, “The Cause Was Understood” (La cause était entendue), penned by Dotremont, called for “an organic experimental collaboration that rejects all sterile and dogmatic theories.”18 It proclaims: We have established, ourselves, that our ways of living, working, and feeling are in common; we agree on a practical level and we refuse to participate in an artifcial theoretical unity. We work together, and we will continue to work together. It is in the spirit of effciency that we add to our national experiences a dialectical experience among our groups. […] We appeal […] to artists from any country who are able to work – who are able to work in our direction.19 Cobra arose out of the various artists’ experiences with groups they founded at home during and immediately after the war. Over 40 artists from more than 12 countries eventually participated in Cobra’s activities, both during and after its “offcial” years of 1948 to 1951. Besides the central groups of artists from Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands, it included French painters Atlan and Jacques Doucet (1924–1994), British painter Stephen Gilbert (1910–2007), Scottish painter William Gear (1915–1997), German painter Karl-Otto Götz (b. 1914) and his partner, experimental photographer Anneliese Hager (1904–1997), Hungarian sculptor Zoltán Kemény (1907–1965) and painter Madeleine Kemény (1906–1993), and the sole Japanese-American Cobra artist, sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri (1923–2009), who was released from an American internment camp to serve in the U.S. Army and made his career after the war in Paris and the Netherlands. They hailed, in other words, from much wider origins than the three northern European capitals of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Cobra deliberately did not keep a membership list. Its program was as general as it could have been, focusing only on the principles of spontaneity, experiment, and collectivity as expressed in the manifesto. These interests crossed mediums and stylistic approaches. Even if Cobra was subsequently framed as an artistic movement, it was really an avant-garde in the classic sense: an interdisciplinary experiment in a collective context that produced creative interventions critical not only of existing artistic and literary institutions, but all forms of cultural nationalism, heroic individualism, and elitism.20 Cobra’s art, like its poetry, rejected aesthetic purity in favor of riotous imagery and radical juxtapositions. The artists committed themselves to Communist ideals like equality, collectivity, resistance to the power of the art market, and transnationalism. The group named itself after three cities (Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), not three nations. The liberation of their home cities and their new ability to travel flled the Cobra artists with a youthful energy and a desire to create a new art based on freedom and transnational collaboration. Their ideas of freedom were very different, however, from the rugged individualism and liberalism associated with freedom in the U.S. For Cobra, freedom meant both personal and social liberation with the ideal of

6

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a more egalitarian society in which everyone could be creative. They defed postwar critics’ claims that abstraction was the ultimate language of Cold War freedom of expression by polemically celebrating kitsch and popular imagery. In a text called “Art Against War,” Dotremont praises widely divergent forms of anonymous creativity that encompass both artist and audience in active dialogue: Despite a propaganda all the more effective that the ‘masters of the universe’ share it, despite propaganda that chips at everyday life, fles down everyday thinking, there are thousands of painters, poets, in all countries, today who are in close combat with their visions […]. All, the old Impressionist painter who paints the undergrowth, the young dauber who makes squares on the background of circles because that’s what is done, the farmer who patiently paints fowers on the beams of his barn on Sunday night (I met him in Denmark, this farmer) and the writers, and the architects and the flmmakers, and the spectators too, the readers, the inhabitants of the house and the farm form the most effective armies of freedom.21 The Cobra artists realized that only by banding together could freedom of expression be defended from the political and economic forces that managed and constrained art, even in a liberal democracy. The interdisciplinary art of Cobra presents a unique combination of spontaneous play, experimental politics, and creative approaches to reusing popular images. Cobra was a coming together of diverse creative energies among young artists eager to restart after the war the international artistic collaborations they had already begun to develop in the 1930s. Dotremont was living in Paris during the war and publishing Surrealist poetry; he met Jorn there in fall, 1946. Around the same time, Jorn also met Constant at the Pierre Loeb Gallery, when the Dutch artist was examining some art work by abstract-Surrealist painter Joan Miró. Jorn had already moved to Paris from Denmark in 1936. Hoping to study with Kandinsky, he ended up at Léger’s atelier when he realized Kandinsky did not have a school. He exhibited with several other artists associated with the infuential Danish abstract-Surrealist journal Linien (“The Line,” 1934–1939). Sculptor Sonja Ferlov (later Ferlov Mancoba, 1911–1984) was the frst Danish artist to move into a Parisian studio in Montparnasse, next door to Alberto Giacometti. Jorn, Egill Jacobsen (1910–1998), Ejler Bille (1910–2004), Richard Mortensen (1910–1993), and Hans Øllgaard (1911–1969) soon joined her in Paris. The Linien group introduced Surrealist ideas of social liberation into Denmark and developed the “spontaneous abstract” (spontane abstrakte) method that would directly inform Cobra. They combined Surrealist methods with native ideas of vitalism inherited from earlier generations of Scandinavian modern artists in their unique approach to an abstract “living art.” Their inspirations ran the gamut from Viking art to Asian art, modern art to popular culture, as seen in Bille’s 1934 Composition, a lively take on the excitement of early animated flms (Plate 2). The sculpture of Ferlov equally exemplifes the group’s spontaneous abstract method but has been overshadowed by the work of Bille, Jorn, and the other “men artists,” as Chapter 4 describes. Her perspective and developing relationship with black South African artist Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) helped to shape Linien’s minoritarian humanist approach. Ferlov returned to Denmark in 1939, but soon came back to occupied Paris for Mancoba, and they married in 1942.

Introduction

7

The Danish abstract artists all returned home in 1939 due to the war. Most would join the exhibition society Høst (“Autumn,” 1934–1950) during the German occupation of Denmark. They also published in the journal Helhesten (“The Hell-Horse,” 1941–1944), a major predecessor to Cobra. Jorn founded Helhesten during the occupation with architect Robert Dahlmann Olsen (1915–1993). The journal’s archaeological and anthropological investigations of avant-garde, popular, and non-western culture specifcally attempted to counter the racist attitudes of the Nazi occupiers with a celebration of the art the Germans condemned as “degenerate.” The Høst group’s emphasis on the spontaneous transformation of popular images moved beyond Surrealism’s interest in the representation of dreams and visions. Their focus on folk art from around the world countered the nationalist appropriation of folk art under Fascism and paved the way for Cobra’s populist materialism. The artists in both Høst and Cobra included Else Alfelt (1910–1974) and her husband Carl-Henning Pedersen (1913–2007), married since 1934; Bille and Agnete Therkildsen (1900–1993), who married in 1944; Ferlov and Mancoba; Jacobsen; Henry Heerup (1907–1993); Erik Ortvad (1917–2008); Erik Thommesen (1916–2008); and Mogens Balle (1921–1988). They developed an art known in Denmark as “spontaneous abstraction,” where the art work suggests symbolic abstract images, the meaning of which are not set in advance but open to the observer’s interpretation. Along with Miró and Giacometti, their infuences included Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.22 Galvanized by the work of younger Linien members Jacobsen, Jorn, and Pedersen, they championed expressive abstraction and defed the heroic neo-classicism of Fascist art. The dialogic nature of this art relates to the vitalist idea of creating a healthier, more progressive community at the heart of the Danish avant-garde.23 The group developed a fantastic and spontaneous, vividly colored abstract art exemplifed by the wartime paintings of Jacobsen and Jorn. Jorn later recalls that the key painting Accumulation (Ophobning), painted by Jacobsen in 1938 (Plate 3) “gave us all such a shock, that it affected our entire further artistic development.”24 The picture depicts a series of forms, possibly masks, and decorative motifs in powerfully thick, black, dripping lines. They appear to overwhelm the liquid colors applied underneath and alongside them, threatening the entire image to dissolve in a weight of material liquidity. Breaking with his usual simple and festive scenes, Jacobsen painted it just after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, an act that alerted the world to the threat of Hitler’s army advancing into neighboring territories and the increasing inevitability of another disastrous war. He drew all over the picture with a brush full of black paint mixed with Paris Blue. “Afterwards,” he recalls, “I was aware that this was a coming to terms with the terror/threat from Nazism. It was a child breaking open its prison. The drawing expressed in a linear manner a prison broken open.”25 The painting could be read as a cage with its bars melting away in a volcanic fow of color – one that threatens to destroy the birdlike creature inside. Materials of color and liquid paint seem to break free of the prison of representation, as if the image itself were collapsing. The cultural implications of this destruction of the image, which questions the very possibility of painting to respond effectively to political violence, anticipates the themes Jorn would explore much later in the monumental abstract painting Stalingrad, No Man’s Land, or the Mad Laughter of Courage (1956–1972).26 Accumulation returns to historical Expressionist methods in which thick, heavy brushwork is more important than symbolic imagery. The title comes from prominent

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Danish psychoanalyst Sigurd Næsgaard, based on Freud’s theory of the problems caused by an accumulation (ophobning) of unreleased desire.27 Jacobsen and his fancée as well as Pedersen and Alfelt had been undergoing analysis with Næsgaard at the time, although they would move away from psychoanalysis in the 1940s. Næsgaard interpreted art work in rote ways that Jorn distrusted, arguing that even the abstract art work “actualize[s the artist’s] soul and its drives.”28 The sense of images and meanings layered on top of each other over time makes Accumulation a potential metaphor for the mysterious and conficted workings of the unconscious mind so favored by Surrealism – but it also represents a conscious emotional response to the artist’s increasing powerlessness in the face of current events. It suggests the approach that would later defne the art of Cobra: the use of abstract color, texture, and composition to transform preexisting artistic methods and imagery toward new interpretations. Accumulation unleashed new possibilities for the expressive application of color. It stands out from the more “balanced” tone and smooth organic forms typical of Linien at the time, even in works as energetic as Ejler Bille’s Composition (Plate 2). Cobra scholars like Jean-Clarence Lambert consider Accumulation a key painting for the way it anticipates Cobra’s major aesthetic concerns, including the rejection of artistic skill in favor of spontaneous play with materials. The painting, he writes, gives “free rein to the contradictory dynamics of form and color, as if the painter did not wish to, or could not, control them.”29 Writing in the 1960s, Gunnar Jespersen calls it an “abstract-expressionist painting full of spontaneous expressive force,” framing it as a European parallel to the by then more well-known American movement Abstract Expressionism.30 Yet it also stands out from the later painting of Cobra, in which images are usually roughly sketched out in the application of strong colors and textures across a painting support that in many cases remains partly visible. Overloaded with color and intensity, it remains a challenging and enigmatic painting. Jorn’s 1945 painting Toy Picture dramatizes the Helhesten group’s unique fusion of a range of artistic sources in equally expressive, but also childlike and playful, scenes that hover between abstraction and representation (Plate 4). The picture demonstrates Jorn’s abiding respect for Bille, whose pioneering approach to abstract Surrealism had shaken the Danish art world in the 1930s. Bille’s Linien-era Composition (Plate 2) appears equally lighthearted but cleaner in its sharp-edged organic abstraction. Jorn now presents the bright colors and childlike forms with a textured brushwork related to Jacobsen’s example and the historic Expressionism of Kandinsky. Jorn’s painting also points to other artistic inspirations, including children’s art, popular culture, prehistoric Scandinavian and Viking art, folktales, myths, Surrealism, and non-Western art. The Danish artists especially praised the “true joy for colors and forms” and “completely free fantasy of the imagination” of children’s art, stating that “in our experience this dreaming, playful quality is one of the most meaningful assets of the child – an excellent quality that, unfortunately, most adults have lost.”31 They viewed art from countries colonized by Europe less as a primitivist source for formal motifs than as a manifestation of collective creativity equivalent to folk and children’s art at home. The Høst group investigated ancient and modern Scandinavian and world art during the occupation, anticipating the wide-ranging interests of the Cobra movement in everything from archaeology to collective mural painting. In the late 1940s, Jorn and the painter-turned-archaeologist P. V. Glob conceived a project on “ancient Danish art” that began to take form after the war, continuing Helhesten’s investigation of the continuity among prehistoric and modern artistic symbols and motifs.32 The

Introduction

9

photographs they took of Bronze Age artifacts in the Danish National Museum where Glob was a curator during the war show modern people wearing the horned Viksø Helmets on their heads, and display ancient amber animal amulets as if they were standing in a landscape (Figure 0.1). The playful animism of these representations is a far cry from contemporary archaeological photography with its emphasis on neutral views of objects in museological isolation. Bille, Jorn, and Ferlov also cultivated relationships with Danish collectors of non-Western art, including Carl Kjersmeier, who showed the artists his notable collection of traditional art from Africa and Oceania. The artists sought out opportunities under the occupation to study ancient, non-Western, and popular art. They took these to be creative “living art” forms not limited by the social constraints placed on art, especially the classical methods still taught in Copenhagen’s relatively conservative Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Besides paintings on canvas and sculptures in wood and stone, the artists also experimented with mural decoration. In 1944, Alfelt, Bille, Heerup, Jacobsen, Jorn, Pedersen, Therkildsen, and Thommesen produced a series of vivid murals at the Hjortøgade kindergarten in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Their experiment in translating spontaneous abstract painting to architectural decoration, which turned a public space into a celebration of personal

Figure 0.1 Asger Jorn and P. V. Glob, Mockup cover of “Olddansk Kunst,” 1950, featuring photograph by Lennart Larsen of Bronze Age objects found at Fårdal, Viborg, Denmark. Photograph by Lars Bay. Museum Jorn Archives, Silkeborg. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

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expression, anticipates Cobra’s collective mural projects at the Architecture Academy’s summer house in Bregnerød in 1949, as well as numerous private homes. The Danish artists described “living art” in the pages of Helhesten as a contemporary art, linked not to any particular style but rather to a spirit of risk and experiment averse to the vapid preservation of tradition associated with the Academy and the Statens Museum for Kunst. Ejler Bille clarifes that living art is opposed to all forms of offcial art, and expresses the fundamental freedom of human nature as described by Rousseau.33 Egon Mathiesen writes in Helhesten: Living art as it manifests itself all over the modern world, from naturalism to its warmest, most experimental forms, is more precious than all the museums in the world. For it presents enormous potential for cultural growth and renewal. With all due respect, the past is dead. Our duty lies with the present – that and that alone.34 The ordinary creativity of those outside the profession of art was central in reviving alternative perspectives. Jorn says as much in the Helhesten text “Intimate banalities,” which proclaims: “those wooded lakes in a thousand rooms with yellow-brown wallpaper belong among the deepest inspirations of art.”35 Attempting even in the face of the Nazi occupations to renew artistic culture by promoting experimental alongside popular art, the Danish artists would inspire their younger counterparts from the Netherlands, Belgium, and elsewhere after the war to create a new art that rejected the traditions of high culture. All of Cobra’s key artistic practices – spontaneity, experimentation, collectivism, symbolic abstraction, anthropological investigation, and the celebration of marginalized cultures – were already developed in the Danish Høst group. The Belgians would contribute their close ties to Surrealism and the hegemonic Francophone culture of art, photography, and cinema, and the Dutch would pioneer a vivid and direct aesthetic through the close artistic dialogue of the painters in Amsterdam. Jorn was by far the most active Danish artist internationally. Alfelt and Pedersen, Heerup, Jacobsen, Bille, Ferlov, Mancoba, Ortvad, Thommesen, and Balle donated works to Cobra exhibitions, but worked mostly independently. They avoided the theoretical polemics that energized the interactions of Jorn, Dotremont, and Constant. After the 1948 Høst exhibition where Dotremont and the Dutch artists frst met the Danish group, Ferlov and her husband, Ernest Mancoba, already facing signifcant social marginalization as an interracial couple, would largely pull out of group involvement for the rest of their careers, returning to a small village outside Paris for a quiet life in 1952. While their earlier work had helped shape Linien and Høst, their decision to isolate themselves in the 1950s refected the diffcult impact of racial and gender politics. Of all the artists on the edges of the Cobra movement, the Mancobas’ work deserves re-examination for its unique perspective on post-colonialism and a humanism that was both minoritarian and cosmopolitan, to counter the elitism and classicism of the humanist tradition in European culture that was revived in the 1950s. One of Cobra’s most important contributions was its development, starting with the Danish Linien group, of a minoritarian humanism in the sense of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of a “minor literature,” the literature of a social minority normally excluded from mainstream representations and institutions.36 As a group the

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Danish artists, like their Dutch and Belgian colleagues, felt marginalized from the dominant avant-garde discourses created in the artistic centers of Paris and Berlin. As communist artists, they also strongly identifed with the working-class critique of capitalism and the elitism of high culture. Else Alfelt, Ferlov, and Mancoba, however, also had to contend with biases that kept critics from taking seriously the work of women and black artists. The experiences of the Mancobas combined with their active interest in African art and postwar African politics made them particularly aware of these issues. The considerable idealism of their search for a “common human expression” in the face of a society intolerant of racial harmony led the Mancobas to isolate themselves from the increasingly commercial art world. Others, like Bille and Jacobsen, would simply re-immerse themselves in the more collectivist institutions of the Danish exhibition societies after the war. They left Jorn, Constant, and Dotremont to the international promotion of Cobra’s approach, which combined the minoritarian humanism of Høst with a more aggressive counter-humanism embodied in the work of Jorn, Constant, and Appel. In Cobra’s art, just as in “minor literature,” every expression is inherently political, so that both the more abstract and the overtly “animalistic” forms of Cobra art express a counter-humanist critique of the exclusionary discourse of modern humanism as it was revived in the 1950s, especially in France and the U.S. “France is ditching the experimental camp,” Dotremont writes in Cobra’s frst issue, praising instead the liveliness of the Danish experimental art he encountered in Copenhagen.37 The Danish artists published a manifesto titled “The New Realism” in the catalog for the November 1945 Høst exhibition, stating: “Our art is a new realism based not on an ideal structure as in Renaissance painting, but on materials’ natural possibilities of elaboration, and on free human development.” The artists described themselves as the next avant-garde after Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. They also emphasized their transnational outlook: “We join ourselves to international art in the struggle to solve the new common artistic and human problems, which our time has generated on the basis of the new scientifc, psychological, and social results.”38 In the transnational spirit that accompanied the end of the war, Jorn sent the manifesto to the Museum of Modern Art along with a number of works on paper, hoping to make contact with American audiences as well as the New York avant-garde. The museum fled most of the works in their study collection under “regional interest” and did not reciprocate.39 Eager to see what artists in other countries had accomplished during the war, Jorn traveled frst around Scandinavia and visited an Edvard Munch retrospective in Oslo. He made contact in Malmö with the Swedish “Imaginist” (Imaginisterna) artists Anders Österlin (1926–2011), Carl Otto Hultén (1916–2015), and Max Walter Svanberg (1912–1994), who later exhibited with Cobra. He then returned to Paris, where he had spent two years working with Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier in the 1930s. He changed his given name from Jørgensen to Jorn in 1946 to make it internationally pronounceable, and met a range of artists from André Breton to Atlan and Wifredo Lam. At the same time, Pedersen and the Høst artist Tage Mellerup (1911–1988) traveled to Sweden, while Egill Jacobsen was awarded a grant to work in Paris. There, through Jorn, he met Dutch artist Constant. Jacobsen and Ejler Bille lived in the south of France for several months in 1946–1947 before Jacobsen returned to Paris, where he would spend another year and a half. Pedersen would move to France decades later, like Jorn, but at the time, of all the Danish artists only Jorn deliberately set out to found a new transnational avant-garde.

12 Introduction Jorn was the most ambitious and the most theoretically inclined of the Høst artists. Between 1947 to 1948 he worked on a 600-page neo-Marxist aesthetic treatise called “Pages from the Book on Art” (Blade af kunstens bog), a third of which was published later as Magic and the Fine Arts (Magi og skønne kunster). Motivated by a belief in the fundamental human need for expression, Jorn believed that creativity could only be cultivated in collective contexts that were directly critical of national and artistic institutions, which cut art off from everyday life. His views developed through new friendships with the two other major theorists of the Cobra group, Dotremont and Constant. Cobra had no single geographical center, but rather a shifting network of meeting places and a changing cast of players, most of whom became involved through these three, the core of the new movement. The Belgian contribution to Cobra was entangled with the permutations of the Surrealist groups in Paris and Belgium. Cobra in Brussels was spearheaded by the poet and later painter Dotremont, the editor of several Surrealist journals in wartime Paris, along with poet Joseph Noiret and the painter, printmaker, and later poet Pierre Alechinsky (b. 1927). Photographer and artist Raoul Ubac (1910–1985) and painter and sculptor Pol Bury (1922–2005) joined from the Belgian Surrealist network, along with other artists from the “Young Belgian Painting” (Jeune peinture belge) group. Dotremont published his frst long love poem Ancient Eternity in 1940, in a style inspired by Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. It was later published in an edition illustrated with etchings by Ubac.40 The two traveled to Paris during the war and cofounded the Surrealist group “The Hand That Holds the Pen” (La Main à Plume) with French poet Noel Arnaud. The title of their eponymous journal changed with each issue due to the wartime ban on magazine publishing. It maintained a clandestine Surrealist presence in Paris during the war, when so many important artists and writers had left for New York. Dotremont was utterly disappointed afterward, however, when Breton returned to revive a movement that suddenly appeared esoteric and out of touch with postwar realities. In 1947, Dotremont co-founded the Revolutionary Surrealist group in Brussels. The group released a manifesto in February, soon followed by a second one called “No quarter in the revolution!” (Pas de quartiers dans la révolution!). It was signed by 17 artists and poets, including Belgian Surrealists René Magritte, Marcel Mariën, and Paul Nougé, published June 7, 1947 in Le Drapeau rouge, the newspaper of the Belgian Communist Party.41 A month later, the Belgians joined forces with a French Revolutionary Surrealist group to publish the manifesto “The Cause Is Understood” or “The Case Is Closed” (La cause est entendue), a pamphlet that criticized Breton’s rejection of the Communist Party. It declares that Surrealism can only develop on the basis of a Communist dialectical materialism, in order to mobilize art and poetry in the service of the material liberation of the proletariat. Jorn met the Algerian-French artist Atlan in Paris in 1946, and likely through Atlan’s connections, met Dotremont at the frst Revolutionary Surrealist conference in Brussels in November 1947. Jorn invited the Dutch artist Constant to get involved, and Constant brought in Appel and Corneille. “The artist is nourished by being part of a community in the broadest sense of the word (internationally) and in the deepest sense of the word (locally),” Jorn wrote to Constant at the time, encouraging his new friends to join the nascent organization.42

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The following year, the conference that brought them all together was organized by former French Revolutionary Surrealists who had fnally broken all ties with Surrealism and now called themselves the “Documentation Center for Avant-Garde Art” (Centre de documentation sur l’art d’avant-garde). Constant presented a talk on “The Artistic Avant-Garde in Holland” and Jorn discussed the “Danish Experimental Group.” They signed the Cobra manifesto a day after the conference. While Jorn and Constant considered Cobra a break with both Surrealism and Revolutionary Surrealism, Dotremont would continue to call the Revolutionary Surrealist group the Brussels wing of Cobra into late 1949. In Cobra 4, the “Revolutionary Surrealist” name fnally disappears from the header, which now reads simply “Organ of the International Front of Experimental Avant-Garde Artists” (Organe du Front international des artistes expérimentaux d’avant-garde). The live-work space Dotremont shared with his wife Ai-Li Mian at 10, rue de la Paille was the heart of Cobra in Brussels. Belgian and foreign visitors met and stayed there on the couch, in salon-style gatherings and art-making sessions featuring Dotremont’s wide range of contacts. Composer Jacques Calonne recalls that they were often followed by late-night wanderings through the city.43 It was a lively, spontaneous, and unpretentious place. The visitors wrote poems on the wall, including “welcome to the revolutionary surrealists of the summer [air]” (bienvenue aux surréalistes révolutionnaires de l’été) and – encircled by a real gold-painted frame – “the beauty in the golden frame and only dance in the Cobra arms of love” (La belle au cadre d’or et ne danse Cobra [pronounced “qu’au bras”] de l’amour). Unfortunately only legends of this space remain, despite some later attempts to turn the location into an “Espace Cobra.”44 Joseph Noiret remembers Dotremont’s apartment as a place of possibility: At Dotremont’s, 10, rue de la Paille, we went in, we went out, we ate, we painted, we drew, we cut newspapers, we discussed positions to take for certain common activities, political for example. […] We felt that we were all creators together.45 Nathalie Aubert describes it as less a site of “radical formal innovation […] than that of a lived experience itself creating space where several cultures come into contact, feed on each other, and from which new forms emerge.”46 Those forms included the “Editions Cobra” books published in 1950–1951; the Belgian editions of Cobra (issues 2, 6, 7, and 10); four issues of Le Petit Cobra, an info bulletin to accompany the more widely distributed Cobra journal; and the “word-painting” experiments by Jorn and Dotremont.47 Dotremont wrote numerous letters there to artists, poets, Surrealists, and friends, urging them to join the new movement. He planned Cobra exhibitions and publications on letterhead reading: “INTERNATIONAL DES ARTISTES EXPERIMENTAUX COBRA Revue bimestrielle de l’IAE/Le Petit COBRA Informations/ La BIBLIOTHEQUE DE COBRA Encyclopédie permanente de l’art expérimental: 10 rue de la Paille, Bruxelles / CENTRE DE RECHERCHES COBRAFILMS: 80, rue du Marais, Bruxelles.” 80, rue du Marais, known as the Ateliers du Marais but called the “Cobra-Films Research Center” on Dotremont’s letterhead, was another Cobra live-work space located a few blocks away from 10, rue de la Paille. It was founded in 1950 by Pierre and Micky Alechinsky, sculptor Olivier Strebelle (1927–2017) and graphic artist

14 Introduction Michel Olyff (b. 1927). They refurbished a building in ruins over six months, creating a new live-work space that lasted for two years before it was sold and demolished. As for the “Cobra-Films Research,” only one “Cobra flm” was made, the 18-minute Perséphone conceived and flmed by Luc de Heusch in 1950. The “research” consisted primarily of the artists projecting flms that interested them onto paper screens hung up at the Ateliers, experiences that Dotremont called the “cinemagique de Belthèque,” a playful transposition of “cinematheque of Belgium.”48 The Atelier’s inhabitants included the young artist Reinhoud (born Reinout d’Haese, 1928–2007), a key Cobra sculptor, and the older Louis van Lint (1909–1986), a founder of the group of young abstract artists “Jeune Peinture belge” in 1946. Even if Van Lint moved away from Cobra’s monstrous images and became renowned for his lyrical abstraction in the 1950s, Dotremont considered him “the most free painter in Belgium” at the time, and reproduced one of his abstract lithographs in Cobra 6.49 The Ateliers du Marais were, in Dotremont’s words, a “hostel-construction sitegallery” (auberge-chantier-galerie), a permanent “congress” and site of experimentation.50 The Alechinskys ran a lithographic press on which they printed art works, exhibition posters, and issues of Cobra. Olyff produced wood engravings fusing the modern abstract and popular art traditions, as in his evocative illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Notes de zoologie, published as a Cobra Edition in 1950; he later became a successful graphic designer in Belgium. Other artists who lived at the Ateliers included painter, typographer, and textile artist Corneille Hannoset (1926–1997); painter Georges Collignon (1923–2002); architect Andre Jacqmain (1921–2014); painter Marc Mendelson (1915–2013), and furniture designer Freddy Michils (dates unknown). The exhibition of the Marais artists at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in January, 1951 garnered several positive reviews. One critic notes that “fantasy and savoir-faire, freshness and authority, inspiration and technique appear cheerfully reconciled” in their works.51 Cobra artists who spent time there included Jorn, Atlan, Bury, Ubac, Österlin, Götz, Constant, Corneille, and Appel, Belgian painter Jan Cox (1919–1980), Spanish Surrealist Oscar Dominguez (1906–1957), and Belgian photographer Serge Vandercam (1924–2005). A few artists named repeatedly by Dotremont and Noiret in relation to the Brussels scene, including Indonesian painter Harry Wiggers (dates unknown) and sculptor Florent Welles (1922–2000), remain obscure.52 International art dealers, curators, and critics came to visit the Ateliers, including Paul Fierens, Peggy Guggenheim, Paul and Luc Haesaerts, Eduard Jaguer, Willem Sandberg, and Curt Valentin. Like Cobra as a whole, however, the success of the Ateliers becomes mainly evident when considering the later works of its inhabitants, of whom only Alechinsky and Reinhoud identifed themselves as Cobra artists. Like the meetings and the journals, the Ateliers was a Cobra space to the extent that its members had affliations with Cobra at the time. The boundaries of the movement were never stable, but constantly expanding in a spirit of inclusiveness. Belgian Cobra, like the Danish and the Dutch sections, struggled both fnancially and culturally for recognition. As Alechinsky wrote later, “Our journal, which had 21 subscribers (including my mother and my aunt), could never afford a four-color illustration.”53 Dotremont recalled that everything they did in 1949 was a failure: he could not afford to buy the Belgian issues of Cobra 2 (1949) from the printer until 1951; and the two Cobra exhibitions he curated, “The End and the Means” and “The Object Across the Ages,” had “no success whatsoever.”54 Yet these early experiences also led up to what even Dotremont admits was a succès de scandale, the 1949 Stedelijk

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exhibition in Amsterdam. They made possible the word-paintings with Jorn to which Dotremont would refer for the rest of his life as one of Cobra’s greatest accomplishments. The later successes of Alechinsky, Vandercam, Reinhoud, Olyff, and Strebelle were launched in works that received critical praise at the Ateliers du Marais. Dotremont’s writings and, indeed, his own life story, suggest an ongoing fascination with failure. He even refers dramatically to his own tuberculosis in his 1955 autobiographical novel The Stone and the Pillow (La Pierre et l’oreiller) as “the catastrophe” (le catastrophe). Yet, as many contemporary artists as well as scientists have demonstrated, failure is not only important but essential to all forms of creativity, fostering critical thinking, and making possible the discovery of new insights.55 In his 1958 theoretical text Concerning Form (Pour la forme), Jorn recalls that artists are often considered criminals, neurotics, and general social failures, a status necessary for their ability to produce new ideas.56 Jorn wrote extensively about art’s potential to change our political, moral, and aesthetic values, making the judgment of art more complicated than ever. Even the most ephemeral or diffcult works of Cobra may effectively signify the movement’s creative potential in material form, making it palpably present for later observers. The art works point to what is living and transformative in the story of the artists and the movement they created. The Belgian branch of Cobra was by many accounts more literary than artistic, and yet a major contribution of the movement was interdisciplinary experimentation based on mutual support between artists with different backgrounds that was forged through close working friendships. Dotremont later became a signifcant if understudied abstract painter in his own right, beginning in 1962 with the poem-paintings he called “Logograms.” While Alechinsky became renowned for his post-Cobra painting around the same time, Dotremont struggled in relative obscurity. Both Jorn and Alechinsky would directly contribute to Dotremont’s fnancial support and help secure exhibitions for his “Logograms.” When Alechinsky was offered the prestigious Belgian pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1972, he accepted on the condition that he could choose another artist with whom to exhibit, and he chose Dotremont, noting that “together we represent the most active Belgian wing of Cobra.”57 Their friendship experienced a hiatus of six years in the 1970s, during which Dotremont would not speak to Alechinsky for complex reasons related to the younger artist’s sudden international success and the response of the art press, which treated him as a spokesperson for Cobra. Yet the two artists reconnected and renewed their artistic collaborations in the 1970s, still working in the name of Cobra until Dotremont’s death in 1979. Pierre Alechinsky was only 21 years old when Cobra was founded, but his involvement with the group shaped his artistic career, as he later explained: Cobra, it is spontaneity; a total opposition to the calculations of cold abstraction, to the misérabiliste or ‘optimistic’ speculations of socialist realism, to all forms of discrepancy between free thought and the action of painting freely; it is also an international opening and a desire for de-specialization (painters write, writers paint) […] Cobra, it is my school.58 Alechinsky trained as a graphic artist at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts Décoratifs, la Cambre, in Brussels, where he studied typography and book illustration. He met Dotremont in March, 1949, at the frst offcial Cobra exhibition in Brussels, “The End and the Means” (La fn et les moyens) at the Palais des

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Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. They were the only two people in the gallery, and Dotremont was carrying the second issue of the Cobra journal under his arm. It features an abstract fgure emerging out of playful ideographs on the cover by Pol Bury, a friend of Alechinsky’s; they had exhibited together in the same building as part of “La Jeune Peinture Belge” in 1947.59 Bury’s image (Figure 0.2) depicts a shadowy fgure loosely created out of dispersed expressive or symbolic elements. Bury was a Surrealist before he joined Dotremont in Cobra, a move that corresponded to his growing interest in artistic materialism. Dotremont later writes of his work: Some painters think that frst you have to have an idea to make a good materialist painting. Pol Bury thinks that frst you need matter. He is partisan of the sea over the boats, the wall of da Vinci over the four walls of muralist-muralizing painting, for the mark over the word, for color over the vignette, for the tooth over the tongue, fnally for liberty over order.60 The marks reminiscent of ideographs that amalgamate into loose fgures on Bury’s Cobra cover seem to demonstrate a kind of creative process in action. They suggest at once ancient writing and the untrained scrawls of graffti, returning us to the fundamental idea of leaving one’s mark on the wall – the same wall where Leonardo da Vinci famously told his students to fnd inspiration. Alechinsky helped Dotremont edit several issues of Cobra, including issue 3 on experimental cinema. His most important contributions to Cobra were less his early art works than his organizing of the Ateliers, printing Cobra issues on his lithographic press in the Ateliers du Marais, and curating the last offcial international Cobra exhibition in 1951 in Liège when Dotremont was ill in the Danish sanatorium. Alechinsky included artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Hans Hartung, deliberately allying Cobra with other abstract artists “to trump the Stalinist clergy” (pour damer le pion au clergé Stalinien), meaning to strengthen the position of abstract art in the face of its recent condemnations by the Communist Party.61 Alechinsky’s own mature painting would develop after Cobra, inspired as much by the modern Japanese ink painters he flmed in his 1955 documentary Japanese Calligraphie (Calligraphie Japonaise) as the vibrant force of Jorn’s monstrous semi-fgurative paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s. In the spirit of Cobra, Alechinsky would continue to produce collective art works “with four hands” (à quatre mains) alongside numerous other artists and writers including Jorn and Dotremont. Together, Alechinsky and Dotremont broke with the Belgian Communist Party after the Party publicly rejected abstract art in favor of Socialist Realism in 1946. The Revolutionary Surrealists supported free expression just at the moment when the Party was turning its support exclusively to fgurative art. The Communist Party was ascendant across Europe immediately after the war due to its ties to the wartime resistance movement. Some Cobra members, like Jorn and Atlan, had been directly involved in the resistance. Jorn printed illegal copies of the Danish Communist Party newspaper Land og Folk in his Copenhagen apartment; Atlan was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activity in Paris in 1942 but placed in the Sainte-Anne Hospital when he pleaded insanity. After decades of experimental abstraction, many other French and Belgian artists associated with the Communist Party returned to representational images of heroic or pathetic subjects after the war in a European version of Socialist Realism. Cobra sought a “third way” that used abstract techniques to convey socialist

Figure 0.2 Pol Bury, Front cover of Cobra 2, 1949. Linocut, 30.8 × 46 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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ideals, situating itself between the increasing Stalinist rigidity of the Party and the total abstraction associated with liberal ideas of individual freedom that would emerge after the war. At the same time, Surrealist artists like the Belgian painter René Magritte came to prominence after the Second World War for painting in a more illusionistic style than artists like Yves Tanguy or Joan Miró, who were more prominent in Surrealism between the wars. While Magritte was close to Dotremont during the war, the two would soon part ways. Cobra considered the representational approach to painting an aesthetic betrayal of the abstract and interdisciplinary Surrealist experiments of the 1920s and 1930s. To many younger artists, the Surrealist movement of the late 1940s seemed apolitical and aesthetically out of touch, while the Communist Party was too rigid and political in its support for representational painting. Although inspired by the artistic experiments and anthropological investigations of earlier Surrealism, the future Cobra artists sought a new way to connect abstract experiments to the material conditions of everyday life, in part because life had been so irrevocably disrupted by the war. Just as the Dada movement attacked artistic conventions in response to the destruction of the First World War, Cobra rejected pure abstraction, Surrealism, and Socialist Realism in favor of the childlike and the experimental amid a Western civilization in ruins after the Second World War. The return to childlike imagery almost brutal in its rawness and simplicity particularly defnes the Dutch Experimental Group that preceded Cobra, formed in July, 1948. The core members of the Dutch group were almost all painters. They included Constant, Appel, and Corneille, joined in subsequent months by Eugène Brands (1913– 2002), Jan Nieuwenhuys (1922–1986), Anton Rooskens (1906–1976), and Theo Wolvecamp (1925–1992), as well as a bartender briefy interested in painting named Tjako Hansma.62 Appel, Brands, Corneille, and Rooskens had all exhibited in Willem Sandberg’s “Young Painters” (Jonge Schilders) exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1946. Constant recalls that he met Appel and Corneille in the winter of 1947–1948 in the support center of the Ministry of Social Affairs in Amsterdam, where they lined up amid fsherman, builders unable to work in the icy weather, and whoever else needed assistance: “That support center is actually where our group was founded,” he said later.63 Both Appel and Corneille had been students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten) in Amsterdam until it closed in February, 1945, but were self-taught painters. Appel studied art history and philosophy, Corneille drawing and etching. They hired models in their spare time and taught themselves modernist painting inspired by Van Gogh and other Dutch modern artists, whose work they knew frsthand, and the German Expressionists and the School of Paris, which they studied from reproductions until they were able to travel to Belgium and France in 1946–1947.64 Constant had left Amsterdam for Bergen with his wife Matie van Domselaer after leaving the Academy of Fine Arts in 1941 (a year after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands). He returned to Amsterdam in 1943, but refused to register with the Kulturkammer, the offcial art organization under Nazi control and the only way to secure art materials. During this underground period, he was unable to paint – but he could read. The most intellectual of the Dutch Cobra artists, he turned his attention to the philosophy of Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and, above all, Marx.65 Constant describes the turmoil of this period in an interview from 1948, by which time the full extent of the tragedy of the war, the Bomb, and the Holocaust had come to light:

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In essence, our culture is already dead. Any façades still standing can be blown away tomorrow by the atom bomb, but even without that they can no longer bewitch us. All certainty has been stripped away, leaving us bereft of belief. Save this: that we are alive and that the nature of life is to manifest itself […]. The structure of our society means we are certainly not yet free, but we are working for tomorrow’s world. A new society will follow this and then man will naturally do what now demands of us a tremendous effort: be a living creature.66 Determined to forge a new, living culture in a city that seemed utterly cut off from the prewar avant-garde, the Dutch artists met weekly in Constant’s studio at Henri Polaklaan across from the Artis zoo, which encouraged their interest in animal imagery. Each brought their latest paintings, which helped the group develop a shared style.67 Constant’s manifesto published in Refex, the journal of the Dutch Experimental Group that formed in July, 1948, is perhaps the most well-known Cobra declaration. It proclaims the group’s break with Surrealism and espousal of utopian Communist goals, to allow people the freedom to create their own art. Constant’s statement is the frst cohesive summary of the populist approach of Cobra. Instead of theorizing an art for the people, it would embody a people’s art that, in its simplicity and directness, would inspire others to create: [This liberation] is the basic precondition for the fowering of a people’s art that encompasses everyone. The general social impotence, the passivity of the masses, are an indication of the brakes that cultural norms apply to the natural expression of the forces of life. For the satisfaction of this primitive need for vital expression is the driving force of life, the cure for every form of vital weakness. It transforms art into a power for spiritual health. As such it is the property of all and for this reason every limitation that reduces art to the reserve of a small group of specialists, connoisseurs, and virtuosi must be removed.68 The manifesto and its sequel, the article “Culture and Counter-Culture” (Cultuur en contra-cultuur) published in Refex’s second and last issue, made explicit Constant’s approach to fusing avant-garde and popular culture into a new “counter-culture” – predating the widespread use of the term in the 1960s.69 Constant’s text celebrated creativity and the destruction of the offcial values of high culture. Constant’s pronouncements refected intense discussions within the Dutch Experimental Group, and not all the artists agreed with his strident political tone. For that reason, only his name appears in the signature of the Refex “Manifesto.” Appel, Corneille, and Brands all formulated their own responses.70 Brands, at the time the best-known of the three, published his article “To the point” in the same issue of Refex. Brands explains the signifcance of abstraction as a way of espousing a simple and direct approach that connects art to the natural world, which appears to precede human confict and makes the art object itself seem to come alive: We paint so-called abstract work. This is a misleading term, which we use since nothing better exists. […] Because we are involved in painting, we work with form and color, and just as you would never dream of asking a blackbird by the Amstel what its song is called, you cannot expect a direct answer from us to the inevitable ‘What is it?’ […]

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Introduction We believe that you should be able to put a painting out in the open air. In our view, an abstract work against a tree trunk in a deserted hollow in the dunes with just blue sky overhead, is far preferable to any otherwise pristine 17th-century masterpiece!71

The polemical optimism of Dutch Cobra rejected pointless Expressionist brooding about the war. Similarly, Dotremont would later recall Magritte’s statement that “the bourgeoisie was optimist between the wars, so we had to oppose it with pessimism; now it’s pessimist and we have to oppose it with optimism.”72 All the Dutch artists survived the harsh conditions of the occupation in the Netherlands, including the “Hunger Winter” (Hongervinter) of 1944, when people starved in the streets of Amsterdam and the Nazis conducted constant raids to terrorize the population. To start afresh, they took inspiration from natural forms, symbols, and processes. Instead of pure abstraction, they found imagery to which ordinary people could connect. As Karel Appel proclaims in his own response to Constant’s manifesto, Experimental painting is not devoid of depiction; it depicts everything and evokes associations in the viewer, who takes an active part in the artwork. The art stimulates the viewer’s imagination. This sparks creative activity in the viewer […] and this way of seeing will be within everyone’s grasp and everyone’s power of comprehension once aesthetic conventions cease to impede the workings of the subconscious.73 Appel utterly rejected the “propagandizing for art” and empty “intellectual theorizing” in Constant’s manifesto. He also later denied the importance of Cobra as a group. At the time, after all, they couldn’t even all speak to each other: “I learned French later on,” he recalls, “but it was too late. Cobra […] missed the chance to chat to each other.”74 Yet even as the artists took different positions on the importance of theory for art, they all agreed on the basics: art must destroy the old values associated with high culture and return to fundamentals through spontaneous imagery that invites viewers from all backgrounds into the action. The international connections of Cobra gained momentum in 1948. Jorn, having returned to Denmark, invited Appel, Constant, Corneille, and Dotremont to visit Copenhagen for the frst time and exhibit with the Danish artists of Høst (Figure 0.3). In rural Jutland, near Jorn’s hometown of Silkeborg, the Dutch visitors painted wall and ceiling murals of strange hybrid creatures on the house of Jorn’s friend, ceramic artist Erik Nyholm. This collaboration was one of many collective mural projects that animated the walls with lively creatures in places far from the art world centers. The artists traveled back and forth among European capitals and more rural artist enclaves, in a nomadic pattern that Jorn and Dotremont would follow for the rest of their lives. Cobra valued collaboration, experimentation, and aesthetic experience over the creation of beautiful objects. The highpoints of Cobra were its collective activities. Key examples include the decoration of Erik Nyholm’s house and the “Bregnerød Congress” in August, 1949, a larger experiment in mural decoration at a house outside Copenhagen owned by the architecture school of the Copenhagen Art Academy. The Cobra artists and their children decorated the walls and ceiling with murals in the context of a two-week conference of art making, cooking, writing, and general merriment. Constant and his Dutch colleagues did not attend the event, though, because Jorn and Constant’s wife Matie van Domselaer fell in love during the summer on

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Figure 0.3 Høst and Cobra artists visiting the Copenhagen zoo, 1948. L–R: Constant, Vibeke Alfelt, Ejler Bille, Corneille, Knud Nielsen, Tony Appel, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba with arms around Wonga Mancoba and Kari Alfelt, Karel Appel, Erik Ortvad, Ernest Mancoba, Else Alfelt, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Agnete Therkildsen, and Ortvad’s son. © Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark.

Bornholm and eloped together, bringing Constant and van Domselaer’s two young daughters Martha and Olga with them. Constant returned to Amsterdam that summer with only his son Victor. Incredibly, despite this crisis which came at a crucial moment in the formation of Cobra, Jorn and Constant would not only reconcile but continue their Cobra work through their ongoing, active correspondence in the midst of the family schism.75 Bregnerød exemplifed Cobra’s refusal of professional specialization: participants played various roles as poets, painters, philosophers, critics, designers, photographers, and sculptors. The wall and ceiling murals they produced were inspired by Jugendstil designs, kalkmalerier (pagan paintings preserved on the walls of Danish churches), Surrealist artistic methods, and popular and children’s art. Jorn’s son Klaus, aged 8, produced a mural on one of the doors (Figure 0.4), and Vibeke Alfelt, aged 14, a ceiling panel. The murals demonstrated Cobra’s belief that personal expression only developed within a collective context. As the notice on the Congress in Cobra 7 states: The International Encounters of Cobra that, one year ago, spiralled out in Denmark were exemplary. […] Exemplary because they were not organized but (as the Danes say) organic. Exemplary because they integrated collective work into everyday life; work and vacation; ‘art’ and ‘life,’ it was impossible at Bregnerød to perceive them in opposition; experimentation was in full swing, which often is no

22

Introduction more than a chronicle in the daytime news. […] We are iconoclasts when necessary, painters when we feel like it.76

Even if the paintings were mostly in the end still made by those trained as artists, the extent of the collaborations and the interaction of adult and child artists were unprecedented. The Cobra artists deliberately left their own countries to emigrate abroad or moved continually around. Several artists, including Appel and Corneille, settled in Paris but traveled extensively around the world. Dotremont circulated among Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and later on the northern Scandinavian Lapland. Jorn had simultaneous homes in multiple cities – Silkeborg, Denmark; Albisola, Italy; and Paris – while continually traveling around to visit other friends. Cobra’s peripatetic history has led one scholar to call it a “diasporic” avant-garde.77 While the term does acknowledge Cobra’s decentered social network and political critique of the artistic center–periphery dichotomy, it goes a bit too far in allying these mostly European artists to other groups forced – often violently – into political exile around the globe. My account foregrounds how the experiences of some Cobra artists like Mancoba and Shinkichi Tajiri differ from those of the more privileged white artists in their relationship to the African and Japanese-American diasporas. I would not, however, claim that the European founders of the movement were in any way forced to travel. After

Figure 0.4 Carl-Henning Pedersen (wall) and Klaus Jorn (door), Wall mural, August, 1949, now destroyed. Bregnerød, Denmark. Photograph by Robert Dahlmann Olsen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

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the dark days of the occupations, they mostly just grabbed their suitcases full of papers and hopped on a train, for the sheer joy of being able to travel once again. The most signifcant collective manifestations of Cobra were the two “International Exhibitions of Experimental Art” in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Liège, Belgium, respectively. Organized by Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg, the Amsterdam exhibition was installed in 1949 by architect Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999), later known for his innovative playground designs. It featured Cobra paintings hung asymmetrically on the wall and low platforms showcasing sculpture and prints. In the opening path of the exhibition, van Eyck positioned a “Poet’s Cage” (Dichterkooi) made of a black wooden frame, hung with manifestoes, posters, and poetry by Dutch Cobra members Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk, 1924–1994), Jan Elburg (1919–1992), Hugo Claus (1929–2008), Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923–2014), and others (Figure 0.5). This was an evocative symbol of the artist’s relationship to society and the history of artists as outlaws, madmen, and revolutionaries, including communist ones. The cell made explicit reference to the Dutch poets who referred to themselves as the “Mayakovsky cell,” after the Russian avant-garde

Figure 0.5 Aldo van Eyck, Poets’ Cage for the frst Cobra “International Exhibition of Experimental Art,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1949. Lower left to top: Gerrit Kouwenaar, Bert Schierbeek, Lucebert, Jan Elburg, and Karl-Otto Götz. Word paintings by Lucebert. Photograph by Mrs. E. Kokkoris-Syriër, courtesy of the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen.

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poet persecuted by Stalin.78 Mayakovsky wrote odes to both Lenin and the revolutionary Communist Party and blunt declarations of feeling that appealed to the younger poets for their utopian celebrations of the future and the force and directness of their cadences. In the main exhibition rooms, Van Eyck arranged the art works, including three mural-sized paintings by Appel, Brands, and Constant, and a large painted cube by Corneille, in Mondrian-inspired geometric compositions to emphasize their wildness (Figure 0.6). Congolese music from the personal collection of Eugène Brands (1913–2002) played on phonographs during the opening, as an homage to another form of popular expression not yet recognized by institutions of high culture. At what was supposed to be a session of poetry readings, Dotremont gave his speech “The Great Natural Rendez-Vous” (Le grand rendez-vous naturel) in French, calling for a spontaneous and symbolic abstract art that rejected all naturalism, whether Socialist Realist or Surrealist. Dotremont was attempting to defend the fundamental human signifcance of Cobra’s investigations, citing recent discoveries by Soviet archaeologists in order to cut across the shallow political divides of the Cold War. However, his monotone reading in French caused a riot in the Dutch-speaking audience, which assumed that he was defending Stalin.

Figure 0.6 Aldo van Eyck installation, “International Exhibition of Experimental Artists,” 1949, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Photograph by Serge Vandercam, courtesy of the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. Works by Madeleine Szemere-Kemeny (left wall), Corneille (painted box), Anton Rooskens (back wall), and granite sculptures by Henry Heerup. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels.

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Thereafter, the Cobra journal was removed from sale at the museum because the Amsterdam alderman of art was upset by Elburg’s modifcation of Titian’s Renaissance Venus of Urbino: he had replaced the beautiful bride’s head with that of an elderly woman winking in a beret. In place of her maids, Elburg provided three male gardeners in clogs from the famous Dutch nurseries in Boskoop, clipped from the Christian illustrated weekly De Spiegel. This was an “obscene mutilation” and an outrage against public decency according to one reviewer, as “one of Titian’s most beautiful paintings is distorted by plastering up a publicly hurtful representation of a public woman with some pimps.”79 Several Dutch Cobra members resigned from the group after these scandals, including Brands, Lucebert, and Rooskens, although Wolvecamp returned for the second major international Cobra exhibition in Liège. The Liège exhibition was the last offcial manifestation of the Cobra group. For this installation, van Eyck memorably placed the granite sculptures of the Danish artist Henry Heerup on beds of coal, linking an elemental material carved into a modern expression to a mundane product of local labor. Although Heerup also produced colorful symbolic paintings throughout his life, he became known in the Cobra movement for his early “junk sculptures” (skraldemodeller) as well as his stone carvings of human and animal fgures, such as The Gnome from Jutland (Figure 0.7). Both sets of works convey Heerup’s distinctive populism, but the carved

Figure 0.7 Henry Heerup, Den jyske nisse (The Gnome from Jutland), n.d. Painted granite, 50 × 55 × 45 cm. Museum Jorn, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

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stone works capture Cobra’s particular interest in reanimating artistic materials. The use of stone reconnected with the foundations of art around the world, such as the ancient rock carvings reproduced in Helhesten (see Figure 1.4). Heerup’s stone carvings parallel Raoul Ubac’s carved Ardoise slate sculptures that were made at the same time in Belgium (see Figure 2.1), but their imagery and colors are more lighthearted. Heerup produced playful and popular imagery out of the resistant stone. “A Stone Will be a Stone Whatever is Carved from It,” Heerup writes in Helhesten. “Can You Fantasize in Stone? Hell Yes! Shouldn’t you let yourself be Guided by Chance? Chance has its own Laws, Material Form, the Power and First Say of the Subject-Matter in All Art.”80 Heerup took as an alter ego the nisse, the little red-hatted gnome of Scandinavian legend, a fantastic vagabond fgure. In the pages of Cobra, Jorn would describe the gnome as a link between historical Norse myth and popular images of the modern Santa Claus.81 A profle of Heerup in Helhesten emphasizes the way he links such imaginative mythic fgures to ordinary people: Heerup stands with his feet frmly on the earth; but in his heart and his head, he lives in the land of fantasy. To Heerup the gnome is among other things an idea just as realistic and living as the police constable and garbage man, and just as decisive for his actions as these fantasy characters of reality.”82 In the Gnome from Jutland, the nisse appears in Heerup’s typical curvilinear, organic forms, painted a vivid red and yellow. The painting of the stones represents a creative dialogue between the artist and the material – one the collector or museum can periodically renew by repainting the stones with the artist’s blessing. He insists that, We Don’t Paint Grey Colour on a Grey Stone nor Green Colour on a Mossy One. No. We apply the Opposite Colors. For We Want Effect. The Objects Must be Capable of ‘Seeing’ and ‘Being Seen.’ They Must Come Alive.83 These works also appear particularly vibrant the way Heerup exhibited them: he showcased them collectively in his garden in Rødovre, to which the Danish and Dutch Cobra artists made regular pilgrimages. At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the Museum Jorn in Denmark, they are displayed on the grass outside, where they seem entirely at home. In the 1951 Cobra exhibition in Liège, Belgium, Heerup’s granite sculptures on a bed of coal formed a tribute to the local workers who mined the material. Jorn exhibited several word-paintings in Liège but was not present at the exhibition, partly due to his own declining health; 1951 was the year he collapsed in Paris from tuberculosis and had to be put on an emergency train back to Denmark. Dotremont, suffering from the same illness, soon joined him in the Danish sanatorium. Dotremont gave Alechinsky the task of curating the Liège exhibition, and he and Jorn declared an offcial end to Cobra. This was the beginning of its long and fruitful afterlife.

A Many-Headed Beast Cobra does not ft the narrow stylistic characterizations of modern art history. Its work circulates in the margins, the space of experiment that connects different disciplines

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and mediums. Its most active members were painters, but most of them self-taught. Several Cobra artists who began in other mediums, including photographers Raoul Ubac and Serge Vandercam, and poets Lucebert and Hugo Claus, as well as Christian Dotremont himself, later became sculptors and painters. Lucebert developed a unique manner of painting strongly inspired by Jean Dubuffet and outsider art. Claus later became renowned as a poet, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, as well as a painter. Cobra art may be individual or collective; entirely abstract or feature creaturely representation, so long as the work conveys a vibrant expression. It is defned not by any one style, but rather by the practices of spontaneous experimentation that the artists shared. Cobra connected the avant-garde and popular culture, meaning everything from kitsch and mass print culture to folk and outsider art. It even annexed ancient and tribal art under the “folk” or “popular” label. The group constructed itself as a band of outsiders within the mainstream art world, and were critical of its exclusive structure. The impact of the Cobra movement on modernist painting could be stated simply as an attempt to turn painting from a high art into a folk art, simple and accessible to all. This accessibility is still visible in the radical simplicity of Cobra imagery, even if the story behind it is complex. Cobra did not just, as often assumed, draw on ancient and popular art. It also looked to new technologies for inspiration, especially those that the high art world dismissed as kitsch. In histories of Cobra that focus entirely on sculpture and painting, the artists’ interest in experimental flm is often overlooked. They admired early animated flms in particular as a modern version of the political cartoon, able to use humor and creative transformation to illuminate the plight of the powerless. In the early Walt Disney flms, workers were often reimagined as animal fgures, like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. Cobra would draw directly on the humor, inventiveness, animal imagery, and widespread appeal of cartoons (“animated drawings” or dessins animés in French) as part of its attempt to reanimate art. The artists were inspired by the apparently magical transformations of early handdrawn animation in both commercial and experimental forms, and their paintings attempted to capture the energy of flm. They liked the commercial shorts of Disney as much as the experimental abstract animations. Pioneering animations by Dadaists Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, New Zealand flmmaker Len Lye, and the Canadian Norman McLaren were shown along with other Cubist, Dada, and Surrealist flms in the screenings that accompanied the 1951 Cobra exhibition in Liège. Belgian Surrealist Jean Raine, who organized the events, writes in the program that painters have long been interested in flm’s ability to show movement. What’s more, cinema was uniquely able to combine drawing and painting with explorations of plasticity, mobility, everyday objects, and sound.84 In short, it was an interdisciplinary medium par excellence, and for that reason played an important role in Cobra alongside the painting and sculpture for which the movement is better known today. McLaren, a renowned pioneer of early animation, contributed an essay to the 10th issue of Cobra on “The screen and the brush,” which proclaims that it is precisely motion that interests him in painting: When I paint or when I look at painting, I have the impression, perhaps by occupational hazard, that the successive metamorphoses undergone by the canvas, from its virgin state to its end which is, in my own case at least, nothing but scribbling and torture, […] that these metamorphoses have a hundred times more interest than the fnished work.85

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McLaren’s outsider approach to painting, and hybrid painting in the radically new art form of animation, suited Cobra’s interests perfectly. The article was illustrated not by flm stills but by images of paintings, including Atlan’s Untitled work from 1951 (Plate 1). As one reads the essay, the forms of the painting appear to jump across the page in rhythmic motion like little animations, recalling at the same time the jaunty soundtracks of McLaren’s flms. For Cobra, animation opened new possibilities by making drawn and painted images come to life. The artists admired the ability of Disney animation to show creatures comically or rhythmically transforming from one thing into another. Jorn considered Disney animation a form of experimental popular art, linking Walt Disney’s animal imagery to earlier political cartoons by Jean-Jacques Grandville in the 19th century, and the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder in the 16th.86 Many observers at the time were fascinated with the way Disney animation seemed to, in the words of one critic from 1939, go “further into the alchemy of transmuting form into motion than did many of the Masters.”87 Another reviewer describes the “Micky Mouse” flms as “contemporary folk art.”88 The Disney shorts in particular had immense international appeal. Outside the U.S., they were often understood by cultural critics as exuberant parodies that, like jazz music or the flms of Charlie Chaplin, made light of what foreign critics viewed as an increasingly technologically driven and impersonal American culture. Walter Benjamin famously praised the “Mickey Mouse” flms because their sadistic plots, involving the radical reconfguration of the body, released a kind of collective laughter in the movie theater that he believed would inoculate modern audiences against the threat of Fascism. “American slapstick comedies and Disney flms trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies,” he writes.89 The Cobra artists similarly believed that early animation, whether Disney or McLaren, could connect people by transforming images and giving them new life. Soviet flmmaker Sergei Eisenstein famously praised what he called the “plasmaticness” of the early cartoons. They suggested to him both a positive inspiration – “a lost changeability, fuidity, suddenness of formations,” and an implicit critique of the reactionary power of images – “a displacement, an upheaval, a unique protest against the metaphysical immobility of the once-and-forever given.”90 Similarly, McLaren writes two decades later in the Cobra journal: “It is the movement that counts.”91 In the medium of hand-drawn animation where, he writes, only immobility is diffcult to realize, everything seems to come alive. The Cobra artists were not interested in either the superfcial entertainment effects or the mainstream distribution practices of animated flms, but rather their new possibilities for art making. Some of their early works, such as Ejler Bille’s Composition of 1934 (Plate 2), convey in abstract forms their fascination with animated flm. The vivid colors and graphic transformations of fgurative and landscape elements in Bille’s manic composition – including people, houses, American cowboy boots and the streamlined forms of a rooster’s crest – recall the lively movement and technological promise of early animated flms. His colleague Richard Mortensen described the phenomenal colors of animated flms in the Linien journal. He considered them abstract art on a par with the best contemporary art in Paris at the time.92 The artists admired the potential of animation to allow hand-made drawings to create new and unexpected, lively expressions. They also appreciated the way animation extended art beyond the social boundaries of the art world into the realm of popular culture.

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By the Cobra period, they turned away from the slickness now associated with the more commercial entertainment of Disney animation in the 1940s, which would ultimately uphold the social structures the artists set out to contest. As Eisenstein notes, even the early shorts only provide a “fctitious freedom. For an instant. […] A fve-minute ‘break’ for the psyche, but during which the viewer himself remains chained to the winch of the machine.”93 Cobra returned to the historic avant-garde’s tactics of questioning of what art is – seeking a deeper level of understanding, one that they hoped would make a more lasting impact on their increasingly commercial and technophilic society. The artists developed their own process of expressively transforming fgural imagery by foregrounding the vivid colors and rough textures of their artistic materials, as in Jorn’s Toy Picture (Plate 4). From thickly brushed paint to the coarse surfaces of found wood or rough stone, Cobra’s materialist art evokes the bare necessities of a life lived through war and occupation. It was this material rawness as much as the simple images they depicted that allied their work to pre-modern art forms. Cobra art works combine the playful animal symbolism of political cartoons and early animation with the use of raw materials to create brutally direct, emotionally powerful expressions in diverse media. Unlike animated flm, which benefts from continual technological development, the art of Cobra demands our direct physical presence to be fully experienced. It resists the purity and perfection of the Disney feature flm as much as that of the modern museum. It was the expansion of the modern museum and the contemporary biennials in Europe in the 1950s that led to the canonization of the historic avant-garde artists the Cobra artists most admired as professionals of personal expression. The techniques of Cobra painting recall the painterly abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky, the childlike fantasies of Paul Klee, the darker spiritual visions of Emil Nolde, and the political allegories of Max Ernst. All four artists were condemned by the National Socialists for “degenerate art” in the 1930s; as a result, their work garnered widespread interest after the defeat of Nazism. The Cobra artists had appreciated their Expressionist predecessors for years, but they rejected the offcial 1950s canonization of individual artists as the “new masters” of expressive abstraction, devaluing everyone else’s creativity. The process gained momentum as France attempted to reclaim the precedence of its artists as a “Second School of Paris,” and the New York School began to claim its own superiority. Cobra proposed a new kind of “outsider” expression against the increasing lionization in the art world of specifc individual artists as great Expressionists and, by the end of the 1950s, Abstract Expressionists. Expressionist artists were exhibited prominently at major international shows of the day, such as Expressionisme: Van Gogh tot Picasso, an infuential international survey at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1949. In the frst international Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1955, director Arnold Bode showcased the German Expressionists alongside contemporary abstract works (Documenta II in 1959 included some of the Cobra artists). Bode aimed specifcally to exhibit avant-garde art that had been banned under the Nazis as “degenerate art.”94 Yet shaped by Cold War ideas of personal freedom promoted internationally by the U.S., Documenta celebrated the Dada and Expressionist artists by presenting them as talented individuals, rather than as part of interdisciplinary avant-garde movements. The New York School ultimately “won” the transatlantic struggle for artistic precedence, and American art dominated artistic accounts of the 1950s for the rest of the century.95 Abstract Expressionism became the high art of its day, above all in the form of abstract gestural painting. The American movement remains canonical,

30 Introduction although recent scholarship on the 1950s is challenging that dominance by promoting overlooked artists and movements from around the world.96 Cobra now appears as one of many global movements that attempted to re-envision traditional or popular symbols and stories in newly expressive and personal ways, from the Saqqakhaneh school in Iran to the Bombay Progressive Group in India. Like those movements, Cobra emerged in a particular local context but drew parallels between its own cultural traditions and those of other cultures. The artists sought universal themes and expressions beneath the offcial spectacles of global politics, rejecting the way postwar political and economic defnitions of international relations reinforced existing social inequality. They attempted to set personal networks and transnational creative communities in place of urban and national art world institutions. Instead of the high modernism newly resurgent in the European capitals, Cobra was interested in unleashing forces that were both repressed and oppressed by the dominant cultural traditions. They wanted to reconnect art to lived experience. As Dotremont later described in the frst exhibition of Appel, Constant, and Corneille in Paris, “They entered into painting by the main gate: that of life.”97 The Cobra artists sought to create a new vitality in tangible forms and simple images legible to those living outside art’s ivory tower. These images appeared in all forms, from painting to photography, book illustration, and poetry. While the Danish artists celebrated the poetry of popular lyrics and folk traditions in the journal Helhesten, the Dutch Experimental Group included several poets who would defne the Dutch literary avant-garde of the “Fiftiers” (Viftigers) in the 1950s, including Lucebert. Recognized for his artistic talent at an early age, Lucebert, the son of a house painter, never completed art school nor any trade approved by his parents. He was taken to Germany for forced labor in a munitions factory between 1943–1944, but was sent home after being declared unft to work.98 After the war he became an itinerant mural painter, sleeping on park benches for months at a time. He began to write poetry, publishing his frst poems in Refex in 1948. He became an editor of the little magazines Blurb and Braak in 1950, publishing a series of visually striking poem-paintings. One of these poems declares in vivid terms the political message behind the poetic imagery of Cobra: “School of Poetry” I am no sweet rhymer I am the swift swindler of love, the hate beneath it heed and there above a cackling deed. the lyrical is the mother of the political, I am none other than the riot reporter and my mysticism is the putrefed fodder of deceit used by virtue to purge it all. I proclaim that the velvet poets are dying timidly and humanistically. from now on the hot iron throat of moved henchmen will open musically.

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yet I, who in these sheaves abide like a rat in a trap, yearn for the cesspool of revolution and cry: rhyme-rats, deride, deride always this far too pure poetry school.99

Reframing Cobra Cobra formed largely out of the interdisciplinary interests and organizational energy of Dotremont, Jorn, and Constant. They worked collectively in different groups throughout their careers, some of which, like the Situationist International co-founded by Jorn and Constant in 1957, have overshadowed Cobra in later critical accounts. Several of the Cobra artists, such as Alechinsky, Appel, and Jorn, became internationally renowned starting in the 1960s, but many artists affliated with Cobra are less wellknown than they deserve to be. This is partly because a few individuals have eclipsed the rest, and partly due to the group’s refusal of nationalism and the rewards that come with it. Even the positive criticism Cobra artists received, paltry at frst until the majority of critics in northern Europe began to support them in the mid-1950s, was characteristically framed within national boundaries and did not take into account the transnational context so crucial for Cobra.100 Major museum presentations like the Cobra exhibitions at the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1982, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels in 2008, and the exhibitions curated since 1995 by the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst in the Netherlands attempt to present the movement from multiple national perspectives.101 Nevertheless, their reception is still determined by national context. This book attempts to disrupt the norm in Cobra scholarship, which has been to address the movement country by country. Enough scholarship now exists on the movement in English to provide substantial overviews of this type.102 Instead, I will describe specifc artistic – meaning primarily visual and tactile – interventions in relation to critical topics that underscore Cobra’s signifcance for the broader history and intellectual context of its time, from a perspective outside the countries that now celebrate Cobra as a native movement. Chapter 1, “Human Animals,” examines how the various Cobra artists engaged the idea of what Asger Jorn called “the human animal” (menneskedyret), which I interpret as a radical critique of humanism in the face of the Nazi occupations, the Holocaust, the Bomb, and the techno-rationalist reconstruction of Europe at the beginning of the Cold War. It addresses the spontaneous, vital, brutal, and intensely physical side of Cobra’s art. The transforming human-animal imagery of Cobra underscores the social signifcance of the irrational and uncultured aspects of human behavior that resist sublimation in high culture. Because the Second World War and the colonial wars of independence revealed in no uncertain terms the violence and inhumanity within European culture, it no longer made sense to recognize “savagery” only in colonized peoples. Instead, the Cobra artists made explicit the brutality of their own culture. Building on numerous artistic precedents for depicting animal energies in art, Jorn and Constant developed a radical Cobra approach to history painting based on popular and animal symbolism. Their works transform individual expression into social allegories and open up multiple critical perspectives, responding to the problem of how to represent the horrors of genocide and the Bomb by revealing the basic human-animal antagonisms beneath Cold War politics. At the same time, Cobra animal imagery explored

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the values of innocence, spontaneity, emotionality, sexuality, directness, and playfulness that Western culture’s representations of humanity – which typically focused on the heroic individual in art – tended to suppress. Chapter 2, “Surrealism into Cobra,” analyzes the shifting relationship to Surrealism among the Belgian, Dutch, and Swedish Cobra artists. The Revolutionary Surrealist movement (1947–1948) involved various independent Surrealist poets and artists in France and Belgium in an attempt to renew the connection between Surrealist poetry and communism. It critiqued André Breton’s French Surrealist group as outmoded and mystical based on Breton’s writings and exhibitions, such as the International Exhibition of Surrealism in 1947. In an era when Socialist Realism dominated the Communist Party’s approach to art, Cobra proposed a third way between representational realism and pure abstraction, which appeared increasingly academic. Revolutionary Surrealism soon became mired in obscure ideological debates, leading the artists to form Cobra. Grounded in the communist theory of historical materialism and Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the “material imagination,” Cobra works foreground the process of materializing – and thus continually transforming – imaginative forms. Raoul Ubac’s slate sculptures, among other works, manifest Bachelard’s “material imagination” in their emphasis on the expressive possibilities of stone. The Dutch Experimental Group (1947–1948) was polarized by the sophisticated neo-Marxist theoretical critique of Constant and the resistance to theory of the other Dutch artists like Eugène Brands. Taking direct inspiration from Surrealism, Brands’s interest in African and Oceanic art and music as well as children’s art produced some of Dutch Cobra’s most innovative art works. The Imaginist group (1945–1956) also joined Cobra at a moment when Surrealism appeared outmoded in Sweden. By the 1960s, however, artists like Belgian painter Pierre Alechinsky and Imaginist artist Max Walter Svanberg again became a part of Breton’s Surrealist network in Paris. Cobra turned away from Surrealism’s psychoanalytic framework and classical mythic subjects, but paralleled postwar Surrealism in its focus on semi-abstract and symbolic imagery. In many respects, the movement never completely broke with Surrealism after all. Chapter 3, “War, Memory, and Renewal,” explores the relationship of Cobra to the legacy of the Second World War, collective memory, and commemoration in the 1950s. It highlights the compelling stories of Cobra artists Serge Vandercam, Karel Appel, and Shinkichi Tajiri in relation to the war. Vandercam’s photographs of ruined bunkers on the Belgian beaches suggest the violence of a war that reduced European citizens to a struggle for survival, but also suggest the possibility of regeneration. They reveal the savagery that underlies the veneer of “civilization” even as they highlight symbolic signs of cultural renewal. Appel’s depiction of refugees in his “Questioning Children” series and Tajiri’s experimental sculpture developed a new approach to art as a “materialist witness” to the atrocities of war. Refusing to focus on images of traumatic memory, however, Cobra art represents a newly unpredictable world where symbols are subject to perpetual redefnition. Tajiri’s early “Warrior” sculptures processed his experiences escaping internment in the U.S. to fght in Europe, where he witnessed the aftermath of the concentration camps. Produced spontaneously using found materials, these works are both imposing and toylike. His early sculpture conveys the physical brutality of political incarceration and violence against minorities, drawing parallels between the Japanese-American internment and the persecution of Native Americans. His later public “Sentinel” and “Knot” sculptures evolved into monuments for peace.

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33

Chapter 4, “Expression for All,” frames Cobra’s unique approach to “interpersonal expression” in relation to the history of modern Expressionism that inspired the artists, but with which the Cobra movement is often confused. I analyze the links between Expressionist ideas of mastering human emotion and the modern defnitions of masculine and feminine identity that are also shaped by class and racial categories. Both individual and collective works materialize the particular Cobra approach to expression as an intersubjective social process. Cobra’s political understanding of artistic expression reframed expression as a way of connecting materially with diverse audiences. The aggressive provocations of the male Cobra artists have defned the movement in wellknown examples such as Corneille’s primitivist paintings. Meanwhile, the work of women artists like Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and Else Alfelt, who were forced to negotiate Expressionist techniques inherently coded as masculine, has been marginalized in discussions of Cobra. In fact, Ferlov and Alfelt developed complex responses to the experiences of the war that have been previously overlooked. Their aesthetics balanced expression and restraint in unique and arguably feminist ways. Histories of Cobra have also ignored the signifcance of the work of black artist Ernest Mancoba, who married Ferlov while interned in Paris during the occupation. The Mancobas’ cosmopolitan humanism claimed a common cause with formerly colonized peoples struggling to assert their political sovereignty after the war. The alternate Cobra stories of Alfelt and the Mancobas suggest a revisionist history of the movement based on its own populist ideals and declared attack on the dominant understanding of expression in the 1950s. In diverse ways, Cobra acknowledged the signifcance of the observer in socially defning what artistic expression means. A short coda, “New Networks,” discusses the legacy of Cobra in the 1960s and later. This chapter acknowledges the importance of post-Cobra movements like the Situationist International co-founded by Jorn and Constant (1957–1972) and The Situationist Times edited by Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939), as well as Constant’s “New Babylon” series (1956–1974), which left painting behind in favor of architectural exploration. It also describes the work of African-American artist Herbert Gentry (1919–2003), who became a self-described Cobra painter in Scandinavia from the 1950s until his death in 2003. I consider his painting in order to question the temporal and spatial limits of redefning Cobra, a movement without any offcial membership roster that set itself directly against the exclusivity of earlier movements such as Surrealism. The alternate Cobra story of Gentry, like that of Tajiri, Alfelt, and the Mancobas, suggests a revisionist history of the movement based on its own populist critique of traditional divisions of center and periphery. Cobra’s unique combination of singular and collective expression is particularly meaningful today, as artists seek new ways to work together and protest the dominance of an individualistic art market without losing their creative autonomy.

Notes 1 “L’orthocatalographe,” November 5, 1949, in Dotremont, Cobraland, 96. All translations from French, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish are mine unless otherwise noted. 2 Lucebert, “9000 Jackals Swimming to Boston,” in Nijmeijer, ed., Four Dutch Poets, 9. 3 Constant, “Manifesto.” 4 The term “bare life” is used by Giorgio Agamben to refer to the reduction of certain groups of people to a minimal existence, with the institutionalization of the camp structure to contain them inhumanely, based on a politics of emergency under a “state of exception” that, in reality, becomes taken for normal. Agamben, Homo Sacer.

34

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5 Jean-Michel Atlan, “Abstraction et aventure dans l’art contemporain,” 16. 6 Léon Degand, “Atlan,” Les lettres françaises, February 3, 1946, trans. in Jacques Polieri, Atlan: Catalogue Raisonné, 647. 7 Jacques Kober, “Une Année de peinture,” Derrière le miroir (Paris: Galerie Maeght, 1947), translated in Polieri, Atlan, 647. 8 Asger Jorn, Magi og skønne kunster, 69. 9 Atlan, Le sang profond. 10 Ragon, Atlan, 15. 11 Atlan, “The Time Has Come to Call Up a World,” 177. 12 Michel Ragon, Atlan, mon ami, 1948–1960 (Paris: Galilée, 1989), quoted in Polieri, Atlan, 648. 13 Asger Jorn, “Forundring, Beundring, Begejstring,” unpublished manuscript, circa 1955, Museum Jorn Archives, translated as Jorn, “Wonder – Admiration – Enthusiasm,” 59–69. 14 Franke, ed., Animism. 15 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), cited in Franke, ed., Animism, 12. 16 Franke, ed., Animism, 29. 17 Jane Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” in Coole and Frost, eds., New Materialisms, 12. 18 Original French typscript reproduced in Lambert, Cobra, 25. 19 Lambert, Cobra, 25. 20 See the defnitions of the avant-garde in Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde; and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. 21 Le Petit Cobra 4 (1950–1951), in Cobra, n.p. 22 Ejler Bille published his account of these artistic inspirations in Picasso, Surrealisme, Abstrakt Kunst. 23 See Hvidberg-Hansen and Oelsner, eds., The Spirit of Vitalism. 24 Jorn, unsent letter to Troels Andersen, 1961 or 1962, MJ, quoted in Andersen, “Egill Jacobsen og Asger Jorn,” 53. 25 Jacobsen, quoted in Peter Shield, “The War Horses,” 27. 26 See Kurczynski, “No Man’s Land.” 27 Shield, “Spontaneous Abstraction,” 89; see also Hjort, Sigurd Næsgaard. 28 Næsgaard, “Følelser eller drifter,” 54. 29 Lambert, Cobra, 31. 30 Jespersen, De Abstrakte, 39. 31 Program text for an unrealized mural project at Husum, quoted in Andersen, Asger Jorn: en biograf, vol. 1, 108. 32 For a description of the project, see Andersen and Nyholm, Asger Jorn og 10.000 Ars Nordisk Folkekunst. 33 Ejler Bille, “Om nutidens grundlag for en skabende kunst,” 11. 34 Egon Mathiesen, “Hvad moderne kunst er,” 82, trans. in Greaves, ed., War Horses, 59. 35 Jorn, “Intime banaliteter,” 34. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?.” 37 Dotremont, “Impressions et expressions du Danemark,” 3. 38 “Den Ny Realisme,” signed by Else Alfelt, Ejler Bille, Kujahn Blask, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, Robert Jacobsen, Johannes Jensen, Asger Jorn, Tage Mellerup, Richard Mortensen, Erik Orvad, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Viggo Rohde and Erik Thommesen, n.p. 39 Greaves, The Danish Avant-Garde, 176. 40 Dotremont, Ancienne éternité (1962). 41 “Pas de quartiers dans la révolution!” 1947, reproduced in Stokvis, Cobra, 67. 42 Jorn, letter to Constant, 1948, quoted in Stokvis, Cobra, 97. 43 Jacques Calonne, Interview in Brussels, March 4, 1974, in Cobra '48 '51 '74, 41. 44 See Dotremont, 10 rue de la Paille, with photographs by Serge Vandercam. The address is now a vacant lot, as efforts to turn it into an “Espace Cobra” ran aground amid postCobra polemics and lack of support in the 1990s. See Minne, “Entre la paille et la poutre,” 59–62; Guy Dotremont, “Réponse à ’Entre la paille et la poutre,’” 66; and Guy Dotremont, “Cobra: L’affaire du 10 rue de la Paille,” AML documents CDXI 04910/1991/005/01; CDXI 04910/1991/008/01; and CDXI 04900/1998/014/01, respectively.

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45 Joseph Noiret, quoted in Lambert, Grand hôtel des valises, 75, cited in Aubert, “10, rue de la Paille.” 46 Italics in original. Nathalie Aubert, “10, rue de la Paille.” 47 The Cobra Editions include Appel, Constant, Corneille, with Dotremont’s text, “Par la grande porte” (1949); Dotremont, Les Jambages au cou, with drawings by Corneille (1949); Brian Martinoir, Le crayon et l’objet, with engravings by Collignon (1949); Alechinsky, Les Poupées de Dixmude, with photographs by Hans Bellmer and Roland d’Ursel and afterword by Luc Zangrie (1950); Dotremont, Le réalisme-socialiste contre la revolution (1950); Havrenne, La main heureuse, with drawings by Pol Bury (1950); Noiret, L’Aventure dévorante, with drawings by Bury (1950); and Claus, De blijde en onvoorziene week–La joyeuse semaine imprévue, with drawings by Appel (1950). 48 Dotremont, “Historique de Cobra en Belgique,” 6. 49 Dotremont, “Historique de Cobra en Belgique,” 4. 50 Dotremont, “Historique de Cobra en Belgique,” 5–6. 51 Jacques Fierens, “Olivier Strebelle,” Le Journal des Beaux-Arts 22, no. 2 (March 1, 1952), 5. 52 Noiret mentions both in Cobra et après, 8. Dotremont writes that Indonesian painter Harry Wiggers helped him arrange the printing of Cobra 2 as the catalog for the 1949 exhibition at Seminaire des Arts, but I have not been able to trace his work. Dotremont, “Historique de Cobra en Belgique,” 4. 53 Pierre Alechinsky, Dotremont et Cobra-Fôret, 26. 54 Christian Dotremont, “Historique de Cobra en Belgique,” 4. 55 Important recent discussions of failure include Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Anna M. Agathangelou, “Bruno Latour and Ecology Politics: Poetics of Failure and Denial in IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2016), 321–47; and Henry Petroski, Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 56 Asger Jorn, Concerning Form, 82. 57 Alechinsky, letter to Dotremont, September 15, 1971, AML, document CDMA 02220/1971/2/3. 58 Italics in original. Alechinsky, Souvenotes (1977), quoted in Abadie, ed., Alechinsky, 158. 59 Alechinsky, “Cobra dans le retroviseur,” 12. 60 Dotremont, Pol Bury: Peintures récentes, n.p. 61 Alechinsky, “Cobra dans le retroviseur,” 21. 62 Stokvis, Cobra, 98–9. 63 Stokvis, Cobra, 75. 64 Stokvis, Cobra, 76. 65 Van der Horst, Constant, 40. 66 Theo Van der Wal, interview with Constant, Bergense Badbode, summer 1948, translated in Stokvis, Cobra, 9. 67 Anton Rooskens, “De A von Cobra,” n.p. 68 Constant, “Manifesto.” 69 Constant, “Cultuur en contra-cultuur,” Refex 2 (1949), trans. to French as “Culture et contre-culture” in Berréby, ed., Documents relatifs à la fondation de l’Internationale Situationniste, 41–3 and 59–61. 70 Stokvis, Cobra, 108. 71 Eugène Brands, “To the Point,” Refex 1, back page, trans. in Hartog Jager, ed., Imaginair, 82. 72 Christian Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir tout à fait,” n.p. 73 “The Manifesto by Karel Appel,” in Kaiser, ed., Karel Appel: Retrospective, 29–30. 74 Karel Appel, quoted in Rasaad Jamie, “Appel Now,” 1984, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 168. 75 Forty-four letters, mostly in French, from Jorn to Constant are preserved in the RKD, substantially discussing everything from the Cobra “Artistes libres” book series to the meetings of Høst in Denmark and the editing of upcoming Cobra issues by Dotremont, Götz, and others. Letter 14 from 1950 even opens with Jorn assuring Constant that his children Martha and Olga are doing well, and includes a note from Matie to Constant in Dutch confrming this.

36 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Introduction Untitled statement likely written by Christian Dotremont, Cobra 7 (Fall, 1950), 5. Aubert, “10, rue de la Paille.” Elburg, Geen letterheren, 142. A.C. Willink in Het Vrije Volk, 1949, quoted in Elburg, Geen letterheren, 147–8. Henry Heerup, “Hvad er en ‘Brok’?” 94, trans. as “What is a ‘Boulder’?” in Henry Heerup and the Avant-Garde, 89. Jorn, “Le Frey (Frö).” Hansen, “Henry Heerup,” 73. Heerup, “What is a ‘Boulder’?’” in Henry Heerup and the Avant-Garde, 89. Raine, Petit Festival du Film Experimental et Abstrait Programme. Norman McLaren, “L’Ecran et le pinceau,” 10–15. Jorn, letter to Constant, Constant Archives, Jorn letter number 22, RKD. Jean Charlot, “But Is It Art?” American Scholar 8, no. 3 (Summer 1939), 269–70, quoted in Mikulak, “Disney and the Art World,” 118. Dorothy Grafy, “Animated Cartoon Gives the World an American Art,” Public Ledger, Philadelphia, 23 October 1932, Women’s section, quoted in Mikulak, “Disney and the Art World,” 116. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” 118. Benjamin’s conteporary interlocutor Theodor Adorno would strongly disagree, characterizing the audience’s laughter as anything but revolutionary – rather “full of the worst bourgeois sadism.” Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed., Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 130, cited in Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 166. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 21 and 33. McLaren, “L’Ecran et le pinceau,” 10. Mortensen, “Abstrakt flm – naturalistisk flm,” 8. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 22–3. Glasmeier and Stengel, 50 Jahre Documenta. The classic account of this struggle is Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. The book has since been nuanced by a wide range of more recent scholarship, not least Guilbaut’s own, in exhibitions such as Be-bomb (2007) and Lost, Loose and Loved (2018). On the Second School of Paris, see Adamson, Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the Ecole De Paris. The most signifcant recent project is the revisionist exhibition by Enwezor, Siegel, and Wilmes, Postwar (2016). Dotremont, “Par la grande porte,” n.p. Anja de Feijter, “Introduction,” in Lucebert: The Collected Poems, vol. 1, 17. Lucebert, “School of Poetry,” trans. Diane Butterman, in Lucebert: The Collected Poems, vol. 1, 87. Laan, “The Making of a Reputation,” 95. Notably, the 1982 exhibition Cobra 1948–1951 researched all the artists included in the original Cobra shows of 1949 and 1951. The two most signifcant studies of Cobra that have been translated to English are by French critic Jean-Clarence Lambert, Cobra (1983) and Dutch art historian Willemijn Stokvis, Cobra (2017). Both authors break down the movement by country and artist more comprehensively than my book, but with less theoretical discussion.

1

Human Animals

In Brussels in 1948, Asger Jorn and Christian Dotremont produced a series of small but highly signifcant works they called “word-paintings” (peintures-mots), inspired partly by Surrealist experiments but foregrounding their new interest in spontaneous collaboration. Je Lève, Tu Lèves, Nous Rêvons, one reads: “I Rise, You Rise, We Dream” (Plate 5). A central form contains wing-, fn-, or beak-like elements, recalling creatures of water or air, but it does not resolve into any single animal; instead it presents a strange half-created form – perhaps even a monster, historically defned as containing elements of multiple animals.1 The picture’s open transformation of animal elements suggests less a single animal than a playful evocation of animality. Other works discussed in this chapter, such as Jorn’s Golden Swine (Figure 1.1), depict recognizable animals more satirically. Yet the “swine” still only loosely resembles a pig. These art works suggest a quick sketch rather than a complete animal, a free expression in the moment that does not depict animal life so much as channel the simpler and more harmonious – or brutal – existence that humans have always projected onto animal experience. The word-paintings of 1948 initiated a decades-long series of Cobra projects in which participants created new works together. The collaborations took artists out of their specialized skill sets and broke down the division of image versus text. In I Rise, You Rise, We Dream, the painted form and calligraphic text seem to have developed as one. Instead of individually, the “dream” arises through collaboration across the creative disciplines. Jorn’s imagery suggests forms derived from natural and artistic sources, both modernist and popular, set in dialogue with Dotremont’s script. Jorn references the plant forms of turn-of-the-century Jugendstil decoration alongside the biomorphic imagery of Edvard Munch, whose death in 1944 led to two major retrospectives in Copenhagen and Oslo in 1946, both of which Jorn saw. In its aleatory and holistic approach, the project breaks down the simplistic dichotomy of nature versus culture. Both artists shared the view that painting, like poetry, was only one facet of an active creative life. The Cobra artists would repeatedly attempt to break down art’s traditional division of self and others in favor of a dialogic practice involving multiple perspectives, momentarily working – or rather, playing – together. Across the diverse expressions and collective practices of Cobra, the imagery of animals and the implications of animality, whether playful or sinister, emerge. The animal as a human totem is at the heart of Cobra, signifed in the very name of the movement.2 Asger Jorn defnes totemism loosely in relation to clan symbols, as humans’ tendency to see themselves symbolized in animals, plants, or other natural powers.3 Animal totems were not used in Cobra to reestablish communal identities, however.

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Human Animals

Figure 1.1 Asger Jorn, Guldsvinet (Golden Swine), 1950. Oil on canvas, 50 x 100 cm. Photograph by Lars Bay. Museum Jorn, Denmark. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Instead, they were abstracted and transformed in order to break open categories of identity, by reframing the cultural genealogies of animal imagery. Since ancient times animals have symbolized the difference between civilization and wildness. They have been defned as creatures of action rather than thought. Their apparent innocence, like the innocence of children, appealed strongly to a generation of artists ready to start over again after the inhumanity of the Second World War. From Aristotle to Marx and Freud, the animal signifed something less than human, serving as a foil for humanity’s superior ability to reason, to imagine, or to make moral decisions; modern problems were often described as a reversal where the human becomes reduced to the animal. As Marx, a key philosopher for Jorn and Constant, writes, Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity […] Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship. Therefore, he continues: Man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.4 For Marx, humanity’s reduction to animal existence signifed a life out of balance. At the same time, the legacy of Darwinian evolution and Freudian psychoanalytic theory led intellectuals to recognize that human and animal existence were actually more similar than previously thought. In fact, the events of the 20th century would make

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clear that the more humans attempted to defne themselves as superior to animals, the more savage their actions toward each other. The highly organized violence of both colonialism and the two World Wars seemed to represent a breakdown of civilized values, revealing the brutality at the heart of Western civilization. Beginning with the Dada movement, which formed as a direct response to the absurdity of the First World War, modern artists were no longer interested in sublimating or repressing the animal side of humanity. In the Second World War, Nazi culture took human civilization to another terrible extreme. The patriarchal and racist order imposed by Nazism led to unprecedented violence, one that belied the very meaning of humanism. This feeling only intensifed with the nuclear threat of the Cold War and the colonial wars of independence that shook the world in the socalled “postwar” decade. The Cobra artists celebrated the animal as a way to envision the fundamental experiences of living, in the sense of survival. They had witnessed the extreme violence that Western nations had wrought in Europe, all in the name of humanism and white civilization. The artists pushed animal imagery to express bodily or phenomenological experience as a kind of freedom from politics, but also to refect critically on the dehumanizing aspects of modern society. Jorn’s theory reconceived the human as the “human animal” (menneskedyret or la bête humaine), inspired by the theories of Darwin, Marx, and Freud. In his essay “The Human Animal” from circa 1950, he writes: The human animal is the key problem of European culture. What is, after all, the reason that Darwin’s matter-of-fact account of human origin still to this day can cause offense? Why is there such a great emphasis on convincing the animal of the ape family that calls itself the human that he is not an animal, though even a child can see it, something that is perfectly natural and normal in itself? Why are we, who pass through all the animal stages as fetuses, forced to deny our nature? Why and how did it happen that the old gods of Egypt, India, Persia, America, yes even Europe, half human, half animal, were transformed, during the Middle Ages and recent history, into devilish representatives of evil? Why does the dragon continue to be the holy sign of China and the Orient, while the dragon killer has become the most popular symbol of the West, the symbol of the struggle against “evil”?5 In taking the snake as its icon, Cobra followed a long line of avant-garde artists from Romanticism and Symbolism to Surrealism in championing the marginalized and misunderstood, starting with the image of the snake, which medieval Christians repudiated as “evil” and modern Europeans dismissed as “primitive.” This sinister aspect recalls Lautréamont’s Maldoror, a favorite text of the Surrealists as well as Cobra, in which the quixotic fgure of Maldoror reverses the imagery of Revelation in depicting God as a monstrous dragon or snake.6 Jorn praised the text for signifying the transformative potential of metamorphosis in its reevaluations of good and evil.7 Jorn’s concept of the human animal recognized the instinctual side of human nature, celebrated the playful and humorous in popular culture, and critiqued the celebration of humanism in high culture as art institutions attempted to rebuild a shattered civilization after the war. Postwar humanism in philosophy and art criticism tended to be self-serious, individualistic, and culturally exclusive in its privileging of European traditions. One of the most prominent humanist critics was Andre Malraux, the novelist, art collector, and later Minister of Culture under French President De Gaulle. Malraux

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radically expanded the defnition of humanism beyond its traditional focus on the classical tradition by including non-Western art in his “imaginary museum” (musée imaginaire) popularized in his book The Voices of Silence (Les voix du silence). But the project ended up framing non-Western art as another form of European-style personal expression. The book is prescient in its reinterpretation of world art by means of the aesthetic possibilities of photography. However, the black and white photographs collapse radically different forms of art into a uniform visual aesthetic, and the text describes each work as the expression of an individual artist in isolation, according to a modern Western framework.8 Still present in libraries around the world, the book exemplifes the postwar liberal rhetoric of individual freedom of expression, framed in relation to personal spiritual striving and seemingly independent of any discussion of power and politics, colonial or otherwise. Cobra’s human animal, on the other hand, was playful, counter-cultural, populist, and collectivist in its implication of the artist as part of a community or “pack.” It suggested a more inclusive and egalitarian politics opposed to the ideologies of Fascism, nationalism, colonialism, and Cold War liberalism, with its selective approach to humanism. Cobra preferred the human animal to the brutal bureaucrat. Jorn observes in 1947 that “with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the whole of bourgeois humanism, objective, free-thinking humanism, crashed down to earth with one blow.”9 His words parallel the writing of contemporary philosophers like Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Aimé Cesaire, who identifed the way totalitarian and colonial regimes dehumanized their citizens and reduced human experience to bare animal existence. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, also in 1947, Adorno and Max Horkheimer critique the Enlightenment doctrine of rational progress as a myth that leads directly to the scientifc domination and cultural destruction exemplifed by the Nazi regime. They describe how anti-Semitism reduces the modern individual to a brutish attitude of pure domination, and demonstrates that modern society has never actually succeeded in rising “above” its animal nature: In the sickness of the individual, humanity’s sharpened intellectual apparatus is turned once more against humanity, regressing to the blind instrument of hostility it was in animal prehistory, and as which, for the species, it has never ceased to operate in relation to the rest of nature. Just as, since its rise, the human species has manifested itself toward others as developmentally the highest, capable of the most terrible destruction; and just as, within humanity, the more advanced races have confronted the more primitive, the technically superior nations the more backward, so the sick individual confronts the other individual, in megalomania as in persecution mania.10 Far from an irrational lapse, the Nazi regime represented in its extreme racism and inhumanity the ultimate legacy of the Enlightenment myth of rational progress. Arendt describes the necessary link between social domination and the dehumanizing ideology of racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She writes that in the 19th century, Nationalism perverted the national concept of mankind as a family of nations into a hierarchical structure where differences of history and organization were misinterpreted as differences between men, residing in natural origin. Racism, which

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denied the common origin of man […] introduced the concept of the divine origin of one people […] Peoples are transformed into animal species so that a Russian appears as different from a German as a wolf is from a fox.11 In the 20th century, as she describes, “Nazism, in the course of its totalitarian policy, attempted to change man into a beast.”12 Echoing Marx, she argues that totalitarian states dominate people by reducing them to an animal existence: Men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfllment of functions are entirely superfuous to totalitarian regimes. […] Precisely because man’s resources are so great, he can be fully dominated only when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man.13 The totalitarian state reduces productive humanity, homo faber, to a working animal, animal laborans.14 The persecution of Jewish and other minority peoples that culminated in the Nazi extermination camps made victims lose some of the “most essential characteristics of human life,” the constitutive elements of communication and social interaction that characterized humanity as what Aristotle called the “political animal.” These aspects of humanity that were previously taken for granted as inalienable, Arendt continues, had to be re-constituted in the postwar period as “human rights.”15 In the Fascist political system only the leaders remain fully human in their ability to act as a political animal, but their vicious actions belie that very humanity. To take Arendt’s analysis one step further, the totalitarian approach to genocide dehumanizes both perpetrators and victims by revealing the inhuman extremes to which the civilized ideals of the Enlightenment combined with modern technology can be taken. This is precisely the observation made by critics of colonialism at the time. Cesaire, the French poet of négritude from Martinique, argues that the colonial system dehumanizes perpetrator and victim alike in his groundbreaking Discourse on Colonialism frst published in 1950. Cesaire’s text provides a powerful rejection of the modern Western society that proclaims itself civilized while cultivating the most dehumanizing extremes of savage behavior both at home and abroad. His critique reframes Cobra’s animalistic art in relation to the emerging post-colonial theories that supported the political independence movements in Asia and Africa. These global movements, beginning with the wars in Indochina and Indonesia that started immediately after the end of the Second World War, would permanently alter the ideological stature of the European nations and “provincialize” their claims to global precedence.16 Cesaire’s text is worth quoting at length: First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and show that […] at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, there is a poison distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. […]

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Human Animals Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justifed by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; […] the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.17

After the Allies won the war against Fascism with the direct aid of the colonial citizens who fought in their armies, black intellectuals were outraged that the European states expected colonized peoples to return to the inhumane way they were treated before the war, and even to fght for the colonial powers to put down rebellions around the world. Cobra artists Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and her husband Ernest Mancoba, a black South African citizen until he took French citizenship in 1961, would directly criticize these developments after the war. While their abstract art proposes new, critical images of a global humanity, the work of the white male artists of Cobra embodies the savagery within European culture so starkly described by Cesaire. Cesaire’s perspective raises important questions about racial politics that help situate a revisionist approach to Cobra. Cobra artists sometimes refected directly on colonialism, such as Lucebert in his 1948 poem “Love Letter to Our Tortured Bride Indonesia” or Mancoba in his “Ancestor” paintings (described in Chapters 2 and 4, respectively). The Situationist International movement co-founded by Jorn, Constant, Guy Debord, and others after the end of Cobra also developed a systematic critique of capitalist society’s “colonization of everyday life” related to class, race, and colonialism.18 The animalistic art works of Cobra mostly skewer Western civilization from a Marxist perspective for fostering general inequality and violence, but the colonialist underpinnings of that system are implicitly overturned when they take the animal as heroic subject. Such images defy the racist theories of both Fascism and colonialism that promoted the ideology of humanity as white. Cesaire links the Marxist critique directly to the colonialist exploitation that made Western capitalism possible. For Cesaire, Fascism reveals the utterly brutal extreme of Western humanism, its racist theories merely the culmination of an already morally diseased and inhumane society. He writes, “At the end of capitalism […] there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophical renunciation, there is Hitler.”19 He makes a powerful argument that the Western colonial regimes inevitably fail to promote a truly global humanism and are unable to enforce universal human rights because colonialism itself dehumanizes the colonists. The artists of Cobra developed animalistic visions to make palpable the inhumanity at the center of European culture so powerfully described by both European critical theorists like Arendt and post-colonial philosophers like Césaire. To frame Cobra’s “human animal” images as critical of the colonial ideology means decentering the common understanding of their work as “primitivist.” The Cobra artists were a generation younger than modernist primitivists like Picasso and Matisse. This earlier generation made their formal innovations by adapting visual forms from the art of colonized peoples in Africa and Oceania while projecting their longings for innocence, sexuality, ferocity, or liberation onto those people, viewing them as exotic. Cobra formed in the aftermath of a war that revealed in no uncertain terms the violence and inhumanity at the heart of Europe, so it no longer made sense to recognize “savagery” only in colonized peoples. Instead, they uncovered the animalistic brutality

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within their own culture. Like Picasso and others they were inspired by the art of cultures colonized by Europe, but their art works foreground childlike gestures and raw materials rather than appropriate the forms of non-Western art or reinscribe assumptions about non-Western people. The Cobra artists considered non-Western art as a form of folk or popular art, a global category they opposed to high art. At the same time, they used animal imagery in a positive way to explore the values of innocence, spontaneity, emotionality, open sexuality, directness, and playfulness that Western culture’s representations of humanity tended to suppress. This repression became particularly acute given the postwar revival of humanism, which combined the heritage of classical civilization with an embrace of modern technology, rational thinking, and liberal individualism in western Europe. The active reconstruction that shaped Europe in the 1950s threatened to deny the unpredictable animal side of humanity. Western Europe and the United States were never, however, truly postwar: they externalized their military violence to the formerly colonized countries or to disputed communist areas. Cobra reframed the relationship of the marginalized subject to the larger society at a particular moment, when European institutions of art and culture were attempting to reestablish the cosmopolitan humanist artistic principles attached to international modernism and the School of Paris before the war.20 Animals became central in Cobra’s responses to a continent beset by rapid technological as well as social changes, resulting in the increasing presence of mediation in everyday life – in the form of air travel, television, and advances in music recording as well as the flm industry over the course of the 1950s. Cobra pushed back, not in order to resist change but to reconnect with elements of material existence that the uncritical celebration of technology suppressed or threatened to destroy. It attempted to foreground social connections in an era of increasing mediation and specialization. Cobra rejected the long line of philosophers and theologians who defned the human in opposition to the animal.21 It favored the integration of human and animal elements as part of a more complex defnition of humanity. This integrative defnition of the human animal is visible in Cobra’s artistic animal–human hybrids and transformations. Even its pure abstractions register, in their simple marks and direct compositions, the presence of instinctive movement and spontaneity in human experience, elements that animated Danish “spontaneous abstract” art since the days of Linien. As Ejler Bille writes in Linien in 1934: “An artist in a confused time seeks instinctively after the animalistic – the only positive – the only stable reference point that appears just before them.” Linien celebrated sexual and social freedoms expressed through the liberation of the imagination. These artists will, Bille writes, “through their own experiences achieve a total expression of life – a synthesis.”22 Cobra art would build on the experiments of the Danish avant-garde in the exploration of what Jorn called the “human animal” in 1950. The term emphasizes the social signifcance of the irrational and uncultured aspects of human behavior that resist the power dynamics of high society. This art evokes symbolic relationships between humans, humans and animals, or between humans and the natural environment. It transforms existing mythic and animalistic imagery into vibrant expressions. Some Cobra artists, such as Karel Appel, would transform their Cobra artistic infuences into a powerfully expressive personal approach, overtly resisting theory in favor of direct play with artistic materials. Other artists, like Jorn, Constant, Dotremont, and Alechinsky, began with Surrealism’s understanding that human psychology was complex and unpredictable, and resisted any simplistic ideas of direct expression.

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As utopian communists, these artists recognized that personal contributions were shaped by a social context, and artistic materials, too, were subject to the materialist demands of politics. Rather than return to the individualism of earlier Expressionism, the more collaborative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed Cobra art work developed through a social process of reevaluating preexisting imagery and artistic techniques. Depictions of threatening creatures like Jorn’s Golden Swine (Figure 1.1) are common in Cobra art. They suggest in symbolic terms the threat of power over the vulnerable, and the injustices of the social world that recall the brute violence of nature – and the way people rationalize abuses of power precisely by pointing to the order of “nature.” Cobra understood symbolic, mythic, and animal imagery to be fundamentally social, linking artist and audience across diverse social contexts. The animal takes myriad forms in Cobra art, from the critical to the celebratory. In works like Golden Swine, animal forms critique the shallow veneer of civilization and the violence on which modern culture is built. Such works embody human foibles in the long tradition of political cartoons and caricature. Elsewhere, creatures seem to frolic in manic Edens, channeling the joy of childhood experience as in Jorn’s earlier Toy Picture (Plate 4). Cobra’s bestiary is less a zoology than a “zoo-anthropology,” commenting on social relations that are quintessentially human.23 The name “Cobra” was Dotremont’s suggestion, made a few weeks after the group signed its manifesto in November, 1948. The snake was not only a mythic symbol that appears in cultures around the world, but also a way to symbolically reframe human political culture: as an anagram of the three northern capitals, Cobra was an avantgarde response to the postwar trade association BeNeLux, formed in a 1944 treaty among the three nations of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg that took effect on January 1, 1948. Cobra, signifying the three cities of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam where its nomadic artists published and exhibited, announced a counterpoint to the cultural dominance of Paris and an attempt to reorient the focus to formerly marginalized areas of Europe, under a new transnational totem of what Constant called a creative “counter-culture.”24 Cobra considered symbols like birds, suns, or mythic beings collective expressions of the human societies that produced them. Jorn collected such images in 1948 for his book The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune (Figure 1.2), a book that was both an anthropological investigation and a sourcebook for his art.25 The rudimentary forms of animals and monsters in his paintings were transformations of older cultural motifs reproduced in his book, relating to the long-term evolution of symbols over centuries of popular tradition in all kinds of media, from astrological symbols and tattoo designs to political cartoons and kitsch illustrations. The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune presented Jorn’s understanding of popular art as something embodied in mythic symbols created anonymously in ancient societies and passed down to contemporary culture in various forms. The genesis for the book was Jorn’s curiosity about the meaning of the symbols depicted on the sides of the Golden Horns of Gallehus, renowned pagan objects found in the 18th century in a feld in Jutland, where they were buried as offerings in the 5th century. The Horns (now destroyed but replaced by replicas in the Danish National Museum) were stamped or engraved with mythic fgures and runes, the exact meanings of which remain mysterious. Lacking any known meaning, the Golden Horn images emblematized Jorn’s theory that any image is given meaning by the observer’s

Figure 1.2 Asger Jorn, double-page spread from Guldhorn og Lykkehjul / Les Cornes D’Or et la Roue de la Fortune (The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune) (Copenhagen, 1957), n.p. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

46 Human Animals interpretation. Jorn describes the book as an “example for the illustration of a new art-theoretical principle, which touches on the possibilities of interpretation as an artistic method in itself.”26 Jorn was demonstrating a new artistic method (or was it actually an old one?) – the collection and interpretation of preexisting images. His interpretations of myth as a popular symbolic language develop through the relationship of word and image in the book. A given page (Figure 1.2) depicts representations of lions, ranging from prehistoric Scandinavian carvings to Roman reliefs and illustrations from French fairy tales, images of the hand giving offerings from Scandinavian and ancient Chinese sources, and the legendary fgure of the wandering Jew, a sort of personal totem for Jorn, the eternal outsider. In the text, written around 1949, Jorn interprets the various myths as symbolizing the cycle of the seasons and the community’s relationship to them. The text also describes the transformation of cultic ritual into the spectator experience of modern theater, circus, and sports. In a Marxist interpretation, Jorn argues that over the centuries the popular rituals and myths became corrupted by developed societies in which the elite determined the beliefs and rituals of the people, instituting religion to morally justify a broader system of inequality. Jorn maintains that the ancient mythmakers were by contrast untrained amateurs, developing myths creatively for use in rituals that held communities together. His text may be romantic in its celebration of early agricultural society, but it directly critiques contemporary capitalism for turning the creative power of myth into passive spectacle. The extraordinary book celebrates through its sheer wealth of visual material the creativity evident in the expansive range and transformation of mythic symbols across cultures. The project makes clear that, while the interest in myth and animal images among the Danish Cobra artists in particular has often been characterized as a quaint focus on Scandinavian folklore, it actually encompassed much broader themes. Animals, after all, are everywhere in world art. In the context of Cobra, Jorn invented a series of fctional monsters in his drawings, paintings, and prints. He called them “Aganaks,” described as “ribby, scaly, leathery or bristly low-slung creatures.”27 These were hybrid and malformed creatures that distorted or combined traditional animal images into threatening beings. As Hal Foster observes, the Aganak “suggests a lowly being of pollution,” disrupting the normative categories by which human society puts the world into order.28 In many cases, they were also direct critiques of war, and the capitalist profteering that uses war as an excuse for economic exploitation. The most developed Aganak, The Golden Swine (Figure 1.1), is a toothy, hog-like creature, low and lean like the new American cars of the day, mesmerized by a foating coin emblazoned with a glowing dollar symbol. The Golden Swine depicts the capitalist greed and superfciality commonly associated with American culture by European critics. The United States was asserting its cultural and political hegemony at the time through the diverse felds of military occupation, advertising, and both high and mass culture, across a continent still devastated by the effects of war. With its radically unfnished appearance, the painting recalls graffti, a medium associated with the wartime anti-Nazi resistance throughout occupied Europe, now turned against a new world order.29 Given its emphasis on line over painterly form, it resembles a political cartoon more than a fnished work, even a modernist one. Jorn’s painting during the Cobra years became radically experimental, incorporating elements of other pictorial forms like writing, informed by his interdisciplinary dialogue with new friends like Dotremont and Constant.

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Jorn’s book on aesthetics, Luck and Chance (Held og hasard), describes art as a subjective medium fundamental to human experience. He defnes art as “life renewal, the enlivening, animating, agitating, inspiring, aspirational, enthusiastic, fermenting, fascinating, fanaticizing, the explosive and rebellious, renewal or the unknown.”30 Painting was a means of exploring humans as social animals, and reacting to the politics that threatened and divided them. The political developments that shaped the art of Cobra began with the rise of Fascism in the 1930s and led to the stark realizations after the war of the depths of inhumanity evident in the Holocaust, the Bomb, and the colonial wars of independence. The sections below trace the ancient and modern infuences on the various Cobra artists. These culminated in Jorn and Constant’s attempt to develop a beastly history painting adequate to convey both the extent of the human tragedy and the necessity to reconnect with the fundamentals of life on earth after a war that seemed to threaten its very future. To reconnect with hope for the future, the Cobra artists continually revisited and reanimated the images of the past.

Symbolic Savagery in Paris Important precedents for Cobra’s animal investigations were Surrealist art and journals from the 1930s such as La Révolution Surréaliste, Documents, and above all Minotaure, its emblem a ferce hybrid beast from Greek mythology. For the abstract Surrealist art of Linien and later Høst (after Linien disbanded in 1939), the pioneering abstractions, automatic drawings, and collages of Miró, Masson, and Ernst, together with the poetic discussions in the Surrealist journals, were central. Equally important were Arp and Klee, a fellow-traveler of Surrealism, as well as Picasso’s Surrealist-inspired painting and prints, including his monstrous representations of the Minotaur from the 1930s and the monumental protest painting Guernica from 1937. Jorn witnessed Guernica in person in Paris before it traveled the following year to Denmark. The Danish artists admired the inventive ways Surrealist painting combined abstract and gestural brushwork with biomorphic forms and collage elements suggesting birds, dogs, roosters, fsh, and other animals as well as mythic beasts like the Minotaur. Bille, Ferlov, Mortensen, and painter Hans Øllgaard visited Ernst, Tanguy, and Masson while in Paris in the 1930s to borrow works for their landmark 1937 exhibition Post-Expressionism: Abstract Art, Neoplasticism, Surrealism in Copenhagen.31 They also brought home Ernst’s painting Bonjour, Satanas for a few hundred Danish kroner.32 Its thick paint, vivid colors, biomorphic shapes, and symbolic abstraction of bird and egg forms would have a marked impact on their own painting in the 1940s. Bonjour, Satanas brings together the two approaches of Surrealist animal imagery that inspired the Danish artists: the harmonious side, seen in the protective isolation of the egg shape that defnes the bird family, and the violent or oppositional tone suggested by the jarring colors and the clawed foot that seems to be trampling the innocent white feathers at the bottom of the scene (the “Satanic” title, a reference to a character from Lautréamont, also helps). For the Surrealists, depictions of aggressive, sexual, and violent animal fgures referenced Darwinian evolution, world mythology, and Freudian theory.33 Ernst developed an elaborate personal mythology in his depictions of his alter ego “Loplop, the Bird Superior,” while Masson transformed classical heroes and maidens in violent and debased scenes of splayed and fornicating bodies. In Miró’s case, abstract paintings

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of roosters, fsh, and other creatures were at once transformations of psychosexual symbols and reminders of everyday life in the Spanish countryside, an aspect directly appealing to the populist aesthetic of Cobra. Belgian artist Reinhoud would exhibit his own welded copper roosters and barnyard birds at the frst Cobra exhibition in 1949.34 Although the Cobra group would be highly critical toward postwar Surrealist representational painting, the more abstract Surrealist animal imagery of the 1930s would rematerialize in Cobra’s expressive transformations of mythic and popular images.35 The Danish artists were interested in not only the abstraction of animal imagery in Surrealist painting, but also the philosophical anti-humanism and animalistic themes explored in the journal Documents, edited by dissident Surrealist Georges Bataille. The relation of the Danish Cobra artists to Bataille’s circle of artists, including Andre Masson and Alberto Giacometti, has not been investigated in depth. Documents along with the modern art journal Cahiers d’Art co-sponsored the Linien exhibition of 1937, however, so the Danish artists were certainly aware of it. Bataille’s writing in Documents fercely critiques the idealist aspects of orthodox Surrealist theory under the leadership of Andre Breton. Bataille’s unorthodox anthropological speculations, rejection of classicism and idealism, and celebration of “base materialism” anticipate in certain ways the anti-classical theories of Jorn and the Bachelardian materialism of Dotremont. In the frst issue of Documents, Bataille reproduces the imagery of zoomorphic monsters carved on ancient Gnostic gemstones known as Abraxas stones, including gods with animal heads or serpent limbs. These enigmatic representations, he writes, make it “possible to see the image of this base matter that alone, by its incongruity and by an overwhelming lack of respect, permits the intellect to escape from the constraints of idealism.”36 Bataille’s writings attempt to destroy the binary operation of symbols and “reduce” the human to the animal. Cobra, by contrast, would create a more complex and open-ended imagery to connect the human and the animal. The art of Andre Masson is another overlooked visual source for the Høst artists, who would have seen his work and may have also visited the artist during their time in Paris. They brought home reproductions of Masson’s paintings in Documents, including violent animal and insect “battle” images from the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Wounded Animal (Animal Blessé) and other paintings reproduced in Documents in 1929.37 Carl Einstein’s text on Masson takes a Bataillean tone in dismissing the “mountains of piety” normally expressed in texts on modern painting. He instead considers the “hallucinatory forces” of the imagination as “the most motile, the most deadly thing.”38 He describes the way Masson’s images defy rationalism, replacing causality with a spontaneous disorder that disrupts the logical order of things. Einstein celebrates Masson’s imagery of animal transformation as a “sign of revolt” that frees us from the old idealist ways of thinking. The conscious self is replaced with a visionary hallucination in which “this eclipsed ego, out of the body of the ecstatic, enters an animal, a stone, a plant.”39 The canvas unleashes the very power of “becominganimal” later described by Deleuze and Guattari, as I describe below. The Cobra artists would make no reference, however, to the discussions of religious sacrifce that pervade the writing in Documents. They preferred to ground their images in the physical operations of artistic materials. Nevertheless, the violent anti-humanism of Masson’s wounded animal images anticipates the creaturely counter-humanism of Cobra. Masson’s use of sand and other textures on the surfaces of his wild animal paintings anticipates the later materiality of Cobra art (and Jorn would use tar, sand,

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and other experimental materials in his paintings of the mid-1950s). The imagery of the wounded animal resurfaces in Cobra paintings like Jorn’s Wounded Wild Animal (see Chapter 4 and Plate 19). Years after his initial encounter with Masson’s art in Paris, Jorn directly references the explorations of Surrealism into the darker aspects of human psychosocial life in a particularly savage phase of European history. Inspired by the brutality and directness of Masson’s experimental paintings, Jorn pushes their animality in new directions in dialogue with popular imagery, humor, and kitsch. Jorn was concerned with the social function of images rather than their psychic repercussions.

Living Abstraction in Denmark In occupied Denmark during the war, the former Linien artists joined others now associated with the Høst exhibition society to develop a new investigation of world folk traditions and an artistic approach that became known as “spontaneous abstract” (spontane abstrakte) art. The Helhesten journal, co-founded by Jorn and architect Robert Dahlmann Olson in 1941, united the Høst group around an explicitly antiNazi animal totem. The name Helhesten meant “Hell-Horse” or “Hel’s horse” after the fearful three-legged beast of the Norse goddess of the underworld, Hel. The artists, many of whom like Jorn were communists, considered it an appropriate antiNazi totem, rejecting the neoclassical heroes of Fascist art. The name of the journal and the abstract cover designs produced by the various artists openly defed the Nazi aesthetic, which appropriated Nordic traditions while celebrating exaggerated images of idealized classical fgures, often on horseback. The horse itself, on the other hand, was a common image in historical Scandinavian art, from the bronze horse pulling the famous “Sun Chariot” (Solvogn) from 1400 BCE in the Danish National Museum to the horse-head carvings on the handles of Renaissance-period “mangle-boards” (manglebrædder), decorative boards used to fold cloth, discussed in an article in Cobra.40 The articles on art, poetry, music, literature, flm, and archaeology published in Helhesten from 1941 to 1944 set the precedent for Cobra in positioning art anthropologically, exploring art in the form of popular and often anonymous creative expressions, many of them animal themed, from children’s art to carved bronzes from Mongolia or ancient Scandinavian rock paintings. The editors of Helhesten saw the journal explicitly, as P. V. Glob recalls, as “a magazine for degenerate art.”41 It was founded just a few years after the Nazis rounded up thousands of art works by major avant-garde artists like Kandinsky, Ernst, and Klee for the famous “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Germany. Carl-Henning Pedersen saw the exhibition frsthand in Frankfurt in 1939, on his way back to Denmark at the onset of war. The Germans framed the art works on view as the worst artistic frauds in history by means of a parodic theme-show-like display. Viewers were pushed through quickly along a predetermined path and subjected to recorded messages denouncing the works as not only incompetently painted but also racially impure, utterly foreign to the “great German art” espoused by the regime.42 Pedersen attended the show like many young artists and ordinary visitors at the time, not in order to scoff but to study and appreciate some of his most admired artistic forebears. He would later declare that “All good art in Denmark today is ‘degenerate.’”43 Although the Nazi occupiers of Denmark never censored Helhesten, perhaps considering it a minor irritation amid the greater culture clash they invented in order to justify the war, at least one Danish journalist identifed it explicitly as “Degenerate

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art” (Vanartet kunst), exemplary of “the spiritless nonsense that proliferates under the label ‘abstract art,’ [which] belongs to no homeland.”44 The Helhesten artists would have gladly agreed that their art rejected the idea of a national homeland, in favor of a broader inclusiveness. They even shared the fascist author’s populist skepticism of the term “abstract,” in favor of reaching wider audiences. Pedersen described his new approach as “fantasy art” instead of “abstract,” not only to recognize fantasy as a universal human tendency to re-imagine the world, but also because he sought a term that allied modern art to folk art, non-Western traditions, and the “free creative play of children” in defance of the heroic, classical types celebrated in Nazi art. He argues: As long as we use the word “abstract,” people will think that the artists have invented a new language that the viewers are in no condition to understand. They believe that it is something they have to learn, whereas the whole point of “fantasy art” is that it sets out from something central in people, something which everyone can understand and feel without prior knowledge. Something they themselves have experienced as a child but have forgotten, convinced of the necessity to grow up and follow foolish social traditions.45 In its radical break with tradition, Helhesten explicitly promoted modern art that the Nazis would have considered “degenerate”: simple, colorful, childlike imagery developed spontaneously in a raw, sometimes brutal manner. Pedersen’s Birds in a Landscape of 1944 (Plate 6) features three large, simplifed bird forms dominating a landscape with tiny trees and houses under a dark sun. Painted in loose, fowing brushwork and rich, almost overwhelming jewel tones, the work is defantly modernist in its refusal of conventional subjects, modeling, scale, and perspective (recalling the fantastic art of Cubist painter Marc Chagall).46 It also transforms the birds into monstrous creatures by using synthetic color and adding odd un-birdlike features such as “dinosaur” spines in a manner later typical of Cobra. These birds – one of whom at the upper right appears to be mounting a second one in a particularly animalistic manner – are the protagonists of a seemingly post-apocalyptic scene. Day has become night in an overt protest against the occupation, signifed in the black windows of Pedersen’s houses that may reference the black cloths or shutters with which occupants were forced to cover their windows at night to protect against air raids and detection after curfew. The scene re-imagines the wartime situation through a fantastic lens, allowing an escape, perhaps, but also the means for viewers to craft their own reinterpretation of reality. These are not literal images, but transforming scenes. Pedersen told a later interviewer that I have never in my life painted a particular animal. If I say it’s a bird, it’s only a postulate. Of course, I love looking at birds, but the bird that I paint has nothing in common with the bird that fies in the air […] It is more a concept, like the Phoenix. The bird of life. The fundamental principle of life embodied in a bird.47 As Egill Jacobsen writes, “Fables and myths in visual art are not depicted, but exist as expressions or beings in their own right.”48 The animal image becomes a key to open a new door, a magical process in the sense that it gives physical form to the impossible. Pedersen explains:

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Why is it that some of you populate your pictures with imaginary creatures, people and animals? Because paintings are magical as well, in the new meaning of this word. A human being communicates with others in the language of the senses, thus giving his message a distinctive quality. A magical quality, which catches other people’s attention, is shouting out its presence in mute appeal. Or it makes itself felt as a quiet feeling of peace penetrating the air. Magic is invocation, and although we need invoke neither evil nor good, we are operating with the same powers. The world around us demands to be experienced and for those experiences to be translated into material form.49 Magic is always a matter of perception. It dazzles, enraptures, or inspires critical skepticism, depending on one’s perspective. To bring it into art is to transgress the traditional distance and restraint of classical aesthetics by demanding a response. The drama of innocence and experience is at the heart of Cobra, and relates to the way Danish artists linked together the animal and the childlike. Like earlier modern artists, all the Cobra artists valued the uninhibited spontaneity, inventiveness, and sincerity in the art of very young children. They incorporated the forms of children’s art more directly in their work than any earlier movement.50 The frst avant-garde artists to celebrate children’s art alongside modern experiments were also some of the frst to prioritize animal imagery: the Blue Rider group of German Expressionists, also later dismissed as “degenerate” in Nazi Germany. Wassily Kandinsky’s colorful, expressive brushwork and Paul Klee’s imaginative and childlike imagery left a strong impression on the young artists. It was Jorn’s interest in studying painting with Kandinsky that led him to Paris in 1936, only to fnd that the Russian artist did not have a school. Instead, he enrolled with Léger and, along with his Danish and international colleagues, expanded his extracurricular studies in abstract Surrealism. Klee also produced a plethora of animal and mask imagery that would directly inspire Cobra. The Blue Rider investigated animal imagery as well as children’s art alongside religious art, modernist art, poetry, and modern music in the Blaue Reiter Almanach of 1912. The Høst artists studied this book closely alongside the Surrealist journals. They would similarly promote children’s and folk art along with more anthropological investigations of animal imagery in the pages of Linien, Helhesten, and later Cobra. The faux-naïve directness and raw simplicity of Pedersen’s Birds in a Landscape surpassed even the experimental directness of Expressionism and Surrealism that the artists had grown up admiring. Gone were the Christian images, cabaret scenes, and primitivist statues and masks common in German Expressionist art, but the focus on expressive landscapes, brushwork, intense color, and vibrant composition remained. Gone were the Freudian references of Surrealism, but the interest in tribal, popular, and outsider art remained. The Freudian idea of “automatism” – the development of images outside conscious control – became a more conscious, spontaneous composition. The symbolic abstraction of Høst bridged these two legacies of Surrealism, the psychological and the anthropological. It performed spontaneous riffs on popular images such as animals, symbols consciously known to the artists and related to the wider cultures they investigated. The Helhesten group called their creation of new vital images “mythmaking” in 1941 (the American artists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman similarly declared themselves “mythmakers” in 1943 without knowing of the Danish artists).51 Danish artist Niels Lergaard proclaimed that mythmaking was a creative

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practice directly opposed to the belief in static mythologies, which kept people within the established boundaries of social, religious, and philosophical traditions. Given Helhesten’s anti-Nazi perspective, he was most likely referring in coded terms to the hierarchical ideology of Fascism. Mythmaking, by contrast, took artistic form as the spontaneous and creative adaptation of symbolic motifs traditionally associated with world myth. This approach transformed Surrealist automatism, defned as the liberation of unconscious expression, into a more social and conscious interpretation of cultural imagery. The emphasis on mythic and symbolic imagery raises the question of how the Høst artists related to the Jungian theory of archetypes, developed and publicized around the same time while Carl Jung was in Switzerland. His theories had a direct infuence on the references to animal archetypes by American artists of the 1940s such as Jackson Pollock, who underwent Jungian analysis in 1930–1940 in New York.52 Several Høst artists, beginning with Egill Jacobsen, experienced Freudian psychoanalysis under the frst Danish psychoanalyst, Sigurd Næsgaard, who had published on the theories of Freud as well as Jung in the 1920s and 1930s.53 Jorn, however, dismissed Næsgaard’s interpretations of artwork, some of which appeared in the pages of Helhesten, as crudely sexual.54 By the mid-1940s, many of the Danish artists rejected discussions of the unconscious in favor of folk culture as a source of conscious collective creativity. Moreover, Jung’s association with the Nazi use of myth made his writings anathema to the artists in occupied Copenhagen. Jorn would later clarify his sentiment that Jung was compromised by his support for the Nazis.55 Elsewhere, he elaborates on his break from the Jungian approach, when he describes aesthetics as the opposite of Jung’s psychological investigation of symbolic archetypes. Jorn writes in the 1960s that his understanding of consciousness is best described by the Danish term samvittighed and not bevisthed (in English, conscience, which stems from roots meaning “thinking together with,” not consciousness, meaning awareness in psychoanalytic terms).56 Jorn also critiques Jung’s use of animal symbolism directly for its subordinate relationship to the human hero’s journey. He dismisses Jung, Freud, and Alfred Adler (student of Freud and founder of “individual psychology”), for continuing the old philosophical tradition that praises the herder for killing the lion.57 Jorn preferred the lion to the human hero. The animal symbol, he demonstrates in The Golden Horns book, suggests human attributes defned according to the community’s needs and interests. Animal images reinforce the mutual relationship between humans, animals, and the cycles of nature. These relationships were more fundamental to the Danish artists than the political divisions of national traditions or high versus popular culture, and they defed the Nazi insistence on drawing cultural and racial lines in the sand. The Høst and Helhesten artists were less culturally isolated than their Dutch and Belgian colleagues during the war and better able to explore both Western and nonWestern aesthetic inspirations. Like Picasso and the Surrealists, the Høst artists were fascinated by the vivid and direct presentation of the body and the symbolic patterns of masks in traditional West African and Oceanic art as well as the monumental forms of pre-Columbian art. They investigated a rich global legacy of hybrid human–animal forms at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris when it opened in 1938; the Charles Ratton gallery in Paris where the Surrealists exhibited art and found objects alongside non-Western art around the same time; and the ethnographic collections of the National Museum in Copenhagen during the occupation. In Copenhagen, they could

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also intimately study art from Africa and Oceania at the home of prominent art collector, lawyer, and poet Carl Kjersmeier, a friend of Ferlov’s parents whose collection later became internationally renowned. Kjersmeier reproduced a set of his west African Chiwara antelope headdresses in the Helhesten journal. Notably, he does not use the term “primitive” in the accompanying text. He refers to the Bambara people respectfully as “industrious agriculturalists,” describing the ritual use of the masks in the sowing and harvest festivals. He also praises the fantastic inventiveness of the artists who continually create new abstract forms for the masks.58 The painterly and festive abstract paintings of Høst reference the geometric forms, animal shapes, and staring eyes of some of the masks seen in Kjersmeier’s collection.59 In their conceptualization of what the mask meant, however, they moved beyond the Surrealist focus on the direct contrast of the bizarre, the exotic, and the ritualistic with modern Western culture, and instead sought fundamental parallels among world cultures. Helhesten framed non-Western representations of animal imagery as equally inventive and abstract as the Western avant-garde. It emphasized that in many different global and historical contexts, animal imagery in art functioned to reinforce human relationships, both to each other within a given community and to natural cycles linked to agriculture and the land. The artists deliberately sought out such trans-cultural parallels in the face of the German occupiers’ racist rhetoric of “blood and soil.” The writing in Helhesten expresses an open-ended, in some ways romantic, universalism. The articles seek shared values that link peaceable communities together. Bille writes, for example, that true art cannot be divided between “higher” and “lower” races according to racial prejudice; living art can in fact only be found outside academic traditions. It stems from the free unfolding of one’s feelings, and therefore expresses the “liberation of human nature” (a concept he bases on Rousseau’s Emile).60 This was the greatest difference between Høst and Cobra: while the animal inspirations were in many ways the same for both groups, the Høst group downplayed the brutality of animal life in favor of images of festive human communality and harmony with nature. Jacobsen pioneered the use of the mask motif as a new approach to modern painting: a method of animating abstract forms, which he often showed eating, dancing, or doing other things to introduce social content into abstract art.61 Jacobsen produced his frst mask painting in 1936, inspired by Picasso and Kandinsky more than particular non-Western masks, although he studied those also. His mask pictures had a signifcant impact on his Høst colleagues, transforming representations of the human fgure into a more hybrid and open-ended form. The mask exemplifed what Linien co-founder Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen called “symbolic abstraction,” a way of producing an abstract art with a social content that invites wide-ranging interpretation.62 In Red Masks (Figure 1.3), the mask forms appear two-dimensional and entirely synthetic or invented, fully enmeshed in a fattened Cubist space where the difference between fgure and ground is collapsed; yet they also convey a certain liveliness, appearing caught in the action of eating and/or dancing. The Høst artists celebrated the potential of the mask as a universal form, both symbolic and abstract at the same time. The mask is situated halfway between the internal and the external, the personal and the social, the animal and the human. In the 1940s, Helhesten featured articles on the art of nomadic peoples in prehistoric Scandinavia, in addition to Africa, Greenland, and China, illustrated with masks and abstract animal carvings or paintings. An anthropologist’s article in Helhesten on shaman masks from Greenland describes the masks as images of “fertile fantasy” based

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Figure 1.3 Egill Jacobsen, Rød Maske (Red Masks), 1943. Oil on canvas, 85 × 65 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

on nature.63 The sixth issue of Cobra in April, 1950, would similarly describe masks and other tribal art objects in relation to folk and outsider art. Both Høst and Cobra regarded all forms of creativity excluded from high art institutions as popular art. But while Cobra responded to the renewed presence of offcial art institutions as they were reestablished in each national context after the war, Høst operated in a cultural space of suspension, under a foreign regime that allowed a certain liberty to their investigations despite an atmosphere of constant threat. Also during the German occupation of Denmark, the painter-turned-archaeologist P. V. Glob, co-editor of Helhesten, began working as a curator at the National Museum in Copenhagen. He invited his artist friends there to study ancient Scandinavian, Viking, medieval, and non-Western objects in the collection, many of them featuring animal interlace or animal–human transformations. Jorn’s paintings at the time depict festive scenes of people and animals frolicking together. Mette Nørredam demonstrates that paintings like Jorn’s Toy Picture (Plate 4) make direct reference to displays of African and Oceanic objects in the ethnographic collections.64 At the same time, Jorn and his colleagues became enthralled with early Scandinavian art, which they saw as defying the classical tradition.

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The Høst artists transform the animal imagery in ancient and Viking imagery in their paintings. The rounded looping forms and eyes in Jacobsen’s abstract masks, the golden fgures and animals with decorative patterns of Carl-Henning Pedersen’s Cobra-period paintings, and the lyrical rhythmic imagery of Erik Ortvad all recall metal decorations and animal forms in Scandinavian Iron Age objects.65 Many paintings also recall the ancient Scandinavian painted rock carvings of boats, suns, birds, and other animals known as helleristninger, discussed by Glob in the Helhesten journal. Jacobsen’s composition seems to echo the patterned contours of these ancient animals (Figure 1.4). The Danish artists also reference the fantastic stone carvings and bestial imagery in the kalkmalerier (“chalk paintings”) found on the walls of medieval Scandinavian churches, discussed by Pedersen in Helhesten.66 These historic animal images suggested not just a return to instinctual origins but also a cultural connection to pagan Nordic art that rejected the classical lineage of European art. Jorn considered animal images – like the Hell-Horse itself – totems of specifc communities that had preexisted Christianity for centuries around the world. The Høst artists transformed these animal totems into new scenes of pastoral festivity and, for the most part, harmony. The Dutch and Belgian Cobra artists, on the other hand, produced animal imagery with a bit more bite.

Figure 1.4 Painted rock carvings reproduced in P. V. Glob, “Helleristninger og magi,” Helhesten 1, no. 2 (1941): 61.

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Primal Energy in Amsterdam Like the Danish Høst group, the Dutch Cobra artists drew directly on precedents for animal imagery in many earlier traditions and movements. Cobra’s interest in the animal built not only on Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Scandinavian art, but also ancient Mediterranean and medieval art. Karel Appel studied philosophy as well as Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam in 1942–1943. Between 1943 and 1944, he and Corneille experienced the reality of survival during the occupation as they fed to the countryside to escape being sent to a forced labor camp in Germany. They barely survived, exchanging paintings for “a handful of potatoes, a bit of raw herring, or a couple of slices of sausage.”67 Appel wrote a poem called “The Hunger Winter” (Hongerwinter) about the Dutch famine during the German occupation in 1944–1945. It includes the lines, “I wish I was a bird / not the rabbit I ate / when I was hungry.”68 Like many of the young Cobra artists who lived on the street or on the verge of starvation during and just after the war, Appel experienced a reduction to “bare life” (the term comes from political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, as I will explain) that would leave strong memory traces in his later art – as well as encourage him to live a healthy life. He did not smoke and rarely drank; to the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg he came across as a “huge vegetarian elephant.”69 As a painter Appel was largely self-taught. Rather than the Dutch landscapes and genre paintings emphasized at the Art Academy, his work drew on the precedents of Van Gogh and other Dutch Expressionist artists as well as the School of Paris. In 1943, he came across an infuential French portfolio called Five Painters of Today (Cinq Peintres d’Aujourd’hui), which featured the post-Cubist painters Léon Gischia, Maurice Estève, Édouard Pignon, André Beaudin, and Francisco Borès. Their work exposed Appel to the widespread infuence of Picasso.70 He saw Picasso’s work with his own eyes in an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum later, in 1946. Also at the Stedelijk, he encountered the work of Paul Klee in a widely praised exhibition of 1948. He was also struck the same year by an acclaimed presentation of children’s drawings there. Appel’s colleagues Corneille and Brands already considered Klee one of the most important modern artists for his reworking of childlike approaches, a view the Høst artists shared.71 Jean Dubuffet and outsider art would complete the young Appel’s aesthetic arsenal. Appel encountered Dubuffet’s colorful early work and his revolutionary, radically childlike portraits scratched into the French artist’s unique “thick pastes” (hautes pâtes) at Drouin Gallery on a visit to Paris with Corneille in 1947. They may have also seen the Foyer de l’Art Brut, the collection of outsider art recently established in the basement.72 After Corneille and Appel moved to Paris in 1950, they saw the exhibition of Psychopathological Art at the Sainte-Anne Hospital outside Paris. The show had a major impact on them; both produced versions of the catalog extensively modifed with their own drawings on top of the reproduced artworks.73 Appel frst encountered the Danish artists in 1948, when he met Jorn in Paris and then visited Denmark with Constant and Corneille. Jorn’s series of “Aganaks” seem to have made an especially strong impact, inspiring a whole series of animal paintings by Appel, in a style that fused the spontaneity and rawness of children’s art with complex modernist compositions of overlapping lines punctuated with vivid color and expressionist brushwork. Appel’s early images of people with animals present a simplifed, colorful aesthetic indebted not only to children’s art, Klee, Dubuffet, and School

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of Paris abstraction, but also to longer artistic traditions. They could be read as an avant-garde iteration of classical pastoral scenes of shepherds and animals. The 1951 Composition with Animal fgures (Figure 1.5) conveys Appel’s distinct energetic vitality, through layers of painted lines drawn over sketchlike fgures and foating color planes (inspired in part by Miró’s abstract surrealism). The aesthetic legacy of Klee’s playful, transparent fgures and Dubuffet’s early colorful street scenes feature here; but Klee’s small, introspective daydreams seem to have come back on the attack, with reinforcements, and Dubuffet’s childlike neighbors appear body snatched by unidentifable creatures from another planet. Appel transforms the classical shepherd image – an old metaphor for leadership, whether in the form of the Christian god or the political state – into a provocative scene of staring children and animals.74 A large bird outlined in red at the right seems to dominate the smaller child in the center and the ambiguous fgure to the left. All three seem to be playing without supervision. The Dutch Cobra artists turned the primary colors of De Stijl into primal expressions. Appel’s monumental painting People and Animals was one of three giant paintings exhibited in the landmark 1949 Cobra exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (see cover image). In this painting, a man stands passively at the left contemplating the scene with his hand on the head of a dog, surrounded by livelier, unidentifable animals.75 An owl-like bird stands on the ground next to a large seal-like creature, both of which seem to wave “hello” with wings or paws that resemble hands (perhaps a gesture indebted to Constant’s “War” paintings, which frequently included raised paws or fsts as a political cry). Appel remakes the old pastoral scenarios into packs of monstrous creatures that recall the ancient Metamorphoses of Ovid as well as the shamans and hunting scenes of prehistoric cave painting. The Cobra poet Lucebert would later produce an evocative commentary on the expansive range of his themes:

Figure 1.5 Karel Appel, Composition with Animal Figures, 1951. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 141 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

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“Appel’s zoo, where animals are no more captive than human beings, is – like the rest of his work – a place where anything is possible, a theater of metamorphosis, our invincible prehistory, our joyous apocalypse.”76 The infuence of Kandinsky and Klee was primary for Dutch Cobra as it was for the Danes. Less discussed is the impact of other Blue Rider artists like Franz Marc, renowned for his colorful Cubist-Expressionist animal images. For Marc, animals represented authenticity and spirituality in accord with the German Romantic tradition. A friend of Marc’s, Dutch Blue Rider artist Heinrich Campendonk, taught at the Academy in Amsterdam when Appel and Corneille met there in 1943.77 Like Marc, Campendonk attempted to convey in his art the cosmic identifcation of human and animal in pastoral, mystical, and utopian imagery. Corneille studied printmaking with Campendonk and taught himself to paint, along with Appel, in his free time. While Corneille’s Cobra period imagery is relatively abstract, the romantic ideas of human– animal harmony visible in Campendonk’s work resurface in his later scenes of women and animals from the 1970s onward. Corneille replaces the European forests with fantastic tropical scenes, the deer with birds of paradise, the male fgures with passively seductive women – but the intense jewel-like colors and linear outlines of the Blue Rider artist remain discernible. Marc’s themes of spontaneous expression and romantic harmony with nature continued to drive the art of Corneille, making him one of the most popular of the Cobra artists in the Netherlands. Appel may be equally popular among some audiences, but his early work represents the defant brutalism of Cobra as an avant-garde movement.

Animal Magnetism in Brussels The Belgian artists of Cobra referenced ancient and modern traditions of visionary art in the Low Countries in their animalistic art. Their works rendered homage to the fantastic creatures of Hieronymus Bosch, the bestial fgures and mythological scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the grotesque visions and masked caricatures of 19thcentury Belgian Symbolist James Ensor. Where the monsters of Bosch and Bruegel were painted as Christian allegories of evil, however, Cobra brought the creaturely investigation to a new material, anti-Christian, and anti-humanist dimension inspired by the grotesqueries of Ensor and the Surrealists. Belgian Cobra’s particular blend of historical references, Surrealism, and impious satire is evident in the art of Alechinsky and Reinhoud as well as the writing of Dotremont. In August of 1949, Dotremont organized the second of two Cobra exhibitions in Brussels, “The Object Across the Ages.” It built on Dada and Surrealist precedents in transgressing the sacredness of the gallery space through the display of everyday objects from potatoes to dirty laundry. Alechinsky later referred to the show as “completely antipictorial,” noting that it anticipated later avant-garde experiments in the 1960s from Marcel Broodthaers’s assemblages of mussels to the installations of Arte Povera.78 The experimental nature of this exhibition must have inspired Alechinsky to make perhaps his greatest homage to Surrealism – one that takes form as an animalistic critique of the human image in northern European art: the Jesus Rabbit (Figure 1.6). He assembled this striking fgure out of shells and animal bones set into a metal mandorla made by Reinhoud. Flemish sculptor Reinhoud D’Haese (shortened to Reinhoud in 1960) met Pierre and Micky Alechinsky in 1949 through another

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Figure 1.6 Pierre Alechinsky and Reinhoud, Jésus Lapin (Jesus Rabbit), 1950. Bones and shells assembled by Alechinsky in an oval cup made by Reinhoud, 39 × 25 × 8 cm. Archives Pierre Alechinsky. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

sculptor, Olivier Strebelle, who ran the Ateliers du Marais with Alechinsky. Reinhoud soon established his studio in the courtyard and set to work making his own metal animals. Jesus Rabbit, its splayed arms made of rabbit hip and leg bones and head replaced by a shell, replaces the Christian icon with an animal fetish as grotesque as it is playful. Its blasphemy is worthy of Dadaist Francis Picabia, who famously labeled a stuffed monkey a “portrait” of Cézanne in 1919 and produced a black ink splotch on paper with the hand-lettered title The Blessed Virgin.79 In both cases, the avantgarde artists subverted the authority of Church icons in carnivalesque ways that were potentially offensive to some, hilarious to others, and irreverent above all. Alechinsky and Reinhoud’s assemblage also conveys the fundamental vulnerability of material life on earth, pointing to the animal nature of humanity in all its brute power – but also its fragility. Christian Dotremont’s writings similarly channeled themes of violence and blasphemy explored by the Surrealists into a new, more animal and material, perspective. During the war, among other Surrealist and Existentialist writings, Dotremont read the Symbolist poet Lautréamont – as did many Cobra artists around that time,

60 Human Animals including Appel and Jorn. Lautréamont attempted to overturn the dichotomy of good versus evil by transforming one image into another; his radical revision of value systems complemented the approaches of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, important philosophers for the Surrealists, discovered by the young Dotremont during the war. Lautréamont’s Songs of Maldoror prose poem features an aggressive bestiary of creatures with claws and suckers, birds of prey, sharks and crabs, spiders, octopuses, and vampires, whose dreamlike interactions produce disturbing refections on the mutability and artifciality of human value systems.80 Jorn’s intense discussions with Dotremont as well as Alechinsky must have reinforced their understanding of the signifcance of monster images in the legacy of avant-garde literature, from Symbolism to Surrealism. Dotremont’s Cobra text “The Great Natural Rendez-Vous” directly recalls Bataille’s unorthodox Surrealist defnitions of the “formless” or the “base material” in order to revise existing value systems. In this case, embodied marks of color and intense physicality refuse the traditional idealism and humanism of painting: Between us, the mark [tache] of color appears to me the mark of health. The mark of color breaches the white wall, stars [étoiler means either “stars” or “cracks”] the empty sky, and it is impossible to play with it: it falls under the senses, like a meteorite, even as it comes from very close, it gives to the eye the power of the hand, and it never lies because it is not a sign become object, nor an object become sign, it fgures neither in conversational dictionaries nor in the metaphysical galleries of trompe l’oeil, it is not illusion but mark, it is not drawing but spit. It is terribly indecent, in the grand salon of shit.81 Dotremont references Bataille’s famous description of the “formless” as “something like a spider or spit,” mobilizing animal functions as a counter to human idealism.82 Dotremont’s understanding of the violent and monstrous side of Cobra parallels Jorn’s perspective on the relevance of the creaturely at this moment in history. Dotremont’s caption to a drawing by Corneille that opens the artist’s book Improvisations, a sort of Rorschach experiment where the poet responded to the artist’s images in gouache, reads: “On the Mediterranean the gondola is abruptly shattered by a black beast in one swoop.”83 The simplifed, calligraphic abstraction of the beast’s paw in Corneille’s image recalls Cobra’s typical interests in the childlike and playful – bête in French means either “beastly” or “silly.” The imagery of a destructive beast roaring out of the Mediterranean – the defnitive classical site – recalls Jorn’s persistent jibes against classical aesthetics. Jorn’s writing critiques the classical tradition and its alliance with social and political power as well as humanism. He asserts that “the classical and European tradition has been a long struggle against the animal side of human nature.”84 Dotremont espouses an even more brutal side of the human animal, in response to the outrage of the war compounded by the subsequent economic miracle that seemed to neutralize all political discussion in the 1950s. In a text from 1962, Dotremont writes: A brutishness which destroys and a pre-fabricated cleanliness: the weaknesses of our time are evidently complementary. It is a time which produces historical monsters […] The kicks of History and Formalism: a sad system. A certain kind of art,

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of which Cobra is a part, has refused to play the game, by reaffrming the primary elements of creation. Thus liberty and spontaneity become violence.85 Dotremont frames Cobra’s monstrous imagery in dialectic relation to political history, in other words, as a critique of the monstrousness of recent history. Pierre Alechinsky would celebrate the monstrous in a Cobra print that also emerges directly out of his dialogue with Jorn, a 1951 aquatint called Saint Michael Floored by the Dragon (Figure 1.7). The print was part of a series titled after the Cobra studio he founded in Brussels, “Les Ateliers du Marais.” Alechinsky engraved the etchings on copper in the collective atelier and took them to Lope Opdebeek in Antwerp for printing.86 At the time, he was interested in modern reworkings of traditional imagery, including André Derain’s colorful woodcut illustrations of characters and animals from Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Aesop’s Fables, for which he produced color linocuts in 1946.87 Alechinsky would have discussed these interests with his friend Michel Olyff, a graphic artist who lived and worked in the Ateliers du Marais from 1950 to 1952. Olyff made posters for the group’s exhibitions, including the 1951 show in Liège, and published modern graphic illustrations of fantastic creatures for the 1950 Cobra republication, playfully titled Notes on Zoology by Lewis Carroll.88 This pseudo-scientifc tract, originally written 100 years earlier, discusses mythical creatures like the “pigeon with one wing” who places an ad in the newspaper, asking for help from his missing friend the crane, and the “poissonx,” a fsh who may be lifted out of the water on hooks grown on his back, re-imagined by Olyff in playful Cubist- and Surrealist-inspired woodcuts. With a similar graphic simplicity, Alechinsky’s Saint Michael print is nearly abstract. The artist defnes the Saint and the dragon with simple outlines and surrounds them with a darker-toned aquatint texture suggesting the night. The body of Saint Michael – lying on the ground below the dragon instead of triumphantly above as per the convention dating back to the Middle Ages – is signifed only by a few lines indicating body, heart, sex, and perhaps the knight’s armored helmet. Here, the helmet fails to protect him against the triumphant dragon dancing lightly over his body. The creature appears almost calligraphic, its head under an ascendant star, looping forms suggesting wings and a sword. The schematic simplicity of the image recalls a Chinese character or ideograph; Dotremont and Alechinsky were both inspired by Asian calligraphy at the time. Dotremont appreciated Chinese painting and met some Asian calligraphers through his frst wife, Ai-Li Mian. He investigated the multiple possibilities of interpretation in visual languages in “Signifcation et sinifcation” in Cobra 7. Alechinsky himself would travel to Japan in 1955 and make Calligraphie Japonaise, an important documentary flm about modern Japanese calligraphy that changed the course of his artistic career, inspiring him to paint using Asian brushes on the foor instead of an easel.89 Alechinsky’s 1951 print reverses the age-old theme in Christian art of the heroic knight slaying the monster, described in the Biblical Book of Revelation (Rev 12:17) as an encounter between Saint Michael and the seven-headed dragon representing evil. For Alechinsky as for Jorn, the dragon takes revenge on the human hero. Jorn wrote in his 1947 article, “Apollo or Dionysus,” that the theme of dragon-slaying is nothing but the aristocracy’s substitute of a cult of hero worship for the working class traditions, for example, collective festivals like Carnival that tied their lives to the changing seasons.90 He later stated even more directly, in a passage critiquing the Jungian

Figure 1.7 Pierre Alechinsky, Saint Michel Terrassé par le Dragon (Saint Michael Floored by the Dragon), 1951, from the series Les Ateliers du Marais. Aquatint, 6 × 4 in. Collection Pierre and Micky Alechinsky, Bougival, France. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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collective unconscious and its emphasis on the hero’s journey, that superheroes and dragon-slayers are defenders of power.91 Cobra was frmly on the side of the monsters. Alechinsky’s mature work from the 1960s and later features a complex interplay of central and marginal imagery, animated by the use of what he calls “marginal remarks” (remarques marginales), small supplementary images or visual stories that serve to activate the central scenes. These recall printer’s marks on early printed books and 20th-century comic illustration as well as flm stills. They frst appeared in New York in 1965, after Alechinsky visited collectors Marlène and Jerome Brody in their apartment overlooking Central Park. He transformed their view of the baseball felds and ice rink north of 59th street into a giant grimacing face directly reminiscent of a Cobra creature. He created several drawings of the animalistic landscape in the apartment as preparatory sketches for the monumental painting Central Park (Plate 7). The image became a foundation for his later studies of the interactions between central and marginal imagery. Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote eloquently about the painting in 1987: Pierre Alechinsky turns his head and, saying nothing, paints a rectangle in which he encloses Central Park in New York, in the late afternoon, seen from the window of his closed eyes. The rectangle surrounds the four sides of the park, and is divided into irregular spaces, themselves rectangles, like the boxes in a theater, the cells in a convent or the cages in a zoo. Inside each box swarm bizarre creatures that are somehow vaguely familiar: Are they they or us? Do we look at them, or are they looking at us? Inside the rectangle, Central Park has been transformed into a green, black and golden Cobra […] Alechinsky draws a magnetic rectangle, a trap of lines, a corral of ink: inside there is a fallen beast, two eyes and a twisting rage […]92 Alechinsky made the generic animal image a central totem surrounded by other living creatures who appear to be in a magnetic orbit around it. After Central Park, Alechinsky developed a distinctive visual language of ribbonlike forms in ink or acrylic that animate the paper surface. Their meandering traces suggest half-thoughts and feelings, a collection of semi-formed creatures at the margins of the human, animal, and vegetal worlds. In this animalistic realm, human behavior becomes a strange, humorous object of study. The eyes and masks that featured so strongly in the work of Høst and Cobra reappear here in grimacing faces punctuated by vibrant paint drips. An American reviewer of the 1960s praises his monstrous imagery in no uncertain terms, proclaiming: “What Alechinsky does is to turn man’s half-tormented, halfbemused mind inside out, exorcising, yet joyously expressing, the gremlins that make life imperfect and therefore bearable.”93 Against civilized perfection, his monsters continually move and transform in imaginative fights. Yet the genesis of these creatures is not pure fantasy, but a complex refection on the trans-national heritage of artistic responses to concrete political situations. When asked about his interest in comic imagery in relation to the “marginal remarks” in his paintings, Alechinsky points to medieval woodcuts as well as Picasso’s

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“Dream and Lie of Franco,” a series of 18 etchings accompanied by a poem by the artist, intended to be published as postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican government and sold at the 1937 World’s Fair.94 Picasso’s allegory of Franco as a toreador threatening the Spanish people, symbolized by a bull, prefgured his monumental protest mural Guernica. It inspired Jorn as well to cite the series as an animal inspiration in his essay on “The Human Animal”: “Picasso with his Franco suite, wherein the superhuman, the toreador, the animal killer, becomes ‘the evil’ and the bull ‘the good.’”95 Picasso develops a biting political critique through the heroic abstract creatures in the “Franco suite.” Guernica, with its implacable bull at upper left and the wounded horse that looms over the fallen Greek hero in the center of the composition, also galvanized the artists of Høst and Cobra. In Alechinsky’s work the political implications of imaginative animal imagery remain implicitly present. Most importantly, Alechinsky presents symbolic imagery in continual transformation, thus subject to continual reinterpretation, instead of referencing an authorized reading. His animalistic and monstrous fgures mostly refuse to be pinned to specifc identities, but function to reconnect contemporary sensibility to historical popular culture. Alechinsky’s friend and collaborator Reinhoud would also develop a unique repertoire of semi-abstract monsters after beginning his artistic career at the Cobra Ateliers du Marais. In 1950, he took over the courtyard of the Ateliers for his sculpture studio and animated the space with the sound of hammering as he worked on his own sprightly metal animals. As Dotremont recalls, “All his noise kept all of us awake. Alechinsky would strike one of his paintings with his brush and I would pound the typewriters: weak reprisals.”96 He exhibited abstract birds including a chicken, a goose, and a metal rooster, mounted on a high pole like a weather vane from some modernist farm, in the 1951 Experimental Artists’ exhibition in Liège.97 In the late 1950s, Reinhoud developed the spontaneous, experimental sculpture for which he became known, based on metal sheets hammered into curving forms and hand-welded into fantastic peaked forms, some of them diminutive and others monumental in scale (Figure 1.8). In Good Grief, two fgures crouch as if in animal conversation on top of a lithographic stone – a playful metaphor for an artistic image coming to life. He produced a whole bestiary in leather, bronze, paper, and copper, bird-headed creatures with webbed feet and other odd parts. One critic calls them his “comedie inhumaine.”98 The smaller ones resemble marionettes, as Dotremont notes; these “Flemish souls who play a leading part in the slums of Brussels” suggest popular creatures rather than exotic animals.99 Reinhoud often arranged these “social animals” theatrically gesturing toward each other or toward an audience. Luc de Heusch compares his sculptures to the fantastic creatures of both Bosch and Ensor. “But the sulphurous wounds that mark the articulations of these upsetting copper and brass fgures,” he writes, “owe just as much to zoology, prehistoric fora and football players.”100 Drawing on ancient stories as well as everyday situations, these hybrid human–animal fgures bring the materials of sculpture, hammered and welded by the artist whimsically to life. In a manner typical of Cobra, Reinhoud’s creatures connect the mundane and playful to the fantastical and legendary. They invite a range of interpretations and situate themselves in a broader social environment. Sincere in their goofness, they speak to children as well as adults, non-artists as much as art-world insiders. They are oddball creatures that reject both the alienating language of pure abstraction and the often moralistic language of realism, in favor of the expressive transformation of common

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Figure 1.8 Reinhoud, Good Grief, 1974. Welded copper on lithographic stone base, 41.9 × 60 × 22.9 cm. 16-1/2 × 23-1/2 × 9 in. Private Collection Los Angeles. Photograph by Joshua White. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

images. They point to an image bank of living things – plants, animals, and people – common in the sense of both popular and traditional, shared over time by particular cultures. They reference not only the animal totems of myth but also the lighthearted clichés of popular culture, from astrological symbols to children’s cartoons. They reanimate traditional images and symbols in unexpected ways. In taking the small and the downtrodden as their heroes, they do not so much speak the truth to power – truth, in Cobra terms, is open to interpretation – as reveal the effects of power and inspire playful resistance. By their very unconventionality, they demand creative thinking, continually opening outward to new perspectives.

The Beastly Visions of Jorn and Constant In 1949, the frst year of Cobra activity, Jorn and Constant developed an abstract history painting based on popular animal symbolism, in social allegories that respond both to wartime experiences and the onset of the Cold War. These are some of Cobra’s most profound political engagements with animal imagery. Jorn’s “War Visions” (Krigsvisioner) and related “History Pictures” (Historiebilleder) of 1949 to 1950 foreground a tension between the reality of painterly materials and the diffculty of expressing a subjective reaction to the traumatic scale of recent events including the

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war and occupations, the revelations of the concentration camps, and the threat of total annihilation embodied in the Bomb. The Golden Swine (Figure 1.1) is part of Jorn’s series of “War Visions,” in which he represents the violence of current political struggles in symbolic form. Jorn’s paintings of the same series, Pact of the Predators and The Right of the Eagle I and II of 1949 to 1951 (Plate 8), attempted to embody the Cold War specifcally. The “right of the eagle” dramatically critiques the idea of the “rights of man” – proclaimed worldwide in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme) – by replacing “man” with a violent predator. In the frst version, Jorn applies thick black paint almost like charcoal in a sort of “blackout.” In The Right of the Eagle I, thick black scrawls over a colorful background seem to defne only in rudimentary form a hybrid animal creature.101 This work conveys the diffculty of fnding a new symbolic language able to communicate the political and emotional impact of current events. At the time, Jorn was living in poverty with his wife and three children outside Paris, suffering from malnutrition, about to crash from tuberculosis. So the darkness of the work was partly about a personal crisis – but only partly.102 Jorn and his Cobra colleagues did not believe in Expressionism’s model of an entirely inner subjectivity, but developed what I call an “interpersonal expression” that both relates to momentary social situations and opens a creative conversation with the past. Jorn’s paintings have as much to do with political cartoons as the Expressionist tradition. They respond to the Berlin Blockade, the signing of the NATO agreement, and the start of the Korean War as much as Jorn’s personal traumas. Many Cobra artists used black extensively around this time, including Jean-Michel Atlan and Theo Wolvecamp (see Plate 1 and Figure 5.6) in addition to Jorn and Constant (Plates 8 and 9). Blackened, sometimes scribbled marks seem to threaten to destroy the images themselves, suggesting a broader loss of faith in the potential of symbolic images to convey meaning at all. The dominance of black in Cobra also coincides historically with a turn to black and white imagery in American Abstract Expressionism. This has been read productively as a reference to news imagery, for the same reason that Picasso painted Guernica in black and white.103 The crisis of depicting historical events on canvas accompanied and at times superseded the individual problems of the artists. After the Second World War, painters struggled with the problems of representing history and portraying personal emotional responses to history, both of which seemed insuffcient, ineffective, and outdated given the traumatic magnitude of recent events. In Jorn’s work, this exploration of the limits of presenting emotional affect in painting would culminate in the whiteout of Stalingrad (1956–1972), a monumental, self-conscious statement on the impossibility of history painting after the war.104 The Right of the Eagle II from 1951 exemplifes the way Jorn’s creaturely aesthetics involves a collision between personal expression, politics, and kitsch (Plate 8). A seemingly spontaneous network of thick, scribbled brush strokes develops into an aggressive double-headed monster: once again an eagle, but seemingly in name only, given its multiple heads and prominent sharp teeth. The creature’s body becomes another bestial head, mouth bristling with more fearsome teeth above two gigantic claws that appear to be reaping a bloody harvest. Accompanying this abomination are a schematic black cat with glowing orange eyes and a twisted greenish-white skull, with lively gray eyes. The painting participates in a long tradition of grotesque political imagery from Francisco de Goya to the political cartoons of J. J. Grandville, fltering

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contemporary politics through the subjective register of dreams and nightmares – but knowing all the while that the forms these nightmares take are shaped by the dreamer’s cultural environment. The double-headed eagle, a reference to both German military imagery (the double eagle was a symbol of Prussia) and ancient heraldic signs, became Jorn’s conscious symbol for the division of the postwar world into two Cold War superpowers, cemented by the NATO Pact of 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Jorn described the image in an unsent letter to Picasso: “I tried to create a symbol for the war, an eagle with a double head on a machine of destruction, which leaves no life behind where it advances.”105 Signifcantly, Jorn leaves open the question of which war – past, present, or future – at a time when the atom bomb made the idea of a war to end all wars seem not only possible, but imminent. While Jorn’s playful use of animal symbols recalls popular art and his rhythmic, broken brushwork suggests fnger painting, his imagery was anything but innocent. His satire attacked the changing political situation head on, but through animal images that had been used for centuries to emblematize humanity’s deepest aspirations and most entrenched conficts. Jorn describes his vision of a new popular art in a letter to the Dutch artist Constant in 1950 that is worth quoting at length. It describes his development of the ant-like “aganaks,” images of the human animal that he created as a new form of symbolic social commentary, referencing the fantastic tendencies of late-19th century Symbolist art as well as earlier artistic precedents. He writes to his friend: With Darwinism man has understood his animal character. The conclusion is not yet drawn in art. There are many human beasts in satire and cartoons and popular art. Popular art is always fantastic and symbolic. There is Grandville and Walt Disney and there is us. Often one can describe the struggle between men, the essential with fantastic beasts, simple, primitive, the raw instincts, only by painting an individual situation, a struggle between police and striking workers […]. We must go beyond this individualism in art and arrive at the symbols common to all. That’s what I am working on right now. I work with original cells of life itself, primitive ants. It seems to me that we must reconstruct the whole plant and animal world of Symbolism entirely, the universe and matter very precisely. […] One can arrive at truth only by employing one’s fantasy to the most incredible visions such as those of Bosch and Breughel but in a pictorial language like the ancient Indians, the Vikings, the primitives and not in a Surrealist naturalist language. We must not describe human animals, we must describe ourselves as human animals. There I provide some perspective.106 Jorn and Constant in particular sought during the offcial Cobra years (1948–1951) to create a new art appropriate for contemporary times, using animals to symbolize political situations in playful and accessible images. While no response exists from Constant to Jorn’s letter, the Dutch artist’s related paintings about war similarly present the destructive violence of savage impulses carried out on innocent victims, often by means of vicious animals interacting in particularly human ways. He made a series of paintings called “War” between 1950 and 1951 and the powerful lithographic portfolio “8 × War” in 1951. Many of them show images of human victims, sometimes writhing under a plane that threatens them from the sky. His animal images of brutality are arguably his most powerful representations

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of human violence precisely because they are symbolic. Constant’s animal paintings of 1948 to 1949 anticipate the images of night raids and burning houses, orphaned children and wounded mothers of the “War” series, which, given the dates, may have responded less to the Second World War than to the new wars just beginning in Southeast Asia, Palestine, and Korea. Constant did not just use animal imagery to represent violence, however; he loved animals throughout his life and lived across from the Amsterdam Zoo from 1946 to 1949, so animals convey many different things in his art. His observations of animals led to complex visual refections on human situations. As a child he built a plaster labyrinth for ants, with tunnels leading to sugar and water, pine needles and plant remains, where he could observe their behavior through glass. Trudy van der Horst relates this early interest in the labyrinth to his monumental later project on utopian (or dystopian) urban architecture he called “New Babylon” in the 1960s.107 His interest in animals gives a personal dimension to the political incisiveness of his art. A 1949 painting called Fauna (Figure 1.9) exemplifes his multivalent depiction of animal fgures as an allegory of human affairs. What animals are depicted seems ambiguous at frst due to their vibrant abstract forms and colors. Two beings are painted under a large, almost clownish, Picassoesque sun. One is fying, the other standing or

Figure 1.9 Constant, Fauna, 1949. Oil on linen, 74.9 cm × 85 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

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crouching, in a composition reminiscent of the way children distribute items across the surface of the page, each in its own sector. According to Constant, the picture represents a large blue damselfy at the right and a combed lizard prowling below, based on a terrarium he had as a child. When his uncle gave him the damselfy to add to his menagerie, to Constant’s horror, the lizard immediately swallowed it.108 A touching memory of an early encounter with loss, perhaps; yet the fact that he decided to paint this scene from his childhood in 1949 suggests that it took on new meaning for him in the context of his wartime experiences. Even without Constant’s narrative account to give meaning to the scene, the black head and malevolent glare of the larger animal makes clear its brute power and menace over the rest. Constant attended the drawing course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam a few years earlier than Appel and Corneille, in 1939–1941. He survived the war years in isolation with his wife Matie van Domselaer, the daughter of De Stijl composer Jacob van Domselaer, and their growing family: they married in 1942 and their son Victor was born in 1944 (the same year, Matie’s only brother Jaap van Domselaer was killed while trying to escape from German-occupied Netherlands to the liberated zone). Constant spent his time reading Marx and other philosophers who shaped his political understanding of art, but he painted in isolation because he refused to join the Nazi-run Kunstkammer, the offcial artist’s organization under the occupation. Largely on his own, he experimented with modern painting inspired at frst by Cézanne. After the war, he was soon exposed to a wider range of experimental art, through the cutting-edge exhibitions of Picasso, Klee, and others at the Stedelijk Museum and the new art he saw in Paris, including works by Joan Miró he viewed at Drouin Gallery, where he met Jorn in the Fall of 1946. He moved that same year to the house on Henri Polaklaan across from the Amsterdam zoo, where he walked his dog every day for decades. His artistic interest in animals, then, related to direct observations as well as Picasso, Surrealism, the founding of Refex and Cobra, and his evolving conversations with Jorn. Their dialogue took mainly epistolary form after 1949, when Jorn and Matie van Domselaer fell in love and eloped in Denmark. They exchanged letters between Paris, where Jorn was living with Matie and Constant’s two younger daughters Martha and Olga, and Amsterdam, where Constant took sole care of his son Victor. One of Constant’s animal paintings at the time, The Scapegoat, refers directly to their personal animosity, which remarkably did not seem to have slowed down their artistic exchange on the nature of art, politics, and the human animal.109 In Animals of 1949 (Plate 9), Constant transforms images of animals, suns, wheels, houses, carnival masks, and other traditional motifs into interpersonal expressions that operate in dialogue with the symbols’ popular meanings. The childlike creatures express both the terror of nighttime bombing raids and playful exuberance. They refect a conscious choice to look forward rather than just relive the traumas of the war, even if their colors are bloody, and their staring eyes fairly post-apocalyptic. Christian Dotremont announced in a 1949 catalog essay the Dutch artists’ aims “to proclaim the organic joy of the universe.”110 That joy is never pure or natural in Cobra painting, but always relates to a darker understanding of politics. The fshlike brown forms with fns and faming “tails” in the center of Animals look suggestively like Fat Man and Little Boy, the American missiles dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The white wheel shape on the right-hand form, a common image in Constant’s painting, suggests a connection between ancient and modern technology. Constant appreciated the wheel as an image of both constructive and destructive possibilities

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in Western art. The wheels related to the bicycles he rode around Amsterdam as well as the train wheels he loved to watch from his apartment window as a child.111 They also related directly to the war, when trains became chilling icons of displacement and death. For an artist who went to Jesuit school and got into frequent arguments with the priests, they could also be references to older images of violence, such as the Catherine wheel on which St. Catherine was tortured and martyred, or the “breaking wheels” on which criminals were tortured and left to die, depicted in Brueghel’s famous – and equally apocalyptic – Triumph of Death.112 At the bottom of Animals, an erupting volcano seems to send a faming orange sun/bomb down on a darkened house, again recalling the bombs and blackout curtains of the war. That the spewing lava morphs into the fgure of an owl in the meantime only emphasizes the chaos of the scene. The owl, a traditional image of wisdom, is accompanied by cats and fsh with skeletal tongues or mouths like scars, who seem to bear inscrutable witness to the human tragedy. Constant’s childlike painting methods recall the vivid, joyful colors and naïve forms of children’s art and its reinterpretation by modern artists like Arp, Miró, and Klee. Yet he and Jorn did not simply embrace earlier notions of the “primitive” or a primitivist “style.” Constant’s two-dimensional forms may look savage, but they cannot fetishize cultural others because no specifc subject is more than suggested in the visual fux of the painting. They celebrate children’s art, popular traditions, and political cartoons as much as avant-garde and non-Western art. These art forms were viewed as a political critique allied to the traditions of modernism that interested the artists most, from the Romanticism of Goya to Surrealism’s complex political engagements, and, perhaps most memorably, their experience of seeing Picasso’s Guernica. The 1937 anti-Fascist mural that toured Europe and the U.S. in 1938 features prominent animal imagery in stark black and white colors to convey its powerful message against political violence. Constant’s 1948 painting Entrapped Bird also signifes violence through the reduction to black and white punctuated by strategic bursts of color.113 There, Constant directly applied the paint in rough bars scribbled back and forth across the face of a large black bird-man, disfguring him in a disturbing depiction of a political prisoner. The bird in Constant’s “War” paintings is a direct reference to the Dove of Peace designed by Picasso as an emblem for the World Congress of Peace in Paris, 1949. That same year, Dotremont wrote a text for a related peace conference in Belgium co-signed by Pierre Alechinsky, Paul Havrenne, and Joseph Noiret as the Communist Delegation to the Belgian Union for the Defense of Peace, accompanied by a brochure featuring Picasso’s poster image. He writes that the assembled artists and writers declare that war cannot be a solution to any problems the world is facing, because “humanity is an ensemble.”114 A relic of an early moment when Dotremont’s Revolutionary Surrealist Group hoped to reconcile with the Communist Party, the idealism of the statement is belied by the animalistic complexity of the art work produced by Cobra artists at the time. Corneille, for example, writes in a letter to Constant in 1949 that “The doves of Picasso on the walls of Paris are […] a little too shy – they should be warrior doves to harass the passerby, no longer leaving him in peace in order to get peace.”115 In Constant’s Entrapped Bird, the dove appears violently confned, but at the same time almost dissolves into abstraction. Constant pays tribute to Picasso’s political images, but also recognizes the vulnerability of any claim for peace. His brutal image of the trapped dove is echoed by the woodcuts he produced of a dove under attack by a black hand in his “View of the Dove” portfolio of 1952.116 Such images suggest a skepticism

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toward Picasso’s postwar alliance with Stalin and its possibilities for peace. Constant’s childlike images combined with his brutal subjects and expressive, almost reckless handling of paint refuse to allow the observer to rest. Many of Cobra’s images are hybrid human–animal fgures, appearing monstrous because they do not ft into existing categories. This art does not dwell on esoteric symbols associated with classical or Christian civilization, but riffs on common imagery. Instead of the privileged perspective of the visionary artist, the work presents a new take on old imagery, in a unique material form. Deceptively simple images suggest diverse readings. The animal images often foreground an energetic resistance to domination: the dragon, rather than Saint George. At the same time, the artists’ raw or brutal methods present the material world and the organic manifestations of the anonymous body, rather than the humanist idea of expressing a person’s unique inner self. The animal motif thus relates, on the one hand, to popular images developed in specifc communities over time (including in the European avant-garde art that inspired Cobra), and on the other, to material and bodily experience, whether banal or resulting from political violence.

Becoming Animal One of the most important meanings of the animal image, whether in the newspaper cartoon, the animated flm, or experimental art movements like Cobra, is a political critique. Cobra recognized the way political regimes – above all totalitarian ones but also liberal ones – dehumanize their subjects by taking away their fundamental freedoms of speech, movement, and other abilities codifed by the UN in December, 1948 (one month after Cobra’s formation) as “universal human rights.”117 The movement participates in a larger philosophical interest in the “creaturely,” an early 20th-century idea described by Walter Benjamin and others to indicate the ways human life approaches the animal when subjected to political oppression. At the same time, however, Cobra’s interest in humor and play links it perhaps more closely to the transformative idea of “becoming-animal” described by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The idea of the creaturely in critical theory is related to philosopher Michel Foucault’s description of “biopolitics,” meaning the way in which power uses the body as its primary site of inscription to organize populations by controlling birth rates and numerous aspects of physical and mental health.118 The institutions set up to organize society, in Foucault’s view, end up exerting control over it, sometimes violently (as in his paradigmatic examples of the prison and the mental institution). The turn to the “creaturely” in discussions indebted to Foucault’s theory relates to the way modern nations treated their citizens against the background of war and violence in the 20th century. As Eric Santner describes, “creaturely life” is a product of people’s exposure to a traumatic dimension of political power and social bonds whose structures have undergone radical transformations in modernity. The ‘essential disruption’ that renders man ‘creaturely’ [has] a distinctly political – or better, biopolitical – aspect; it names the threshold where life becomes a matter of politics and politics comes to inform the very matter and materiality of life.119 Franz Kafka’s writings are exemplary of this sensibility, “registered as a chronic state of agitation and disorientation, a perpetual state of exception/emergency in which the

72 Human Animals boundaries of the law become undecidable.”120 When Josef K. cries out “like a dog” at the moment of his execution at the end of Kafka’s novel The Trial, for example, the phrase refers not only to the inhumanity of his death but also the larger, seemingly meaningless and unjustifed political structures that render him “creaturely” throughout the story. Gregor Samsa’s more well-known, equally absurd transformation into a “monstrous verminous bug” in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis similarly reveals the role of the family as a microcosm of the larger inhumanity of a rigid social order. Theodor Adorno describes the way that, “instead of human dignity, the supreme bourgeois concept, there emerges in [Kafka’s writing] the salutary recollection of the similarity between man and animal.”121 Jorn echoes these assessments in beginning his essay on “The Human Animal” with a description of Kafka – yet for Jorn, what has been overlooked in the pessimistic readings of Kafka is the crucial element of Kafka’s sense of humor.122 It is this element that ultimately sets Cobra apart from the discussion of the creaturely. The creaturely, linked by Walter Benjamin to a posture of melancholy – to bodies bent over, cringing, and gazing down at the earth – is a transition from the human to a more passive and victimized state. This passage from human to animal is signifed in the term’s derivation from the Latin term creare, so that the creatura denotes something in the process of being created by the arbitrary exercise of absolute power.123 As a response, Cobra re-imagines the creaturely as something in the continual process of creation. The Cobra creature may have been created by the subjugation of one creature under another, but it also appears unfnished, in a process of change. Its brutishness makes it appear empowered to witness the injustice of an impermanent social situation, and perhaps to fght back. Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently expanded upon the idea of the creaturely in his infuential theory of “bare life.”124 This term describes the way political power takes absolute control over subject’s lives under exceptional situations such as wartime – situations that are often extended indefnitely, as in the 21st-century “war on terror.” This form of absolute sovereignty justifes the dehumanization of certain people marked as “outsiders,” reducing humanity to absolutely minimal, creaturely conditions of existence in situations such as concentration camps, the paradigm of bare life in a state of exception from the supposedly normal system of politics. Both “creaturely life” and “bare life” are biting critiques of the inhumanity of political developments from the rise of Fascism to the refugee camps of the 21st century. In fact, at least three Cobra members were interned in camps during the war: Shinkichi Tajiri as a Japanese-American in the U.S., Serge Vandercam in a German labor camp in Poland, and Ernest Mancoba as a South African (and therefore a citizen of Britain) in France. A fourth, the Jewish artist Jean-Michel Atlan, captured along with his wife as part of the anti-Fascist Resistance in Paris in 1942, convinced the government of occupied Paris that he was psychologically unstable in order to be confned in a mental hospital and thus avoid execution. Notably, these artists were less interested in animal imagery than recapturing a minoritarian vision of humanity, as later chapters will describe. The turn toward the animal occurred among artists less directly impacted by political manifestations of “bare life.” Their works speak directly against the human cruelty of the Second World War that all the Cobra artists either witnessed or experienced frsthand. They also respond to the implacable possibility of even greater, nearly unimaginable cruelty in the threat of nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War. Some Cobra art and poetry also contests the dehumanization of the colonial wars of independence.

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Hal Foster describes the Cobra movement in precisely this political context, taking its animal obsessions seriously as cogent cultural critique in the company of the great theorists of the 20th century, from Benjamin to Agamben. He writes in “Creaturely Cobra” that Karel Appel’s animal fgures express “a damaged past as much as a transformed future”; and Constant’s formulation of painting as “an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these” is a “cipher of the confused aftermath of the war.”125 Against the common characterization of Cobra as naively primitivist, advocating a return to innocent animal states, Foster observes that “this becoming-animal of the human in Cobra is no simple recovery of a lost nature, for it also attests to the denaturalization produced by the war and the Holocaust.”126 The creaturely in Cobra, then, is a postwar equivalent to Kafka’s prewar depictions of the Western subject as an entity subjected to the extremes of inhumanity at the heart of human civilization. At the same time, the Cobra subject is potentially resistant in its very untameability. There is a cringing and passive aspect to the theories of the “creaturely” discussed by Foster that miss something crucial, something vibrant and transformative, within Cobra – something exhilarating, animated by its own creative agency. This aspect is more along the lines of the theory of “becoming-animal” described by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. “Becoming-animal” involves a process of moving out of existing categories of identity into transformative experience, without ever “reaching” any fnal destination. While Deleuze and Guattari describe several parallel processes including “becoming-woman” and “becoming-child,” there is no such thing as “becoming-man” because “man” is the invisible dominant perspective, subject to critique from the margins. According to Deleuze and Guattari: There is no becoming-man because […] man consitutes the majority, or rather the standard on which the majority is based: white, male, adult, “rational,” etc., in short, the average European, the subject of enunciation.127 To become animal, then, is to relinquish and/or attack the privilege of the adult, male, white, heterosexual, by all accounts dominant subject position associated with traditional humanist ideas of authority, including masculine control, racial superiority, and class privilege. It is a movement without end from a “majority” toward a “minority” position, in sympathy with the marginalized and oppressed, against the dominant assumptions of the mainstream. The fact that the most animalistic Cobra artists were those in these dominant subject positions explains some of their motivations in taking up creaturely images in the frst place. Later chapters will address art works by female artists and artists of color in Cobra who chose not to engage such imagery, as they worked from subjective positions that were already marginalized. Their minoritarian positions played out in other ways, often linked precisely to a revised form of humanism – because the “human” or the “artist” were subject positions they had to claim for themselves. As Helle Brøns notes, for both Jorn and Deleuze and Guattari it is “not a question of outwardly […] resembling the animal, but rather of fnding a closeness with the animal, of letting oneself dissolve into the animal in a non-subjective, non-mastering, nomadic state.”128 In other words, while Cobra art works might seem to represent animals in some rudimentary or childlike way, they point rather to an opening up of human identity toward the animal, as a suppressed reality related to the childlike, the popular, the feminine or androgynous, and other outsider states.129 These categories

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reject the classic humanist idea of individual expression, which depends on conceiving the human as separate or above the other terms. Cobra’s monstrous animal–human hybrids signify a movement between or among various categories of identity (animal and human, male and female, master and servant, Danish and French, and so on). More fundamentally, the images move between self and other, the individual and the social. In their imaginative text A Thousand Plateaus – a book that resists conventional ideas of critical theory founded on binary thinking in favor of a complex experiment in multiplicity and “rhizomatic” structures of interconnection – Deleuze and Guattari describe the human animal not as a concept, but rather a process or a perspective. “Suppose a painter ‘represents’ a bird,” they write. “This is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color.”130 Even if written philosophically and not in reference to any specifc art movement, few lines have been more apt in expressing the way Cobra’s art focuses on the shifting meanings of the image as it takes material form in a specifc social context. The artistic transformation of the image liberates us from our existing assumptions about what the image means – and thus, about what it means to be human. Becoming-animal is neither a literal metamorphosis nor an escapist fantasy, but rather the forging of a connection between the human and the animal, vegetable, material, and social worlds.

Material Evolution Cobra “monsters” are monstrous not because they suggest plausible organisms, but rather because they are emerging, not yet fully formed, out of their inorganic material. They reveal a fundamental transformation of material, and thus reinforce a human connection to the inorganic as well as the organic world. This recognition of the relatedness of human, animal, organic, and inorganic is also a leitmotif of “new materialist” theories. New materialism similarly addresses Cobra’s interest in fostering open-ended connections among human, animal, plant, and non-living entities. In the words of Rosa Braidotti, it combines the “phenomenological theory of embodiment with Marxist – and later on poststructuralist – re-elaborations of the complex intersection between bodies and power.”131 While the range of approaches in new materialism is beyond the scope of this book, its interests are anticipated in Cobra. Cobra art works overlay the physical and the social world by means of symbolic forms that are clearly human-made. Its forms and materials are both personal and culturally specifc, pointing to the insight developed in historical materialism and new materialism alike that nature cannot be conceived outside culture, and is shaped by ongoing social and technological evolution.132 Cobra re-imagines the animal as something in a continual process of creation, seemingly creating itself out of the raw materials of art, and transforming from one creature to another before our eyes. The animal is not a traditional symbol, as in familiar heraldic or popular images that stand for one idea at a time, although Cobra made extensive use of those symbols. The Cobra animal is rather a symbol of possibility that points toward something new, a dynamic potential not yet realized – or one it would be dangerous to overlook. As a result of the Second World War, European culture seemed to have fnally grown up, thanks to a series of tragedies particularly human in their utter premeditation and their reprehensible application of technology.

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All the more important, then, to reconnect with the fundamentals of human–animal existence: material experience, sociability, struggle, and pleasure, above all through spontaneity, creativity, and play.

Notes 1 See Wengrow, The Origins of Monsters, 1. 2 The references to totemism in this text maintain the anthropological breadth that characterized the Cobra interest in animal “totems.” As symbols of human society, they could in varying contexts be either playful, satirical, political, or violent. As Lévi-Strauss argues in his 1962 book on the topic, theories of totemism are so general that they refect the interests of the anthropologist more than the cultures under study. LéviStrauss, Totemism, 10. Jorn later references Lévi-Strauss’s observation in Totemism that Christianity demanded a discontinuity between the animal and the human, a situation that Jorn believed had a negative impact on society and fostered inequality. Jorn, “Det dyriske menneske,” 13–18. 3 Jorn, Guldhorn og Lykkehjul, opening section on “Tegn, symboler, emblemer, totems, heraldik og attributter,” n.p. 4 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, sections XXIII and XXIV. See also Thomas E. Wartenberg, “’Species-Being’ and ‘Human Nature’ in Marx,” 77–95. 5 Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 56. 6 Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, 52; Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems. 7 Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 56. 8 Malraux, The Voices of Silence. 9 Italics in original. Jorn, “Apollon eller Dionysus,” 254. 10 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156–7. 11 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 234. 12 Ibid., 179. 13 Ibid., 457. 14 Ibid., 475. 15 Ibid., 297. 16 As Dipesh Chakrabarty describes, “provincializing Europe” is an ongoing process of reevaluating the assumption of Europe’s centrality in world history and taking seriously the values of other cultural traditions. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 17 Cesaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 7–11. 18 See the discussion of the Watts rebellion and the Situationist analysis of the colonization of everyday life in Stracey, Constructed Situations. 19 Cesaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 78. 20 See Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris. 21 For a philosophical overview, see Lippit, Electric Animal. 22 Bille, “Omkring Arne Sørensen,” 11. 23 Armengaud, Bestiaire Cobra, 24. 24 Constant, “Cultuur en contra-cultuur,” n.p. 25 The book built directly on numerous 20th-century precedents for the picture book, from Surrealist artist’s books to Danish writer Rudolph Broby-Johansen’s pictorial compendium Hverdagskunst-Verdenskunst. 26 Jorn, Guldhorn og Lykkehjul, opening section, n.p. 27 Atkins, Jorn in Scandinavia, 73. 28 Foster, “Creaturely Cobra,” 14. 29 See, for example, Brassaï’s famous 1944–1945 image of the double Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of General de Gaulle’s Free France during the war, emerging almost magically on a Parisian wall out of the black paint presumably applied by the German occupiers to cover it. Brassaï, Graffti, Plate 6. 30 Jorn, Held og hasard, 114. 31 Efter-expressionisme. Accounts of this period include Bille, Breve fra Paris, 20; and Jespersen, De Abstrakte, 52–8.

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32 Max Ernst, Bonjour, Satanas, 1928, oil on canvas, 92.4 × 73.6 cm, KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg. 33 See Strom, The Animal Surreal. 34 Draguet and Adriaens-Pannier, eds., Cobra, 230–1. See also Weitering, et al., Miró and Cobra. 35 Jorn used Breton’s own term, “dream photography,” to dismiss the representational painting of artists like Dalí and Ernst. Jorn, “Abstrakt kunstnerkoloni i Silkeborg.” 36 Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” originally in Documents 1 (1930), 1–8, in Visions of Excess, 51; quoted in Miller and Rapacki, “Painting in Tongues,” 212. 37 Einstein, “André Masson,” 104. 38 Ibid., 96. 39 Ibid., 102. 40 Rasmussen, “Danske Manglebrædder,” 4. The centrality of the horse in Scandinavian tradition is discussed in Shield, “The War Horses,” 20. 41 Interview with Peter Shield, quoted in Shield, “Spontaneous Abstraction in Denmark,” 116. 42 See Barron, et al., Degenerate Art. 43 Pedersen, “Billedkunsten i Dag,” 7. 44 Quoted in Jespersen, De Abstrakte, 129. 45 Pedersen, “Astrake kunst eller fantasi kunst,” 92, translated in Greaves, War Horses, 65. 46 See Gether, et al., Carl-Henning Pedersen and Marc Chagall. 47 Pedersen, paraphrased in Lambert, Carl-Henning Pedersen, 74. 48 Jacobsen, “Introduction til Carl Henning Pedersens billeder,” 73. 49 Pedersen, “Abstrakt kunst eller fantasikunst,” 93, translated in Greaves, War Horses, 65–6. 50 See Fineberg, The Innocent Eye. 51 Lergaard, “Myten,” 65. For a discussion of the American “mythmakers,” see Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism. 52 Pollock’s paintings of she-wolves and other animal archetypes related directly to his Jungian therapy. See Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 120–202. 53 See Næsgaard, Psykoanalyse, seksualitet og intelligens and Psychoanalyse. Other intellectuals in the Helhesten circle, like feminist writer Elsa Gress, read Jung as well, indicating a general knowledge of his theories. Gress, Fuglefri og fremmed, 138. 54 Næsgaard, “Følelser eller drifter”; Næsgaard, “Fra surrealisme til abstrakt kunst.” Jorn drafted his opinions in a text where he mentions Næsgaard in reference to the misunderstandings of psychologists looking at art. Jorn, “Psychoanalysen og vor tids kunst.” 55 Jorn, “Johannes Holbek og nutidens kunstopfattelse,” 14. 56 Jorn, Nordens teoretiske æstetik, 201. 57 Jorn, “Drapa og titoli,” 99. 58 Kjersmeier, “Bambara,” Helhesten 2, no. 2–3 (1943), 35. 59 Kjersmeier, Negerskulptur. See also the Bakwele mask from Congo owned by Kjersmeier, reproduced in Nørredam, “Primitivisme i dansk kunst,” 17. 60 Bille, “Om nutidens grundlag,” 11. 61 See Mussari, “Farvens Sprog.” 62 Bjerke Petersen, Symboler i abstrakt kunst. 63 Johansen, “Østgrønlandske aandemanermasker,” 77. 64 Nørredam, “Primitivisme i dansk kunst,” 26. 65 See, for example, Jorn, Magnus, and Franceschi, Bird, Beast and Man, ill. 33–4: “Relief brooch of silver gilt with niello. Style I. Votive/hoard fnd. 5th century AD. Gummersmark, Bjæverskov Parish and District, Præstø County. NM C 12524,” an object in the National Museum collection, Copenhagen. 66 Pedersen, “Middelalderens Kalkmalerier.” 67 Appel, “Appel’s Circus,” trans. Kenneth White, quoted in Eleanor Flomenhaft, “Karel Appel,” 1985, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 243. 68 Appel, “The Hunger Winter,” quoted in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 385. 69 Ginsberg, “Playing with Appel,” in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 308. 70 Kaiser, Karel Appel: Retrospective, 191–2.

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71 Katja Weitering, “The Dutch Cobra Artists and Paul Klee,” in Klee and Baumgartner, Klee and Cobra, 60–1. 72 According to Stokvis, they visited Drouin gallery in 1947 after Dubuffet’s exhibition of portraits came down, so they viewed his works in storage, and they did not see Foyer de l’Art Brut at that time. Stokvis, Cobra, 78. 73 Appel, Psychopathological Notebook. The unpublished notebook modifed by Corneille was discovered by Brenda Zwart. See Zwart, “De invloed van kunst.” 74 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 184. See the discussion of the shepherd as a wanderer who strays rather than guides in Romantic poetry in Gurton-Wachter, Watchwords, 22–3. 75 See Stokvis, Cobra, 151. 76 Quoted in Lambert, Karel Appel: Works on Paper, 78. 77 The connection between Campendonk and Appel is made in Selz, New Images of Man, 17. 78 Alechinsky, “Cobra dans le retroviseur,” 23. 79 Francis Picabia, Natures Mortes; Portrait de Cézanne, Portrait de Renoir, Portrait de Rembrandt, 1920, toy monkey and oil on cardboard, dimensions and whereabouts unknown, reproduced in Cannibale (Paris) 1, April 25, 1920; Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vierge (The Blessed Virgin), 1920, ink and graphite on paper, 33 × 24 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. 80 Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems. 81 Dotremont, “Le grand rendez-vous naturel,” 3–4. 82 Bataille, “Formless,” in Visions of Excess, 31. 83 Christian Dotremont and Corneille, Improvisation, original word-drawings 1949. Artist’s book, facsimile printed by Jan Nieuwenhuizen Segaar (Amsterdam, 1990). NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; Cobra Collection; gift of Golda and Meyer Marks. 84 Jorn, Magi og de skønne kunster, 130. 85 Dotremont, “Cobra,” translated in Shield, Carl-Henning Pedersen, 163. 86 Dominique Durinckx, “Cobra and Cie. Lithographs and Prints,” in Draguet and AdriaensPannier, eds., Cobra, 278. 87 Abadie, Alechinsky, 154. 88 Carroll, Notes de Zoologie, with four woodcuts by Michel Olyff (1950). The text was an excerpt from Carroll’s The Rectory Umbrella, compiled when he was a teenager in 1849–1850. 89 See Karen Kurczynski, “Poems Without Words: East–West Encounters in Postwar Painting,” in Friis Herbsleb and Kurczynski, eds., Expo Jorn, 141–7. 90 Asger Jorn, “Apollon eller Dionysus,” 254. 91 Asger Jorn, “Det dyriske menneske,” 16. 92 Octavio Paz, “Central Park,” in Alechinsky, Pierre Alechinsky: Margin and Center, 10. 93 “The Gremlinologist,” 88. 94 Pierre Alechinsky and Michael Gibson, “Bordering on Something Central,” in Alechinsky, Pierre Alechinsky: Margin and Center, 27. 95 Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 57. 96 Dotremont, “Reinhoud,” n.p. 97 See Draguet and Adriaens-Pannier, eds., Cobra, 230–1. 98 Baudson, “Une rétrospective Reinhoud,” 14. 99 Dotremont, “Reinhoud,” n.p. 100 de Heusch, “Fatherland, mother tongues,” n.p. 101 Asger Jorn, Le droit de l’aigle I, 1950, oil on hardboard, 122.5 × 124 cm, KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg. 102 Atkins reads the paintings as expressions of personal crisis in Jorn in Scandinavia, 85. 103 Levin, “The Response to Picasso’s Guernica in New York.” 104 On Stalingrad, see Kurczynski, “No Man’s Land.” 105 Jorn, letter to Picasso (original in French), Museum Jorn Archives, quoted in Andersen, Asger Jorn: en biograf, vol. 1, 199. 106 Jorn, letter to Constant, Constant Archives, Jorn letter number 22, RKD. 107 van der Horst, Constant: De Late Periode, 30. 108 Ibid., 30.

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109 Interview with Trudy Nieuwenhuys-Van der Horst, Utrecht, December 11, 2018. Constant, Zondebok, 1949, oil on canvas, 92.11 × 75 cm, Collection Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany, image online at https://stichtingconstant.nl/work/zondebok (accessed July 11, 2019). 110 Christian Dotremont, “Par la grande porte,” n.p. 111 Interview with Trudy Nieuwenhuys-Van der Horst, Utrecht, December 11, 2018. 112 Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562–1563, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid. 113 Constant, Verstrikte vogel (Entrapped Bird), 1948. Oil on canvas, Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. 114 Christian Dotremont, manuscript, 1949, AML, dossier CDDA 00100/1949/001/01. 115 Corneille, letter to Constant, Paris, 1949, RKD, document 0095.239. 116 Constant, Het uitzicht van de duif, portfolio of 9 woodcuts (Amsterdam: Édition Galerie le Canard, 1952), image online at https://stichtingconstant.nl/exhibition/werk-van-consta nt (accessed July 11, 2019). 117 United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, published in Paris on December 10, 1948. 118 Michel Foucault frst used the term in his History of Sexuality, vol. 1, and defned it further in “17 March, 1976,” 239–63. 119 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 12. 120 Ibid., 21. 121 Adorno, Prisms, 269. 122 Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 55. 123 Julia Lupton, “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 1 (spring, 2000), 1, cited in Santner, On Creaturely Life, 28. 124 Agamben, Homo Sacer. 125 Foster, “Creaturely Cobra,” 7. 126 Ibid., 8. 127 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292. 128 Brøns, “Maskulin standhaftighed,” 110. 129 Richard Miller’s discussion of the “becoming-animal” in Cobra relates it also to jazz and popular music, other marginalized expressions equally appreciated by the artists. Miller, Cobra, 85. 130 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 304. 131 “The Notion of the univocity of Being or single matter positions difference as a verb or process of becoming at the heart of the matter: Interview with Rosi Braidotti,” in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, eds., New Materialism. While the contemporary new materialist approach (at least in the work of Braidotti and Karen Barad) is characterized by its emphasis on process, situated knowledge, vitalism, desire, and affrmation, as is Cobra, it goes beyond Cobra in its post-humanist perspective, and its explicitly feminist project makes Cobra’s lack of attention to gender politics evident. 132 On this theme in historical materialism, see Williams, “Ideas of Nature.” On new materialism, see Coole and Frost, eds., New Materialisms.

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The series of peintures-mots (word-paintings) that Jorn and Dotremont produced in Brussels in 1948 developed directly out of the experimental practices of Surrealism. The word-paintings’ neatly legible cursive texts include I Rise, You Rise, We Dream (See Plate 5) and There Are More Things in the Earth of a Painting than in the Heaven of Aesthetic Theory (Plate 10). They directly recall the poetic titles invented by Paul Éluard for Joan Miró’s paintings and written by the artist in an elaborate decorative script on their surfaces.1 Whereas Éluard came up with his titles after the paintings were already done, however, the Cobra word-paintings were generally produced on the spot, by a poet and painter working together. They present a unique “interpersonal” form of spontaneous expression produced collectively in a social setting. They point, therefore, to a particular understanding of identity as something that develops in a conscious dialogue with the world, a dialogue that shifts with each passing moment. Some of the word-paintings, such as I Rise, You Rise, We Dream, suggest typically Surrealist meanings, in this case the celebration of the dream as an unconscious state. For the Cobra artists, however, spontaneity meant the artist’s conscious interaction with a social and physical context. “I rise, you rise, we dream” is a social call to action on a subtle level, not a strident political demand but a suggestion of collective experiences to come. In this case, the “word-painting” expresses not an individual dream but a social dream, and a moment of shared friendship. The defning feature of French Surrealist creativity was the practice of automatism, whether in writing, drawing, or other forms of creative production. The Surrealists attempted automatism in various ways, trying everything from hypnosis to drawing in the dark. Dreams were a primary inspiration; so were magic and esoterica, legends and folktales, social and sexual deviance, and jokes. Automatism was supposed to physically enact the liberation of the unconscious, according to André Breton’s defnition in the 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto”: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.2 Surrealism rejected both conventional aesthetics and morality – especially Christian morality. It pioneered a multitude of new techniques of personal and collective expression and expanded in the 1930s to multiple international contexts. It set traditional artistic media alongside interdisciplinary experiments, found objects, photography,

80 Surrealism into Cobra flm, and ethnographic explorations. Cobra continued these experiments, emphasizing the collectivism of artists linked to the communist movement that helped organize the resistance against Fascism across Europe during the war. Cobra developed the idea that spontaneity was more unpredictable and interactive than automatism. “Spontaneity is our weapon,” Dotremont writes. “It is the only one we have against formalism.”3 Dotremont opposed the spontaneous experiment to the automatic method, which he later called “mechanistic.”4 Instead of expressing an individual unconscious, the spontaneous work demonstrated material interaction among subjects in a particular physical and cultural environment. The largest of the word-paintings, There Are More Things in the Earth of a Painting than in the Heaven of Aesthetic Theory, emphasizes its abstract materiality by pushing the cursive text to the outer edges of the picture. The text was formulated by Dotremont after a line by Shakespeare and written in blue paint by Jorn. Dotremont adapts Hamlet’s admonishment to Horatio in Hamlet – “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”5 Layered on Shakespeare’s celebration of life over academic thought, Dotremont and Jorn make the statement a more specifc materialist critique of postwar art criticism. Its presence adds a layer of interpretation within the work itself, refusing to allow the image to speak “purely” on its own in a formalist interpretation. The image consists of four abstract fgures in earthy colors drawn by Jorn, based on a smaller composition Jorn painted on a trip to Djerba, Tunisia, in 1947.6 The lines morph from vegetal forms into faces, connected by curving lines looming out of a fowing linear network. The “faces” are defned by loose, gestural forms, developed spontaneously but colored roughly, rejecting any overt virtuosity or calligraphic form. Jorn had by this time developed a unique, heterogeneous fusion of his early artistic infuences: the faux-naïveté of Klee, the bodily distortions of Picasso, the expressive brushwork of early Kandinsky, the symbolic abstractions of Ernst, the menacing abstractions of Miró, the vegetal forms of Jugendstil decoration, and the biomorphic imagery of Munch. His composition relates visually to the fuidity of Surrealist automatic drawing, but it comes shortly after a 1946 experiment in which Jorn asked his artist friends to consciously interpret a spontaneously drawn abstract composition in multiple ways.7 This experiment with “multiplicity” (fertydighed) invited people’s diverse interpretations of a single image. It set itself directly against reductive ideas about the expression of the psychoanalytic unconscious in art, such as those of analyst Sigurd Næsgaard in Denmark. In some ways, Jorn’s experiment paralleled the actual practice of psychoanalysis, which depends on the diversity of interpretations of the same story or image, whether in analyst–client discussions or through visual tools like the Rorschach test, which became widely popular around the same time. Cobra was interested in the social collective, though, not the individual unconscious. In the Cobra word-painting, Jorn’s gestural abstract lines playfully distort the symbolic forms of trees and eyes, related to popular motifs such as the “evil eye” that he had seen in Djerba and not any kind of personal or dream imagery. In dialogue with Dotremont’s text, Jorn’s composition reads like something between a poetic message, an abstract adage, and a popular lyric. These earliest expressions of Cobra convey the movement’s sense of humor, conviviality, materialism, and interest in breaking down the barriers that separate literary and artistic disciplines. The artists sought personal expression developed through interpersonal experience. They viewed art as an expressive language, just as poetry

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was a written expression – made all the more material when hand-written. As Jorn wrote in Helhesten in 1944: “Art and handwriting are the same. An image is written and handwriting is images. There is a handwriting, a graphic element, in every image just as there is an image in every piece of handwriting.”8 The artists recognized the graphic element in the way artistic images become manifest, and the way these images function in relation to each other in a kind of syntax. Their self-conscious experiments with crossing the visual with the textual call attention to the creative process itself. “True poetry is where writing has its own say,” writes Dotremont in regard to his later “Logograms,” word-images inspired directly by Cobra.9 He describes the wordpaintings as very characteristic of Cobra: the polyvalence of most forms of any truly spontaneous creation, in particular most forms of writing, at the same time as the affrmation of a real universalism under dissemblances. In our word-paintings […] it was a matter of showing writing just as it is, creative of material forms that extend plastically beyond the “signifcation” of the text. We went further and closer than the Surrealists, who in their “automatic writing” considered [only] the text without writing.10 He celebrates the materiality of language that unfolds its meanings in the moment of writing – and again in the later moment of reading. Dotremont’s poetic reference to “universalism under dissemblances” captures Cobra’s aspirations to create new social connections without erasing differences – an important recognition of the complexity of trying to connect disciplines and cultures without imposing hierarchies from above. They sought universality, in other words, “under” or beyond the Enlightenment framework, questioning the whole Western colonialist ideology of universality. This was a set of human connections beneath the high-culture language of humanism, among subcultures left out of the mainstream discourse, in other words, a minoritarian universalism. It was more interested in dialogue among people of different backgrounds or specialties than in relying on a theory like psychoanalysis as a method of interpretation centered around the individual subject and the mastery of obscure concepts. It was not interested in bodies of secret knowledge like the history of esoterica so important to Breton’s Surrealism. The Cobra artists felt that Surrealism’s emphasis on esoteric ideas reinforced art’s specialized status and isolation from society, even if from the perspective of the Surrealists it was a political response to mainstream knowledge that went far beyond the question of art. The Cobra artists had varying relationships to different international factions of Surrealism, from the Linien group in Denmark and the core French group around Breton, to the clandestine Surrealism of the occupation and the Brussels and Hainaut groups in Belgium. Dotremont had ties to all of the French and Belgian groups. He helped found the Surrealist journal The Hand That Holds the Pen (La Main à Plume) in Paris during the Occupation. This chapter begins by investigating the events that led Dotremont to break with these groups and found the autonomous Revolutionary Surrealist movement in Brussels in 1947. A short-lived French Revolutionary Surrealist group was also established in 1947 by Dotremont’s colleagues from La Main à Plume, including writers Noël Arnaud and a young Édouard Jaguer, painter René Passeron, and French Cobra artists Jacques Doucet and Jean-Michel Atlan. That movement would dissolve in less than a year, leading Arnaud and some of its participants to

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create a new “Documentation Center for Avant-Garde Art” (Centre de documentation sur l’art d’avant-garde) in 1948. Cobra was founded just after their conference in early November that year. The story of Cobra’s relationship to Surrealism involves over 100 artists and poets. Many were also members of the Communist Party in France or Belgium, another major player in the story. This account focuses on the key role of Dotremont and several other Cobra artists also involved with Surrealism, including Jorn, Belgian artists Raoul Ubac and Pierre Alechinsky, Constant and Eugène Brands of the Dutch Experimental Group, German painter Karl-Otto Götz, and Max Walter Svanberg, Carl-Otto Hultén, and Anders Österlin of the Swedish Imaginists. The chapter aims, frst, to describe Cobra’s purported break with Surrealism in 1948–1949 with a focus on the art and the ideas shared across the various factions of Surrealism, Revolutionary Surrealism, Refex, Imaginism, and Cobra, and second, to maintain the complexity of Cobra’s overlap with Surrealism without losing the main thread of the story. Cobra’s break with Surrealism, it turns out, was never fnal, and part of Cobra’s importance comes from its openness to diverse aesthetic and political tactics – many of which it actually shared with Surrealism at mid-century despite its declarations to the contrary. Automatism and spontaneity overlap, as they are often similar practices merely interpreted differently, and both groups explore mythic images. Yet Cobra’s emphasis on popular images and material artistic practices makes it unique. Cobra activates the observer by emphasizing the momentary confguration of artistic materials into images that invite diverse audiences into the dialogue. Its focus on popular images rejects anything related to preestablished meanings or narratives that might alienate its audience – including the classical and esoteric references favored by French Surrealism. It also resists the use of beauty or fnish to seduce the viewer into complacency. Just as Surrealist art runs the gamut of artistic methods and often falls prey to reductive ideas of beauty or artistry, some later Cobra work also falls into these traps, as described below. At their best, both Surrealism and Cobra produce vital material encounters that energize us and inspire us to see and inhabit the world differently. The international artists of Cobra would push Surrealist methods from an automatic expression informed by psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious – especially prominent in French and Danish Surrealism – toward a more conscious spontaneity. They would move away from Surrealism’s emphasis on myth and dreams toward an immediate material experimentation that rejects preestablished mythic meanings. They would also push back against the French movement’s rejection of conventional morality with a renewed interest in the ethics of art and its role in society, shaped by the prominence of the Communist Parties at the time and their own utopian interpretations of Communist theory. Cobra would maintain the focus on collectivity that had been so essential to early Surrealism but was overshadowed by postwar Surrealism’s emphasis on the fantastic, sometimes visualized in representational paintings the Cobra artists considered facile and bourgeois. The Cobra artists also misread French Surrealism’s critique of the Communist Party as a rejection of all collective endeavor – until they, too, were condemned by the Communist Party in a sort of repeat of Surrealism’s failed attempt to reconcile with the Party in the 1930s. The discussions of Revolutionary Surrealism and the Dutch Experimental Group built on the foundations of spontaneous abstraction and populism laid by Linien and Høst in Denmark, transmitted to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam largely through the mediation of Asger Jorn. In 1946, Jorn traveled abroad for the frst time since the war

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began. In Paris, he reconnected with old friends from the 1930s like the French painter Pierre Wemaëre, with whom he would soon collaborate on modern tapestries, and the Chilean Surrealist painter Matta (who would be excluded from Surrealism by Breton in 1948 but reintegrated later). Jorn also made new friends, including Cuban Surrealist Wifredo Lam, French-North African artist Jean-Michel Atlan, and the young French critic Michel Ragon. He fnally met Picasso as well as André Breton. Baffed by Jorn’s rambling theories, likely expressed poorly in French, Jorn reports that Breton accused him of being the spokesperson of a new “Swedenborgism.” The remark may, however, have been an attempt on Breton’s part to recognize their common interests. Jorn later wrote that he had no interest in mysticism, but did appreciate Swedenborg, the Swedish theologian famous for his turn from science to mystical visions, as a dialectical philosopher.11 Jorn would nevertheless strongly critique Breton’s postwar interest in esoteric philosophy, as would Constant and Dotremont, the fellow travelers who theorized Cobra’s purported break with Surrealism in favor of a new materialism. In the frst issue of Cobra, Jorn quotes Breton’s 1924 defnition of Surrealism only to reproach the movement for its mysticism. Jorn calls Breton’s idea of “pure psychic automatism” metaphysical, and states that “the act of expression is a physical act that materializes thought.”12 He reveals a clear debt to Surrealism in his attempt to “escape from the reign of reason which has been and still is the reign idealized by the bourgeoisie to seize control of life.”13 But automatism was no longer the way to break free from bourgeois artistic methods: instead, “by means of […] irrational spontaneity we reach the vital source of life.”14 Cobra attempted to start again on the premises of Surrealism, but grounded in a materialism responsive to current social and economic conditions. The war set moral positions into sharp relief, and the occupations of their respective cities solidifed the Cobra artists’ anti-establishment sentiments. The wartime resistance movement with which Jorn was loosely involved (he printed copies of the banned Communist newspaper Land og folk on a duplicator hidden in his sofa in Copenhagen) revived his interest in Communism as a network of social liberation that resisted vested political interests. “Neither good nor evil, beauty or ugliness exist in themselves,” he writes. “It is only in their relation to interests that events, actions, things have a moral or an aesthetic value.” He breaks with the rejection of morality announced in Surrealism’s manifesto when he says: “The purpose of art is frst and foremost moral, then aesthetic.”15 The statement, in fact, could be seen to align with Surrealism’s ongoing attempts to redefne morality as something beyond Christian defnitions – like Surrealism, Cobra was critical of Christian ideologies, having taken for its totem a Christian symbol of evil. But Jorn’s point was that Surrealism was out of touch with postwar realities on the ground. Cobra’s rejection of Surrealism hinged on its interpretation of postwar Surrealism as too idealistic in its emphasis on myth and too representational in its art. After its strident political declarations of the 1920s and 1930s, Surrealist art and poetry changed its tone after the war to deliberately embrace the esoteric. Breton’s strategy of resisting commercialization by exploring the intellectual and affective sphere of myth, writ large in the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition with its totemic sculptures and references to initiation rites, set itself in opposition to the widespread postwar mood of moral judgment and bearing witness to the tragedies of the war. Since the 1920s, Breton described art as a window onto the imaginary, although he would eventually move in the 1950s to embrace abstract methods. “It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window,” he writes in Surrealism and

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Painting, and “my frst concern is then to know what it looks out on.”16 He tended to favor the stylistic naturalism that led Jorn and Høst to reject Surrealist paintings by artists like Dalí and Magritte for their “extremely conscious and punctilious psychophotographic art” (despite Dalí’s actual expulsion from Breton’s group in 1934).17 Jorn dismissed Surrealist painting as nothing more than “dream photography.”18 Dotremont’s relationship with Belgian Surrealism evolved rapidly after the war.19 In dialogue with Jorn and Constant, he turned away from his earlier support for Magritte and criticized the “old-Surrealism” of Dalí, Léonor Fini, and Magritte in the Cobra text “The Great Natural Rendez-Vous,” praising instead the more abstract work of Ernst, Masson, Miró, Wolfgaang Paalen, and Yves Tanguy.20 The painting of Paul Delvaux in Brussels, the Danes Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen, Else Thoresen, and Wilhelm Freddie, and the Swedish Halmstad group that came to represent Surrealist art in the Nordic countries also relied on the naturalism, linear perspective, and academic fnish that Cobra’s methods rejected. The Surrealist movement splintered in several directions after the end of the Second World War, a topic still inadequately addressed in art history. Breton’s group distanced itself from the Party and openly espoused esotericism, having tried and failed to unite Surrealism and communism in the 1930s (the failure was due more to the Party’s short-sightedness about the role of culture than to the Surrealists). Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929 already made explicit his interest in myth, in calling “for the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism.”21 In the 1930s, mythological themes took precedence in Surrealist art; for example, the Surrealist myths of Loplop and Gradiva developed in the art of Ernst and Masson – both key artists for Cobra. The Cobra artists built on these precedents in their attempt to link the investigation of myth to popular traditions in a utopian communist critique of the isolation of art from life. Breton, however, seemed to reinforce art and poetry’s isolation from society in proclaiming that society needed a “new myth” after the war instead of embracing the material and social liberation defned by Communism. He began to systematically explore the idea of a “new myth” in the early 1940s.22 He announced the controversial idea of the “Great Transparents,” a crystallization of invisible forces he hoped could inspire audiences to connect in creative ways with the non-human world, in “Prolegomena to a third Manifesto of Surrealism,” in the American journal VVV in 1942.23 Breton’s book Arcanum 17, written in Québec during the war, reads as a defense of esoteric philosophy – meaning bodies of knowledge not condoned by the Church. His personal musings on Percé Rock develop through the imaginative lens of Mélusine, Osiris, and other preestablished myths.24 It would not take long for other Surrealists in exile to question the relevance of Breton’s emphasis on prophets and religious rites for contemporary society.25 The Brussels Surrealists also rejected this turn inward. Marcel Mariën writes that, “a system of beliefs crystallized in ‘beings’ and mysterious ‘forces’ has replaced the enthusiasm of the beginning.”26 Undaunted, Breton reiterated his call for a “new myth” upon his return to Paris, in the catalog essay for the International Surrealist Exhibition at Galerie Mæght in 1947.27 Breton uses the term “myth” in the 1930s and later to signify the Surrealist dream of uniting social, personal, and artistic revolution. He closes the 1935 “Speech to the Congress of Writers” with the lines, “‘Transform the world,’ Marx said; ‘change life,’ Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.”28 Breton’s summary of the Surrealist position after he offcially broke with the Party in 1935, “Political Position

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of Surrealism,” affrms that the group aims to “reconcile Surrealism as a method of creating a collective myth with the much more general movement involving the liberation of man.”29 A few years later in 1938, Breton met Léon Trotsky, who was living in exile in Mexico. Together they produced the manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” espousing an independent political position for art. This tract rejects the “treacherous” Soviet bureaucracy and its persecution of free artists and critics of the regime, a persecution that led directly to Trotsky’s assassination by a Soviet agent in Mexico just two years later. Breton and Trotsky defend an art liberated even from politics, proclaiming that “true art […] insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time – true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.”30 Such a claim, in fact, seems entirely in keeping with Cobra’s project. But the younger artists were not yet ready to leave the Communist Party behind, nor could they place in myth alone the faith Breton was trying to collectively inspire after the war. Breton’s Surrealist group reestablished their independence from Communism and denounced the Stalinist show trials in the 1947 text “Inaugural Rupture,” the most important Surrealist collective statement after their return to Paris.31 The tract declares that the Communist Party is no longer qualifed to see the workers’ revolution through, because it has resorted to the methods of the bourgeoisie and consists of ineffectual “salaried bureaucrats.” While the Surrealists agree with the Marxist goal of the liberation of the Proletariat, they see economic revolution as only a stage in the total liberation of humankind, which necessitates liberation from Christianity as a religion. The declaration returns to the old Surrealist ideas “from the child-woman to black humor, from objective chance to the will to myth,” all major principles described in Breton’s earlier texts (and all of which relate in complex ways to the Cobra interests in the childlike, playfulness and humor, spontaneity, and art as creative mythmaking). The text closes with a call for a “non-Moses morality,” one that equally rejects Stalinist, nationalist, and Christian doctrines. The problem for the Surrealists was that, even if their rejection of the Party was prescient, Communism was ascendant in Europe just after the war. Not only were the Soviets viewed as the force that turned the tide of the war after the Battle of Stalingrad, but the Western Communist Parties were the primary organizers of the anti-Nazi resistance. Intellectuals from Dotremont and Jorn to Jean-Paul Sartre publicly overlooked the excesses of Stalin in their calls to support the Party (until they didn’t: Dotremont rejected the Belgian Communist Party in 1949; Sartre fnally renounced Stalin upon the invasion of Hungary in 1956). The Surrealists recognized right away, having experienced the rigidity of the Party in the 1930s, that after the war, the Party became a channel for the “narrow-minded fury” of a French nationalist and ruthlessly punitive response toward the German people.32 It would take a frsthand experience of the short-sightedness of Party politics for the Belgian Revolutionary Surrealists to fnally reject the Communist Party in 1949 and begin calling themselves simply Cobra, after Party offcials began to directly attack their art. Revolutionary Surrealism came out of a very different situation than that of Linien and Høst, which worked in the context of a more culturally open-minded Danish Communist Party. While Dotremont and his colleagues around the wartime journal La Main à Plume set out to “maintain Surrealism” in Paris during Breton’s absence, their experiences pushed them beyond simply conserving the movement, into something new “in the spirit of Surrealism itself.”33 While the journal began with a Trotskyist

86 Surrealism into Cobra political position, its members evolved toward different views of the Party over the course of the occupation when, as Arnaud later described, they couldn’t regard their colleagues from the communist resistance as enemies.34 They hoped Breton would reorganize the movement upon his return to Paris in 1946, but were disappointed with how he did it, in part because of his refusal to involve the Party. Breton accused Dotremont of being a Stalinist in one of their discussions, “even in my choice of beverage” – as Dotremont recalls he was a bit “into the vodka” at the time.35 “What we turn against Breton,” Dotremont concludes, “against his Fourierism, his humanism, and his occultism, is Communism.”36 Breton’s political statements seemed like “Martian” pronouncements to those who had seen the atrocities of the war and survived the occupation. As René Passeron recalls, “How could we go into raptures about the marvelousness of the Great Transparents when children were starving: that there was our Communism.”37 So they decided to restart the Surrealist movement themselves, frst with Revolutionary Surrealism in 1947–1948, and then, after another set of ruptures, with Cobra. Recalling the importance of the Surrealist movement for Belgian Cobra, Dotremont praises its humor, experimental spirit, and collective approach: There were in Surrealism, and particularly in Belgian Surrealism, fundamental components for Cobra, but in a cold and deliberate state: a synthetic conception of the arts, an anti-specialism, a gravity, very determined by Marxism, a humor without gratuitousness, a general experimental spirit, a powerful anti-individualism, which unfortunately most often resulted in an impersonal painting instead of arriving, as Cobra would arrive, at a painting nourished by inter-subjectivity; this anti-individualism, however, has formed in us the group spirit and the international spirit.38 Cobra set out to reconnect with the “international spirit” that characterized Surrealism since the 1930s by reestablishing their cultural ties beyond France and trying once again to reconcile with international Communism. In Brussels, artists and poets allied themselves with various Surrealist factions even as they turned to new theories like the materialism of Gaston Bachelard. In Amsterdam, only Constant and Eugène Brands explored Surrealist artistic theories and methods in depth. The Dutch Experimental Group developed a relatively unifed aesthetic approach, turning its collective attention to a particularly raw spontaneous approach to art closely inspired by children’s art. While the sole issue of Revolutionary Surrealism (Le Surréalisme révolutionnaire) appeared in March, 1948 (after a short Bulletin published in January), the frst issue of Dutch Refex appeared in September– October, just before the founding of Cobra in November, 1948. The second and last issue of Refex was published in February 1949. Cobra picked up from there, its frst two issues appearing almost simultaneously in Copenhagen and Belgium, respectively, in March 1949, until its fnal 10th issue was published in Belgium in fall, 1951. After Cobra ended, however, several Cobra artists, including Pierre Alechinsky, Corneille, and the Imaginist artist Max Walter Svanberg became involved with Surrealism in the 1950s and 1960s. While most of the artists continued to work in ways that developed out of their key early experiences with Cobra, some, such as Svanberg, became internationally known not through Cobra but through the continued activities of Surrealism.

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The evolution of the Danish and Dutch artists from Surrealist automatism to spontaneous abstraction played the most important role in shaping the art of Cobra. The group’s characteristic directness and populist dimension responded to a rapidly changing postwar situation: after a brief period of ascendancy for the Western Communist Parties in the late 1940s, social democracy and economic liberalism would rise to prominence in both Western Europe and the United States in the 1950s. As the Cold War developed, the European Communist Parties became more embattled and adversarial. Cultural institutions vied to reestablish the preeminence of the European ideas of freedom of expression defned by the historic avant-garde, but increasingly appropriated by American cultural hegemony. Free expression in art, most visibly in the form of abstract painting, came to be framed on both sides of the Atlantic as an attack on Soviet Communism and defense of Western culture, in an artistic confrontation that paralleled the real violence of the Korean War and the colonial wars of independence (the global arenas of Cold War confict). In breaking from Revolutionary Surrealism, Cobra reframed its theoretical approach, still based on the original philosophical principles of Marxism but no longer working with the Party, to bolster a new artistic attack on high culture and its ideological support for human oppression. It mobilized childlike elements to reanimate art and celebrate the survival of life, combined with brutal techniques of aesthetic protest against cultural elitism, bourgeois individualism, reactionary nationalism, and the technological threat of the Bomb.

Belgian Surrealism and the Material Imagination The Belgian Cobra group arose directly out of Surrealism; almost all of the Belgian artists and poets identifed as Surrealists before, and sometimes while, they participated in Cobra. The history of Surrealism in Belgium itself was complicated. Some artists, like Raoul Ubac, moved to Paris to work with Breton’s group in the 1920s–1930s. Others started their own distinct Surrealist circles in Brussels and La Louvière in the province of Hainaut, working only intermittently with the French Surrealists and only briefy with Revolutionary Surrealism. Jorn and Dotremont met in 1947 at the frst congress of Revolutionary Surrealism in Brussels (Jorn invited Constant, who did not make it). Dotremont and Noiret maintained friendships with Surrealists such as Belgian poet Achille Chavée and Spanish painter Oscar Dominguez even during the Cobra years. Alechinsky befriended Surrealist artists including Hans Bellmer and Alberto Giacometti (even if Giacometti was excluded from Breton’s movement in 1934), and would himself exhibit in major Surrealist exhibitions. The Revolutionary Surrealist movement founded by Dotremont with its eponymous journal Surréalisme révolutionnaire was the latest of many Surrealist groups with which he was involved in the 1940s. In his “History of Cobra in Belgium,” Dotremont lists a wide range of Cobra artists also involved in Surrealism, including Alechinsky; the architect Paul Bourgoignie; writers Noiret, Marcel Havrenne, Jean Raine, and Théodore Koenig; flmmaker and anthropologist Luc De Heusch; painter and later kinetic sculptor Pol Bury; photographer Marcel Lefranq; composer Jacques Calonne; and illustrator Robert Willems.39 It is arguable that Belgian Cobra was a branch of the International Surrealist movement, as a few French critics like Édouard Jaguer and José Pierre have more or less claimed, sympathetically to Cobra: Jaguer writes that “it is not inappropriate to consider Cobra a major incident of the permanent crisis of Surrealism.”40 The relationship

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between Cobra and Surrealism is almost inevitably described by Jaguer and others as “Oedipal,” as it involved a series of deliberate breaks, sometimes more polemical than real.41 Surrealism set the tone for the poetry and organizational activities of Dotremont since the publication of his Surrealist poem “Ancient Eternity” (Ancienne Éternité), written in 1938 when he was 18 years old.42 He met photographer Raoul Ubac after writing him at the address found on the back of the Belgian Surrealist journal Collective Invention (L’Invention Collective), founded by Ubac and Magritte in 1940. Dotremont soon met other Surrealists at Ubac’s place in Brussels, including Magritte and Louis Scutenaire.43 Dotremont became the youngest member of the Surrealist movement, and edited numerous Surrealist journals during and just after the war. During the occupation in 1941, Dotremont and Ubac began making clandestine trips to Paris. André Breton had left Paris just a month before Dotremont arrived. Dotremont and Ubac co-founded The Hand That Holds the Pen (La Main à Plume, 1941–1944) with former members of the (anti-Breton) Dada group Reverberations (Les Réverbères), including French poet Jean-François Chabrun and Surrealists Adolphe Acker and Robert Rius.44 Another former member of Les Révèrberes, Noël Arnaud, joined the group, which named itself after the journal, with the second issue, Nocturnal Geography (Géographie nocturne). It was affliated at various points with Hans Arp, Christine Boumeester, and Henri Goetz, as well as Paul Eluard and Georges Hugnet (both excluded from Breton’s Surrealist group in 1938–1939), and a young Edouard Jaguer, among other poets and artists from the Surrealist circle.45 The journal changed title with each issue to avoid wartime censorship. The fourth issue of 1942, called The Conquest of the World by the Image (La Conquête du Monde par L’Image), featured contributions by Arnaud, extolling the virtues of collective poetry, and Dotremont. Dotremont’s text argues that the Surrealist image must be realistic, as in the example of Magritte’s painting – a view the Danish and Dutch artists would later convince him to revise.46 At the time he still considered himself primarily a poet, and Magritte’s cerebral painted objects seemed like the ultimate visual expression of Surrealist poetry. Dotremont’s postwar Surrealist journal The Two Sisters (Les Deux Soeurs, 1946– 1947) attempted to move beyond the wartime experience when no one could publicly proclaim themselves Surrealist.47 Dotremont announces the idea of Revolutionary Surrealism in the last issue. He claims that Surrealism is not a school, nor a group of individuals producing automatic writing isolated in their rooms: “there is only a collective Surrealism.”48 Yet the politics of the war, which have pushed Communist Parties into “a certain evolution,” have led Surrealism to “lose its momentum.”49 Breton had initially welcomed Les Deux Soeurs among Dotremont’s other publishing initiatives immediately after the war, and even agreed to contribute, but he soon dissociated himself from it as Dotremont’s dissent from his leadership became clear, not least due to this text.50 Dotremont declares his independence from not only Bretonian Surrealism but also the Sartrean Existentialism that claimed to supersede it. He writes that the freedom of spirit that Surrealism calls for is not Sartre’s freedom to choose, deciding every day between “apolitical” Trotskyism and “political” communism as if between chocolate and coffee. He acknowledges an important “abyss” between communism, a rational political movement that seeks the economic liberation of the proletariat, and Surrealism, an anti-rational movement that seeks a general liberation of the individual – including from politics. The problem is that Surrealism does not

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always acknowledge the necessity of economic freedom to make such a total liberation possible.51 Dotremont believes that Surrealism cannot fulfll its own aims without allying itself with communism: “The Surrealist experience […] risks becoming absorbed in its hermeticism if it does not keep in touch with revolutionary political action.”52 Dotremont’s text responds to a precise political moment, but at the same time conveys profound insights regarding the role poetry must play in raising people’s consciousness of social oppression. “The proletariat does not react in a revolutionary way because of the scientifc observation that has been made about its enslavement; it acts because of a diffuse, but carnal, intimate, poetic one could say, consciousness of its enslavement.”53 Contemporary scholars have made similar observations regarding the way intuition and emotional response rather than rational facts drive people to work toward social change.54 Revolutionary Surrealism, as Dotremont describes it, was entirely of its time in the specifcs of its attempt to reframe the relationship between art and politics. But it also responded to the more fundamental necessity of recognizing the potential of art to inspire people to not only envision but also work toward social liberation. In his essay, Dotremont asks the Surrealists not to prejudge the Communist Party, which, while far from perfect, remains a revolutionary party. Therefore, he writes, the Surrealist who believes that the revolution has failed and yet speaks of the revolutionary nature of their writings proposes only defeatism. Politics must not be left to the specialists. Finally, just as the “right of heresy” has been invoked by the French Surrealists in relation to the Communist Party, so it must be taken up regarding Surrealism itself.55 Dotremont juxtaposes “Revolutionary” and “Surrealism” in this 1947 text to create a mutual critique of each approach. This perception would not last long, however, as the problems on each side would ultimately prove intractable. Dotremont’s relationship with the Belgian Surrealists was as tricky as his complex dialogue with Breton. This was not surprising in the rapidly shifting landscape of postwar Surrealism, where multiple groups formed, joined, dissolved, and competed in several different cities. In August, 1945, an article Dotremont wrote defending the French poet, flmmaker, and impresario Jean Cocteau, a famous adversary of the Surrealist movement, led Magritte and Belgian poets Marcel Mariën and Paul Nougé to exclude him from the Surrealist group in Brussels, although Achille Chavée would write them to reconsider.56 Dotremont did participate along with Ubac and others in the frst major Surrealist event in Belgium after the war, the Surréalisme exhibition Magritte organized in December, 1945, at La Boétie Gallery in Brussels. Under the pseudonym “Christian Witz,” he submitted a Christmas tree covered in swastikas called The Tree of Evil and Evil (L’Arbre du Mal et du Mal).57 But his overtures to the Communist Party would soon lead to a permanent break with Belgian Surrealism over politics, even as the Belgian Surrealists were breaking with Breton over tactics. In 1946, Magritte circulated “Surrealism in Broad Daylight” (Surréalisme en Plein Soleil), a tract signed by fve Belgian Surrealists and French fellow traveler Joë Bousquet, to accompany the radically colorful and humorously expressive paintings of his wartime “Impressionist” period. These works, shocking at the time considering the restrained and highly fnished approach to painting for which he was known, paralleled Cobra’s irreverent aesthetics in their direct challenge to the high seriousness of the postwar French art world. They present direct parodies of academic themes, for example a female nude painted with feathery brush strokes in four Day-Glo colors, each applied to a different limb.58 Cobra would seek childlike and outsider inspirations

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instead, and take them in completely anti-academic directions. Dotremont was still attached to Magritte’s old techniques at the time and attacked the paintings in Les Deux Soeurs, though he would later admit he was wrong to critique them.59 While Magritte along with other Belgian Surrealists including Mariën, Nougé, and Louis Scutenaire went to a few meetings of Dotremont’s Revolutionary Surrealism group and signed its initial tracts (as did French poet Paul Éluard), they did not play a major role in the movement. Belgian poet Chavée from the Hainaut Surrealist group participated more actively. Together, French and Belgian Revolutionary Surrealism had over 87 members, including the abstract painters Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, and Gérard Schneider. Critic Michel Ragon would later claim these Parisian artists were “excluded” from Cobra when it broke with Revolutionary Surrealism.60 However, in pointed response to Breton’s tight control over French Surrealism, Cobra never rejected any members; it just continually solicited more. Ragon’s colleagues JeanMichel Atlan and Jacques Doucet, both French Revolutionary Surrealists, would later show with Cobra. Besides Magritte, perhaps the most signifcant Belgian Surrealist artist to become involved with the French movement between the wars was Ubac. Ubac was a major Surrealist photographer in Paris in the 1930s, known for his innovative methods of burning (brûlage), double exposure, and solarization.61 His photographs explore what he calls the “latent quality of the sensible surface” that gives the photographic image a new expressive potential.62 His frst photographs, he recalls, were of stones he found on the Dalmatian coast in the early 1930s, anticipating his later interest in stone carving.63 In early 1940 in Brussels, Ubac and Magritte co-founded the journal Collective Invention (L’Invention Collective), through which the younger Dotremont frst contacted them. Only two issues were published in February and April, 1940, due to the German invasion of Belgium and France in May. Magritte, Ubac, and Scutenaire took refuge in Carcassonne, France, when the German invasion began, but they were subsequently able to travel back and forth between Paris and Brussels. In March, 1940, Ubac wrote to Georges Hugnet (a fellow Surrealist excluded by Breton in 1939) that he believed Surrealism would only survive by “surpassing itself,” a telling formulation and one prescient of Cobra’s ambivalent relationship to the movement.64 Living out the occupation in Paris, however, would change his views on Surrealism, politics, and art. He soon moved away from photography and toward more introspective and lyrical drawing and painting. He claimed that photography was too “close to history. While art […] approaches myth.”65 Perhaps ironically, his embrace of myth led not to a reconciliation with Surrealism, but a new relationship with Cobra alongside an introspective life as a postwar painter in Belgium. Ubac distanced himself from Surrealism by the end of the war and took no part in Revolutionary Surrealism. He writes that “the war liberated me from Surrealism in that it absorbed certain aspects of the visionary and returned them in its own horrors.”66 In 1943, Ubac writes to Dotremont that he feels closer to the Catholic poetry journal Messages than Dotremont’s La Main à Plume, because it “witnesses a larger spirit” and moves beyond the outdated positions of Surrealism, which have not evolved since 1930.67 In 1946, he writes to Magritte that after the occupation he has no more faith in revolution, as humanity has not fundamentally changed since ancient times. Preferring to work alone, he turns his back on Surrealism as well as Communism, which in his view takes up the messianism inherited from Christianity. He says to Magritte that we must produce based on our own experiences, and “return moral or political ideologies to the

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trash.”68 Even though Dotremont still believed in the political ideology of Communism at the time, he joined Ubac in rejecting the theoretical polemics of Surrealism. He would soon reconnect with Ubac in Brussels and bring him into the evolving network of Cobra. Dotremont included Ubac’s earlier photographs in the 1950 photography exhibition he curated in Brussels, “The Developments of the Eye” (discussed in the next chapter), but Ubac had become occupied with painting and sculpture by that time as a result of his wartime experiences with drawing and engraving. From 1935 to 1938, Ubac studied engraving using a burin at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris. He associated the technique with photography as another way to inscribe an image. He also connected it to the early impact of Kandinsky’s woodcuts in the artist’s 1913 book Sounds (Klänge), which struck him for the “violence of the line that expressed the forms instead of describing them.”69 During the war, he made pen drawings of everyday objects, using a slow process of building up forms through shading that he compared to developing a photograph. By 1945 he had abandoned photography in favor of painting, sculpture, and engraving, exhibiting his frst engravings as part of an exhibition of drawings at Galerie Denise René in Paris in 1945.70 He also made a series of gouaches on the theme of “Heads” and showed abstract paintings produced in layered emulsions at Galerie Maeght in France and internationally in the 1950s, in the context of Lyrical Abstraction. The war led Ubac to explore the relationship of stone to the passage of time and human mortality: “Dolmens – menhirs,” he writes in 1946. “It is against you that we fnally crash. […] Earth to earth – Face to face. Our body is fnally rejoined at the level of stone.”71 That same year, Ubac picked up a piece of slate (ardoise) from the ground on a trip to Upper Savoy in the French Alps, and carved into its surface with an old nail. He became fascinated with the possibilities of slate, which he calls “a resistant material” (un matériau ingrat).72 The stone’s own material qualities and range of gray tones seemed to express themselves through the carving process. Ubac’s slate sculptures are aesthetic cousins of the abstract fgures in wood carved by Høst and Cobra artist Erik Thommesen in Denmark, which also allow the unique properties of the wood to defne their simple and monumental forms. Ubac’s engraving of a snakelike form and “Cobra” title for the seventh issue of the journal exemplifes this new and more materialist artistic direction (Figure 2.1). He carved not a recognizable snake but rather an embossed organic form that appears to emanate rays of light through lines engraved into the solid stone surface. This unstable form rises up in what appears to be a triumphant action like double raised fsts, caught paradoxically in the opaque density of a material produced through ancient sedimentation. Ubac intervenes in the slate surface just enough for its unique materiality to manifest itself. Where painting and drawing use the paper or canvas as a passive support, he writes, Engraving, by employing hard and strong materials is embodied more in the chosen material. At this contact, the mark takes on a deeper and more convincing value, because in penetrating the wood, metal or stone, the tool expresses, along with the message of the man, that of the material he cuts.73 Ubac abandoned the gouge and chisel in favor of “second-hand tools [that] tear rather than slice”: chipped points, gimlet screws, or old framing nails. With these, he could create patterns of serration attuned to capture the light, cutting across the grain of the slate.

Figure 2.1 Raoul Ubac, Cobra, 1950. Engraved slate, 30.5 × 20.5 cm, produced for the cover of Cobra 7. Collection Pierre and Micky Alechinsky. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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Ubac’s carvings on slate were a way of reconnecting with his childhood experiences in the Belgian Ardennes, as well as a larger interest in ancient and popular traditions of carved sculpture. Cobra 6 (1950) reproduces an Ubac carving beneath a slate stone featuring two simple carvings of human fgures found along the Belgian Semois river by Corneille Hannoset. The historic stone appears to be carved with Celtic or Norman graffti – the same kind of “outsider” popular art that Jorn would later celebrate in his book Signs Carved on the Churches of the Eure and Calvados (Signes Gravés sur les Églises de l’Eure et du Calvados). Jorn describes graffti as refecting an essential human need for expression, but also an outsider status in relation to artistic norms and institutions.74 The two fgures carved from simple diamond patterns, the one on the right with a round intact head and male sexual organs delineated, recall Ubac’s statement in his letter to Magritte that humans have not changed since prehistoric times because ancient stone carvings depict the same bodies as ours.75 Ubac viewed such stones as evidence of the survival of fundamental human creativity. He writes to Dotremont in 1951 suggesting that he would be happy to contribute a text on popular art to Cobra based on materials from the Belgian national library. Specifcally, he wants to reproduce some small terra cottas from Mexico representing roosters and an owl, made as whistles for children. He describes these objects as without pretension, made for real use, but with a “plastic value” that one no longer fnds in European culture. He writes: I believe that popular art is directly related to a state of civilization; unfortunately, ours destroys its very bases. The closed world necessary for the fourishing of an unadulterated popular art is broken by the press, the radio and especially the cinema which creates a veritable complex of visual inferiority. [Nevertheless] folk art remains vibrant in the so-called backward regions.76 Ubac never wrote the article for Cobra, but his sculptures became an important part of the group’s artistic production inspired by popular art. His paintings were more lyrical-abstract and, as he wrote to Dotremont, diffcult to reproduce, so they were never included in the Cobra journal. His ideas about the primordial qualities of stone, however, continued to have an impact on Dotremont. In his autobiographical novel The Stone and the Pillow, Dotremont writes that civilization has not advanced any farther than ancient human culture: Culture has long been on Paris like a cloud that never dies, that’s what manages to disgust me. Modern man is looking for a prehistoric stone to lay his head. […] Paris is entirely hostile to the prehistoric man who is already rising from the ruins of history. If Paris showed its ruins altogether, confessed that there is nothing left in front of so many things behind, there would be much light on modern man.77 Dotremont joined Jorn and the Danish artists in rejecting the power of national – especially French – art institutions that defned modern art in limited ways, always looking to a glorious past and trying to reinstate their own cultural identity as the epitome of modern civilization. Cobra recognized the fallacy of modernism in proclaiming its own culture as the most “advanced,” a claim that meant a denial of history. Cobra

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took a radically egalitarian view of culture, in which no one set of aesthetic values could be held above any other. Like Dotremont’s writing, Ubac’s slate sculptures relate to two central interests of the Cobra group: popular traditions, and a materialism related to Communist historical materialist philosophy on the one hand, and to the theories of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard on the other. Bachelard developed a concept of the “material imagination” that became important for both Surrealism and Cobra in the 1940s. He taught the history of science at the Sorbonne and became renowned for his poetic essays on the psychological, anthropological, and philosophical implications of scientifc concepts and natural elements, in books like The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and Water and Dreams (1942).78 While the Surrealists read Bachelard in the 1930s, Dotremont was the frst Cobra poet to encounter his work in 1941 at the philosopher’s lectures at the Sorbonne, attended by several members of the Main à Plume group. Dotremont attempts in his essay “The Great Natural Rendez-Vous” to bridge the two forms of materialism indebted to Marx and Bachelard: Who could therefore call himself a Marxist without seeing that the distinction between the end and the means is the refection of the metaphysical distinction that the upper class makes between art and life, between culture and politics, and fnally between matter and spirit? And who could therefore call himself a Marxist without recognizing within matter an intense life, an imagination that exceeds function, without recognizing in the hand a creative desire, in the execution a say in the plan, and in the tool and the material a power over the entire work?79 Cobra would explore the imaginative transformation of materials as a means to combat the alienation of everyday life and the limited understanding of the art work as a commodity in capitalist society. The very provisionality of the “word-paintings” Dotremont made with Jorn in 1948, thinly painted with cheap colors, emphasize less their materiality in the sense of opacity or thickness than their transformation of material forms, and of language into a physical image (see Plate 10). Joseph Noiret later claimed that Bachelard “conceived this happy materialism that Cobra spontaneously lived.”80 While most Cobra painting would not become intensely material in its use of paint and texture until the mid-1950s, the genesis of Cobra out of Surrealism was the moment it theorized the signifcance of transforming popular images through the use of artistic materials as a metonym for social transformation. In Bachelard the artists found a language for the development of images spontaneously through experimenting with the physical properties of art. Bachelard defned the “material imagination” as “images that stem directly from matter,” in opposition to the “formal imagination,” an interest in variable and novel images that is simultaneously more fckle and more rationally directed. He writes of the material imagination that “when forms, mere perishable forms and vain images […] are put aside, these images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately. They have weight; they constitute a heart.”81 In his poetic description, Bachelard acknowledges the complementarity and mutual infection of the “formal” and “material” imagination. The essential concept for Cobra is his groundbreaking recognition that matter itself plays a signifcant role in the development of imagery and that, in return, imaginative imagery shapes our encounters in the world.

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For Bachelard, the imaginative encounter with the material world creates subjectivity, as opposed to images that merely symbolize it. Bachelard writes about the imagery of elemental materials like fre, water, and earth, and their discussion by Symbolist poets Lautréamont and Rimbaud (whose poetry was also fundamental for Surrealism). Bachelard’s 1939 book Lautréamont was, along with Lautréamont’s 1868 prose-poem Maldoror itself, a key source for the Cobra artists. Bachelard emphasizes the “delirious, mobile forms” of Lautréamont’s bestiary, their “active” and vital use of metaphor.82 Where Bachelard’s readings focus on the individual poetic encounter, though, Cobra viewed the creation and interpretation of images as an intersubjective process, exemplifed in the collective “word-paintings.” Cobra’s playful experiments with interdisciplinary expression linked words and material objects as well as different artistic and poetic voices dialogically. The “material imagination” describes many art works produced by Cobra artists, including the work of French Revolutionary Surrealist Jacques Doucet. The woodcut that Doucet produced for the cover of Refex 2 in 1949 (Figure 2.2) sets the artist’s hand in active dialogue with the material’s own properties. The imagery of Doucet’s woodcut, related to his 1948 painting on paper called Tightrope Walkers, recalls Paul Klee’s use of arrows and childlike fgures as well as children’s art, but instead of tentative painting the print showcases the violence and unpredictability of the act of cutting into the wood.83 Doucet was incarcerated for his involvement with the resistance

Figure 2.2 Cover of Refex 2 (1949), featuring Jacques Doucet, Untitled, 1949 woodcut, private collection, the Netherlands. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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group “Free Art” (L’Art Libre) in Paris during the occupation and only released in 1945, after which he returned to his artistic activities. He was struck by the graffti made by former prisoners on the walls inside the Santé prison. In his Cobra book on Doucet, French art historian (and former French Revolutionary Surrealist) Jean Laude called it “the sordid magic inscribed on prison walls, graffti charged with liberating energy.”84 For Laude, this appreciation of graffti was about witnessing – bearing witness to traces of another human presence. The print forcefully enacts the carving of graffti into a wood surface, also a process of reproducing preestablished, simple signs. But here the wood surface pushes the image further by producing an interaction between the artist’s cuts and extra marks seemingly made by chance, appearing to come from the material itself, a piece of wood given to him by Corneille. Corneille met the French artist Doucet in Budapest in 1947, when Hungarian collector Margit Eppinger invited both artists there.85 Bachelard’s own contribution to Cobra 6, a discussion of the fgurative engraver Albert Flocon, perhaps more aptly describes the abstract and materialist art of Doucet: “Is not the plow the burin of the felds?” Bachelard writes. “The chisel takes us back to certain matter. […] Vegetal values command us. […] We are really at the heart of a metabolism of images.”86 Doucet’s woodcut suggests imagery forming spontaneously out of the wooden plank. Carved arrows direct these provisional fgures and emphasize their movement and transformation. The artist’s intentional marks dialogue with marks produced by organic matter over long periods of time. Doucet’s post-Cobra paintings of 1952 and later similarly embody the colorful and textural materiality of oil paint, which Pol Bury describes in Bachelardian terms in Cobra 2: G. Bachelard speaks of the active imagination that penetrates into the fbres and the twists of the wood. We could fnd there […] the grounds for a painting of matter, the active imagination insinuating itself between the colored surfaces and striving to rediscover in the arabesque and the mark the diverse movements […] of which the painter is unaware.87 In some of Doucet’s later works, the paint seems to direct the viscous fow of the imagery itself, in a slow movement around the canvas that powerfully demonstrates Bachelard’s material imagination.88 Cobra’s approach to materialism does not suggest a “pure” material presence, but instead understands materiality as a social experience. Cobra art works embody the way imagination develops intersubjectively and intersects materially with the world. The artist creates new meanings through physical encounters with symbolic forms that are defned socially. Images are both physical and social, just as graffti is both a bodily expression and a political protest. Bachelard’s poetic theories helped the artists understand the interpretation of material images as itself a creative act, subjective as well as intersubjective, formed in relation to a social consciousness. Over the course of the 1950s, works by the Cobra artists became increasingly tactile and materially intense. The ceramics experiments of Jorn, Appel, Corneille, and Jaguer in Italy in 1954–1955 emphasized what Bachelard described as the elemental “paste,” the combination of water and earth that becomes a dynamic material, a “medium of energy and no longer merely of form.”89 These projects pushed Appel, Jorn, Corneille, and Serge Vandercam toward more material and scatological paintings that negated the refnement of Lyrical Abstraction. Jorn applied gritty, non-art materials such as

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glitter and dirt to the surface of paintings in the tongue-in-cheek “Frivolous Pictures” series of 1955. In 1958–1959, Dotremont and Vandercam collaborated on a series of word-paintings and ceramic word-sculptures called Boues or “mud-works,” directly related to the elemental theories of Bachelard.90 These projects built on the theoretical ground developed during the 1940s of an artistic materialism that reconciled the properties of matter with an intersubjective redefnition of expression. The Revolutionary Surrealist group attempted to join theory and action in a way that reconciled Surrealist experiment, Bachelardian material imagination, and communism. Of these three volatile ingredients, only the material imagination would truly endure in Cobra.

Revolutionary Surrealism and Communism Dotremont founded Revolutionary Surrealism on April 5, 1947 in Brussels. The group’s activities were soon extended internationally through Noël Arnaud, who organized a French Revolutionary Surrealist group with mathematician and artist Max Bucaille, art critic Edouard Jaguer, painter René Passeron, and others. The French and Belgian groups published manifestoes both independently and jointly within a few weeks of each other. In June, 1947, seven artists and poets including Brussels Surrealists Magritte and Paul Nougé signed the Belgian tract, “No quarter in the revolution!” (Pas de quartiers dans la révolution!)” published in The Red Flag (Le Drapeau Rouge), the newspaper of the Belgian Communist Party. It declared that Surrealism may have been successful in “opening up to an interior revolt the feld of unlimited experience,” and in “disciplining that revolt in collective experience,” but it failed to create a successful revolutionary movement because it left the transformation of the world up to the individual.91 On July 1, 1947, the French and Belgian Revolutionary Surrealists published their joint manifesto “La Cause Est Entendue” (“The Cause Is Understood” or more colloquially, “The Case Is Closed”). It proclaims that Surrealist experimentation is only meaningful when developed in relation to Marxist dialectical materialism, and that Surrealism’s essential contribution to the revolutionary movement is the liberation of artistic creativity from its idealistic constructs. “Surrealism is functionally opposed to the creation of new myths,” it pointedly declares. Its task is […] to dismantle the mechanism of formation and functioning of myths; one of its current goals in the capitalist world is to expose the modern collective myth in order to relieve man of it, and thus make him more receptive to the consciousness of the economic conditions that he is given.92 These ideas responded directly to those expressed by Breton’s circle in “Inaugural Rupture” in April, 1947 (just three months earlier) – the rejection of the Party as “salaried bureaucrats” and the call for a post-Christian morality and a “New Myth.” On the cover of the frst (and only) Bulletin international du surréalisme révolutionnaire edited by Dotremont (to be followed by the Parisian Surréalisme révolutionnaire, also in a single issue), another “Declaration Internationale” appears beneath a photo of the group featuring Dotremont and Jorn, among others. It proclaims that not only does the group condemn Surrealism, but also “the aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical tendencies, which arrive at the same failures […] notably abstractionism, anti-social psychoanalysis, and Existentialism.”93 Their movement would increasingly stake its claim among a plethora of new postwar alternatives to Surrealism.

98 Surrealism into Cobra The frst International Conference on Revolutionary Surrealism, where Jorn initially presented the ideas of Høst in public dialogue with Dotremont, took place in October, 1947. The invitation calls the conference “A quick critical study of the Surrealist condition, of the Surrealist state of mind in the present world – in which the ‘S’ of the dollar sign has replaced the German SS.”94 Dotremont considered the conference the high point of Revolutionary Surrealist activity.95 Bob Claessens, a representative of the Belgian Communist Party, gave a lecture, and the heads of the various international participating groups addressed the frst national Belgian congress of Communist artists that took place immediately afterward in Antwerp. Along with the French Revolutionary Surrealists came Zdenek Lorenc and the painter Josef Istler, representatives of the Ra group from Prague. Lorenc’s “Declaration of the Ra Group” in the Revolutionary Surrealist Bulletin declares the “absolute value of automatism,” but mistrusts theories proposed a priori and the “obscure” ideas proposed by Breton upon his return to France. “Our base is dialectical materialism,” he writes, “and we fnd ourselves in a country moving toward socialism.” The artistic situation is not the same in Czechoslovakia and in the West: the relationship of political and economic forces with cultural forces is completely different. With you, to speak generally, the role of these is destructive, while with us it is constructive (with us, the Communist Party is the strongest party, the governmental party, with you, it is an oppositional party).96 These ideas would be severely tested after the Soviet-backed coup of 1948, which prevented the Ra artists from leaving Czechoslovakia again and cut off all contact between them and Cobra. A few engravings that Istler had left behind in Brussels were shown in the 1949 Stedelijk exhibition. Marie Godet observes that the 1947 conference “crystallized various currents without managing to unify them.”97 Predictably, tensions between members with divergent aesthetic approaches and political backgrounds ensued. Dotremont attempted to rally Belgian Surrealists including Nougé, Magritte, and Marcel Mariën to Revolutionary Surrealism. However, the older Surrealists denounced Jorn when he presented an animated discourse on “folklore” at the conference in Brussels. A cultural misunderstanding ensued from the contrast of Jorn’s polemical presentation (in halting French) of positions on popular art developed by the Høst group, and the Belgian Surrealists’ assumption that all promotion of folklore was Fascist.98 In contrast to the celebration of folklore under Fascism, however, Revolutionary Surrealism’s approach was explicitly international, on the model of both Surrealism and communism. The artists explicitly rejected nationalist institutional frameworks, starting during the war when Dotremont defended Picasso in a letter to a Vichy journalist who attacked him in print.99 Jorn would emphasize this point repeatedly in his writings, as when he states in Cobra 6 that “popular art is the art of the global people and a specifcally national art does not exist. The national character is nothing but a variation of the common theme.”100 Eager to reconnect his Danish colleagues with the international postwar scene, Jorn did so by divorcing their work from the Surrealist currents that shaped it in the 1930s. Jorn considered art a process of seeking the unknown consciously modeled on scientifc investigation, a collective model pioneered by Surrealism.101 However, he dismissed postwar Surrealism as both metaphysical because of its retreat from Party politics, and aesthetically traditionalist for its emphasis on representational painting.

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Jorn reportedly told Dotremont upon their frst meeting in 1947 that, “he had never been Surrealist – Surrealism had not taken root in Denmark, where painting had never been literary, where the state of the ‘Surrealist’ spirit was diffused, natural.”102 The comment actively disavows Linien’s important role in introducing Surrealism in Denmark in the 1930s, not to mention the Scandinavian Surrealist art of Wilhelm Freddie, Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen, Elsa Thoresen, and many others in Denmark and Sweden. The Linien artists had already broken with the art of Bjerke Petersen in the 1930s precisely for his over-emphasis on sexuality, the irrational, and the representation of dreams; they preferred a more fundamental, holistic, and open-ended approach that balanced the rational and the irrational. As they describe in the 1945 “New Realism” manifesto of Høst: Our most meaningful and diffcult process of liberation, which has given our art its distinctive appearance, is the transition to the liberation of color, to painterly spontaneity. Color becomes independent of drawing, which arranges itself after color’s demand for extension, a spontaneous sensation.103 While the Høst artists were known as either the “abstract” (abstrakte) or the “spontaneous abstract” (spontane abstrakte) artists, it is also telling that Jorn declares the group’s interest in “the spontaneous-popular” (det spontant-folkelige) in 1951.104 His attempt to bring together spontaneous methods of composition with communist ideas of popular liberation would ground the Cobra approach. Jorn also divorced the Høst interest in mythmaking from the postwar Surrealist idea of a “New Myth” proposed by André Breton in the late 1930s and reiterated in the catalog essay for 1947 Surrealist Exhibition, in part due to its perceived elitism. He felt that Breton attempted to change myth without changing the material aspects of life. Jorn defnes myth as the “explanation and fguration by means of which humans make an event out of lived experiences.”105 Humankind, he argues, must live in an “active state of mythic creation.” He opposes his own “materialist” view that myth develops out of life to the “metaphysical” view that myth, or thought, creates life. Jorn argues that mythologies related to the metaphysical view remain static and fxed in order to ensure a religious order. The task of artists is to oppose this metaphysical/ religious conception of myths, and move from the passive state of belief to the active state of mythic creation.106 The Danish artist Niels Lergaard had earlier proposed the idea of “mythmaking” in Helhesten as a continually evolving process directly opposed to the belief in myth. His idea of mythmaking was allied with the use of abstraction in art to foreground process over fnish.107 Jorn viewed Breton’s “New Myth” as an attempt to impose a belief system. Jorn argued that Breton’s movement was losing its avant-garde status by promoting traditional artistic practices marked too much by metaphysics, literary interests, and the literal representation of dreams.108 Jorn and Høst valued material works over ideas, the physical manifestation of symbols over their literary meaning, and abstraction over fgural representation. Given the diverse artistic approaches of Surrealism, however, this was a simplifcation. In fact, the Danish perspective on “mythmaking” may have been closer than Jorn wanted to admit to Breton’s call for a “New Myth.” In Breton’s view, the idea meant an openness to new ways of thinking, one that must be accompanied by an attitude of “enlightened doubt.” Breton evaded specifc description about the nature of the new myth, but he explicitly opposed the creation of myth to the “cult” belief he

100 Surrealism into Cobra saw exemplifed in Marxism.109 In setting ancient and arcane knowledge in relation to modern creative production the “New Myth” was, Kristoffer Noheden argues, “far from a simple restoration of myths from the past.” Not just a theoretical proposition for the Surrealists, it was also “invested with their hopes of healing the world” after the war.110 At stake for Cobra, then, was whether a society’s healing happened through a regrouping in the private sphere or through an intensifed focus on the material conditions of the world, with art as a catalyst for social change. In March, 1949, Dotremont curated the frst Cobra exhibition in Belgium, The End and the Means (La Fin et les Moyens), at the Séminaire des Arts in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. This show brought the aesthetics of Høst alongside the latest currents in Belgian abstract art. The exhibition was presented in Belgium as both a Cobra show and an exploration of “the surrealist adventure from new perspectives.”111 It featured paintings, drawings, and objects by Else Alfelt, Karel Appel, Ejler Bille, Paul Bourgoignie, Pol Bury, Corneille, Dotremont, Doucet, British painter Stephen Gilbert, Belgian painter Walter Hoeber, Czech artist Istler, Egill Jacobsen, Jorn, Constant, Noiret, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Belgian painters Selim Sasson and Robert Willems, and Indonesian painter Harry Wiggers.112 It also included a small assemblage sculpture by Belgian composer Jacques Calonne. The show’s title pointed toward a holistic unity of form and content, in works that bridged what Dotremont called the “stupid dilemma” of reducing painting either to pure means of “painting, color, forms,” or else subjecting these means to the ends of “idea, dream, subject, landscape.”113 Dotremont emphasized the material spontaneity of the paintings, writing: “to Tristan Tzara, who said poetry is made in the mouth, my Danish, Dutch and Belgian friends respond today with a painting that is made in the hand.”114 These artists, he argues, reject the contradiction embedded in Surrealist painting that focuses on cerebral object lessons instead of automatism. They bring painting back to the founding “raw material” (matière première) conveyed by Surrealist poetry. The show was also historically important for introducing Dotremont to the young Pierre Alechinsky. Alechinsky, in his last year studying book illustration at the academy of La Cambre, was deeply impressed when he walked into the show and met Dotremont in the nearly empty gallery. He had shown his work two years earlier in the same building with the Jeune Peinture Belge group, along with his friend Pol Bury, whose black and white print graced the cover of the second issue of Cobra Dotremont was carrying under his arm (See Figure 0.2). “But your exhibition is much more lively,” he told Dotremont.115 He was deeply impressed with the Cobra artists’ experimental work, above all the memorable word-painting There Are More Things in the Earth of a Painting Than in the Heaven of Aesthetic Theory (Plate 10). Alechinsky would become a crucial editor and organizer of the movement, establishing the Ateliers du Marais with his wife Micky shortly thereafter. Dotremont framed The End and the Means as a direct overturning of Surrealist intellectual snobbery – an attack pointedly aimed at Magritte: There is hardly any of the intellectual irony here any longer that tried to redeem what sensibility could have delivered, that skeptical and ‘scandalous’ wink warning the viewer against a real illusion (this is an apple but this is not an apple), which nevertheless remains the basis of painting. There is no longer that antiviewer complex. Look at us from faraway, do not touch, and actually just leave, you’re too stupid.116

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The art works in the show rejected not only the mystical ideas but also the perceived social privilege of the Surrealists after the Liberation. The famous founding Surrealists, after all, had mostly escaped the wartime travails of the occupation in New York and Mexico. Despite the reality that the Surrealists came from a variety of class backgrounds and mostly failed to make a living off of their creative activities, Dotremont viewed Cobra as a scrappy upstart against the Surrealist establishment. He writes to Noiret: The fantastic Cobra is real, it’s a fantastic poor, while the surreal fantasy is a castle. The genealogy of Surrealism loves its aristocrats, Sade and Lautréamont. Surrealists dream of castles. Cobra does not dream. Cobra crawls, fumbles, and from a black misery makes a colorful reality.117 He praises the outsider status of the Danish spontaneous-abstract artists, describing them as “surrealists like peasants.”118 He notes that their fantastic colors respond to the long Nordic night – an image that could also be understood as a metaphor for the darkness of the war, itself the violent outcome of persistent social inequality in Europe. Dotremont would demonstrate the making of Cobra virtue out of material necessity in his next Brussels exhibition, “The Object Through the Ages” (L’Objet à-Travers les Âges) in the Séminaire des Arts. There, no paintings were shown, only objects (altered or not) and a few drawings. Included were an alarm clock, some change arranged according to size on a pile of velvet, and a crushed hair curler submitted by Calonne. No objects were listed in the catalog or signed in any way, making these untransformed things more Dada-inspired readymades than poetic Surrealist found objects.119 Noiret recalls that the objects were all everyday, perishable items, exhibited without any “museological” intentions. The public was invited to add things in, and each of the participants retrieved their contributions afterward, so that everything disappeared at the end.120 The exhibition’s display of ordinary objects relates to Dotremont’s reading of French neo-Marxist critic Henri Lefebvre’s infuential 1947 book Critique of Everyday Life (Critique de la Vie Quotidienne), which praises the communalism of peasant festivals and critiques contemporary society for its social alienation and systematic inequality.121 Most memorably, Dotremont placed potatoes in a case and a basket of dirty laundry on the foor. He later recalls, “I have to say that we were so miserable that we were waiting impatiently for the end of the exhibition so we could eat them.”122 The potatoes literally inserted the provincial into the space of the cosmopolitan gallery, manifesting Cobra’s communist perspective by materializing its links to rural and working-class life. Its presentation of the potatoes as a readymade, a neo-Dada thing rather than an aesthetically transformed object, differed radically from the poetic way Surrealist artists depicted them; for example, Miró’s visionary abstract paintings like Potato (1928), or Brassaï’s transformations of the potato into monstrous creatures in his “Circumstantial Magic” (Magique-circonstancielle) photographs in Minotaure.123 The Cobra artists displayed readymades as a temporary intervention, transgressing the notion of the gallery as a guardian of beauty and permanence. Cobra’s potatoes signifed that human material needs preceded desires. This return to Dada anti-art tactics broke with the hyper-aestheticization and esoteric symbolism they associated with Surrealism at the time. To that end, the Revolutionary Surrealists responded vehemently against the 1947 International Exhibition of Surrealism curated by Breton and Marcel Duchamp at

102 Surrealism into Cobra Galerie Maeght in Paris. The show was designed as an initiation rite, with a series of “ordeals” facing the spectator on various levels, including a “Hall of Superstitions” and a labyrinth containing 12 altars designed by Victor Brauner, Wifredo Lam, Breton, Matta, Toyen, and others with objects relating to Vodou, tarot, games, and magic. The emphasis in the 1947 Surrealist exhibition on art as a ritual experience or a cosmopolitan collection of world cultic symbols made the Surrealist “new myth” look like an exotic mythology, and thus the antithesis of mythmaking as a social and material engagement. The Revolutionary Surrealists protested outside the gallery, wielding a hilarious pamphlet parodying the exhibition by Arnaud and Dotremont called Surrealism in 947. Where the famous cover of the 1947 Surrealism exhibition features Marcel Duchamp’s three-dimensional artifcial breast and the invitation “please touch,” the 947 pamphlet is graced with a photomontage of Duchamp in a dancer’s pose and a cutout of a breast on his chest, labeled “THE COVER BY MARCEL DUCHAMP SEEN FROM 4 METERS” (Figure 2.3). The back cover reads “PLEASE TOUCH [or colloquially, PLEASE RECEIVE] 50 FRANCS.” The second page includes a comical list of “Ancient Countries Represented” including “Confusion, Verbiage, Occultism, Myth, Switzerland, Pictorial Integration, […] Inconsistency, Sycophancy, [and] Anticommunism.” Dotremont’s text, signed André NORMAND, “In Full Curtain,” (En Plein Rideau) parodies the title of both Breton’s text “Behind the Curtain,” (Derrière le rideau) and Magritte’s declaration “Surrealism in Broad Daylight” (Le surréalisme en pleine soleil). It opens with the rambling salvo: To those who still doubt Surrealism’s strange surpassing ability, the surpassing ability that a war whose horror rivalled its absurdity has left surprisingly intact […] the exhibition of 1947 the doors of which have just been opened oiled by this special sense of mystery of which I know the secret will not fail to deliver a lethal blow.124 The text parodies Breton as a ridiculous pedant proclaiming himself master of mystery while lining his pockets with the exorbitant price of his catalog. The installations in the exhibition were criticized by a wide range of artists. The Belgian Surrealists considered Breton’s appropriation of prophets and religious rites unacceptable, as Paul Nougé writes in 1948: Here come the tarots, horoscopes, premonitions, hysteria, objective chance, black masses, the kabbalah, voodoo rites, sclerotic folklore and ceremonial magic. It is now out of the question to cite André Breton, he’s a reject.125 Several major Nordic Surrealists, including Erik Olson, Rita Kernn-Larsen, and Bjerke Petersen, also left the movement behind as a result of the war. Kernn-Larsen wondered, from the viewpoint of the London Blitz, why paint inner reality’s visions when it was being overtaken by external events? After waking up to fnd the Marie Curie hospital across the street bombed to ruins, she writes, It was a horrible sight. Everywhere in the park, the remnants of the hospital were spread to all the winds, and in the trees you could fnd parts of chairs, tables and other equipment. At this point reality had surpassed Surrealism.126

Figure 2.3 Le Surrealisme en 947: Patalogue Offciel de L’Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Surrealism in 947: Offcial Patalogue of the International Exhibition of Surrealism), pamphlet cover. Paris, 1947. 24 cm. Fluid Archives.

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The 1947 exhibition included a pool table where the artists played at the opening, an action that only seemed to compound their distance from wartime events. Jorn would later recall: The shocks inficted on the European audience by the Dadaist and Surrealist artists paled […] in comparison with the experience of the horrors, destruction, torture, and mass murder of the Second World War. Nevertheless, after the war the Surrealists thought they could continue where they had left off. André Breton returned from America and began playing billiards on a table which he had installed in an art exhibition. This no longer had the shocking effect on the audience that he had expected. During the evacuation of Dunkirk, as the war was raging around him, a young man, really just a boy, was going in circles around a billiard table in a run-down and derelict public house on the outskirts of town. He did not know what to do and so he set up a game. This was the writer Christian Dotremont. Several years later, when he encountered the work of Breton in an exhibition, he fnally understood that he belonged to another world, that he was a representative of another kind of art, un art autre, as the typical aesthete [Michel] Tapié calls it. The era of Surrealism was over.127 Jorn’s recollection echoes that of the postwar Danish and Belgian Surrealists as they redefned their relationship to a movement that seemed to be staging its own elaborate funeral. Soon after Arnaud and Dotremont distributed Surrealism in 947, however, the French and Belgian groups parted ways. Arnaud, Passeron, and the other French members no longer wanted to call themselves Surrealists, which Dotremont continued to do.128 The French group was also forced to leave Revolutionary Surrealism behind when Party offcials told them that autonomous factions would not be tolerated by the French Communist Party.129 The French section declared their independence from both Surrealism and communism in favor of artistic advancement on the basis of Marxist ideals independent of the Party, or “dialectical materialism in itself.”130 The conference of the “Documentation Center for Avant-Garde Art” that Arnaud organized with Jaguer, Max Bucaille, and René Passeron in Paris in November, 1948, was to sort out these differences among the various factions. Instead, it led to the walkout that resulted in Cobra. Tired of theoretical polemics after the conference ended, Dotremont’s group reconvened at Café Notre Dame and signed the Cobra manifesto, “The Cause Was Understood” or “The Case Was Closed” (“La Cause Était Entendue,” referring to the Revolutionary Surrealist manifesto “La Cause Est Entendue”). The manifesto declares a new “organic” collaboration that rejects dogmatic theories. As Noiret recalls, their intent was not anti-intellectual per se, but rather a call for intellectuals to take full account of sensory reality and action: It was not an anti-intellectualism in the sense that we hear it too often today, that is to say a condemnation of intelligent activity. Rather the rejection of a certain technocratic form of intelligence, where the intellect loses its sensible foundations, detaches itself from the hand, the eye and the ear to become a sort of permanent commentary that has forgotten this fundamental origin.131 In the end, both groups would agree on the need to leave behind both Surrealism and the Communist Party. Cobra’s break with the Belgian Party would occur as a result of specifc events in Brussels.

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The Belgian Surrealists, working in a more intimate cultural milieu, were much closer to their Communist Party leaders than in France. Magritte and his circle had joined the Party in 1945, and were able to work with the Communists, in Magritte’s case for just a few years before the Party publicly rejected all abstract and Surrealist art.132 While Jorn, Constant, and Dotremont disagreed with Surrealism’s break with the Party in “Inaugural Rupture,” the avowed Trotskyist politics Breton expressed in texts like “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” were actually closer to Cobra’s own unorthodox perspective than the increasingly strict offcial Party doctrines. While the Revolutionary Surrealists in France were forced out by the French Communist Party already in 1947, the Belgian group would be attacked by their Party as it evolved toward a dogmatic support for Socialist Realism in 1949. Dotremont and Noiret were on the editorial committee of the Belgian edition of the Communist culture journal Les Lettres Françaises – a journal founded in 1941 as a clandestine resistance publication and later funded by the French Communist Party. In late 1949, critic Fernand Lefebvre published an article there proclaiming Socialist Realism the only possible Communist art, without showing it to the editorial board frst.133 He directly criticized the painting of Alechinsky and that of his abstract colleagues. Lefebvre had already counseled Alechinsky, whose work he initially praised, to stop his “formal” experiments and paint images to bear “witness to the great combat, the great hope of the workers” in an article in Le Drapeau Rouge in 1947.134 Alechinsky would never forget his dismissive advice “to follow not the line of [his] pencil but that of the Communist Party.”135 Lefebvre demanded that the abstract artists emulate the representational painters endorsed by the Party like the French Communist artist André Fougeron, whose somber works were inspired by the realism of Courbet and other 19th-century painters. “For progressive painters,” he writes, “two paths are not possible. A single one imposes itself: to put their talent, their technique, the traditions inherited from the glorious masters at the service of the people.”136 Fougeron’s large painting Parisian Women at the Market (Parisiennes au Marché, 1947–1948) was the subject of a major debate about the methods of “new realism” when shown at the Salon d’Autumne in Paris in 1948.137 The French Communist Party promoted his work heavily over the next few years. Alechinsky and Dotremont, with their Bachelardian materialist views on how to present reality in art, reacted viscerally to being told what to paint and responded with their own polemics. These included Alechinsky’s declaration, made into a text-based print after he left the party, “It’s by force that we become Fougeron” (C’est en forçant qu’on devient Fougeron).138 Dotremont published a biting response to Lefebvre’s position in his tract “‘Socialist Realism’ Against the Revolution” (Le ‘Réalisme Socialiste’ Contre la Révolution). There, he notes that Lefebvre’s position was more restrictive than that of the Belgian Communist Party itself, which had not yet taken an offcial position on Socialist Realism. His text systematically counters the numerous critiques of both Surrealism and Revolutionary Surrealism published by Lefebvre in a series of articles in Les Lettres Françaises. Dotremont responds that, unlike Socialist Realism, Surrealism was at least an attempt, the only collective attempt in any case, to arrive at an organically revolutionary art, a dialectically revolutionary art, a totally revolutionary art, an art revolutionary from the ‘form’ to the ‘content’ (as they say), revolutionary from the ‘cry of revolt’ to the consciousness, revolutionary from ‘magnetic felds’ to ‘social realities.’139

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Dotremont declared at the Party meeting of November, 1949, that abstract art was not the enemy, demanding, “what is the red fag, if not an abstract rectangle that makes millions of hearts tremble?”140 He argues: “Here is a party that presents itself as the liberator of the people and which is hostile to popular art, and which only presents to the people the lowest products of petit bourgeois art, of the worst paltry realism.”141 With these objections, Dotremont and Alechinsky left the Communist Party permanently behind. Alechinsky writes at the time that it is useless to keep corresponding with colleagues of such bad faith. He states that after rereading the “political position” of Surrealism, he realizes that Cobra is facing the exact same situation.142 In a letter responding to Lefebvre, Alechinsky states that his artwork is a “bouquet” he offers to the revolution, but by means of “a spontaneous art free from illustration.”143 Much later, Alechinsky would refect that their attachment to communism after the war came out of nostalgia for the Party’s history and their own inexperience.144 Like the Surrealists, they had to learn about the differences between art and Party politics the hard way. Dotremont and Alechinsky’s polemics against the Party rankled Constant and Jorn, who still saw themselves as closely allied to communism. Jorn had been a member of the Danish Communist Party since his student days in the early 1930s.145 Between 1948 and 1949 he was thoroughly engrossed with a 600-page tome on Marxist aesthetics (the second third of which was published in 1971 as Magi og Skønne Kunster). He was an unorthodox communist since his early days studying with syndicalist Christian Christiansen in Silkeborg, and believed that art and politics were parallel discourses that continually informed each other. Constant, who had also explored Marxist theory in depth during the war, wrote a letter to Jorn expressing his anger that Dotremont would critique Socialist Realism, with which he and Jorn had a lot in common.146 Jorn wrote to Constant of a letter he received from Dotremont stating that, as Jorn paraphrased Dotremont, “The Belgian Communist artists are Fascists we must crush. They make the same mistakes as the Nazi Party regarding art.”147 Jorn criticizes Dotremont for acting as a provocateur in Brussels. He tells Constant that they do not need to join the Communist Party but they must remain amicable with it, so that art is not forever excluded from it – important advice that may have gone unheeded by Dotremont. Jorn proposes that the Cobra artists not break entirely with Socialist Realism precisely because it is based on progressive politics: “We must accept Socialist Realism because there are revolutionary artists that practice it, but at the same time we must break its monopoly. That is a Marxist point of view.”148 Jorn’s conciliatory attitude was strategic. Several of his letters to Constant involved attempts to convince the Dutch artist not to leave Dotremont behind completely, not to give up on the Cobra project. A break with Dotremont would mean losing their main connection to the cultural dialogue in France and Belgium. The fact that the Cobra project survived another year is signifcant in itself given the diffculties of coordinating artists in so many different countries. These countries also included Germany. Much of Jorn and Constant’s epistolary discussion related to the relationship with Karl-Otto Götz (Figure 2.4), the editor of the German avant-garde journal Meta in Hannover who Jorn invited to edit Cobra 5. This was to be an issue devoted to “realism” in response to the postwar polemics around the topic. Jorn sent Götz his German text “Socialist Herrings, Realistic Oil Paintings, and Popular Art” (Sozialistische Heringe, Realistische Ölfarben und Volkskunst), proclaiming that art cannot be limited to a profession or a craft, even if

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Figure 2.4 Karl-Otto Götz, Zwei Figuren (Two Figures), 1946. Gouache on paper, 25 × 37.5 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

craft is also a form of art. “There exists above all only one concrete artistic reality,” he asserts, “and that is the artwork’s real, objective effect on people.”149 Jorn based his interpersonal conception of art’s engagement with reality on the materialist realism developed by Høst, which the Danes called a “New Realism” in 1945, based on “materials’ natural possibilities of elaboration, and on free human development.”150 Jorn restates this view in the second issue of Cobra: “The true realism, the materialist realism, […] searches for the forms of reality common to the senses of all men.”151 Jorn’s invitation to bring Götz – and by extension, German artists – into the Cobra fold meant, as he explained to Constant, expanding its social network and connecting to the prewar avant-garde of the Bauhaus, so important to the Danish Linien artists. This move caused some major tension within the movement, because Constant did not take Dotremont’s role as general editor of Cobra seriously and sent his texts for the journal directly to Götz, leading to another dispute among the three Cobra organizers. Jorn stood by his larger goals: Against professional sectarianism and against the sectarianism of style and of theories. Against the reign of the bourgeois aesthetic, for a positive goal of art: art at the service of life. Against the isolation of art in life.152 Cobra attempted to connect with the realities of daily life in 1950, building its network among artists whose freedom was by no means secure after the war, above all

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in Germany where, as Jorn notes in the same letter, the Western authorities were no longer allowing communists to traverse the country. What was most important to Jorn was to keep the movement open to a contemporary interpretation of realism that did not exclude other possibilities and welcomed international participation from artists on both sides of the Cold War confict. Jorn did, however, stand up for Cobra’s materialist interpretation of realism. Socialist Realism was just one of many realisms gaining ascendancy in the postwar period, from Cobra’s material realism to Surrealist interpretations of academic naturalism. In supporting painters like Fougeron, the French and Belgian Party followed the Socialist Realism promoted by the Soviet regime since the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934. The signifcance of realism and its associations with leftist politics were again becoming hotly contested, as they had been in the 1930s, when Surrealism frst rejected realism.153 Cobra’s materialist approach contested Surrealism’s metaphysical naturalism and Soviet Socialist Realism’s idealism, as well as the pathetic scenes of misery in European Socialist Realists like Fougeron. Jorn specifes in his Cobra text “Forms Understood as a Language” (Les Formes Conçues comme Langage) that all the naturalistic painting approaches were outmoded because they are not about realism but “illusion,” founded on classical principles. “It is the metaphysic of classicism that has succeeded in spiritualizing and intellectualizing art,” he writes, in another unspoken dig at Surrealism.154 Surrealists like Fini, Magritte, and Delvaux revived naturalistic methods derived from both sign painting and academic art to present dreamlike scenes or metaphysical themes, which, at worst, devolved into shallow images of beauty, ironic brain teasers, or esoteric narratives that threatened to alienate viewers or lose touch with everyday life. Communist artists internationally promoted by the Party used techniques pioneered in 19th-century Realism to present heroic or tragic images of laborers, with whom they assumed observers would automatically sympathize. Dotremont felt that Jorn and Constant did not understand how dogmatic the support for Stalinist politics and approaches to art was in Belgium and France. In the Danish Communist Party, artists were historically given more freedom. In the end, however, the artists moved ahead with their artistic projects despite their different opinions on the Party. Jorn’s letters to Constant following the 1947 Revolutionary Surrealist conference express his excitement for furthering their artistic collaboration toward a free, spontaneous art based on Marxist principles. Jorn expressed his admiration for what the Dutch artist was doing as well as his reservations about the number of “bad Belgian painters” he met in Brussels (presumably the Jeune Peinture Belge group). He counsels Constant to found a permanent exhibition society with his Dutch friends, on the basis of Høst in Denmark, one that would exhibit together at the same time every year, and publish a catalog that would also function as an art journal to explain the group’s aesthetic interests to a Dutch audience. It helps, Jorn writes, to create a local base to make possible international activity.155 The result was Constant’s founding of the Dutch Experimental Group and its journal, Refex.

Refex and Experimentalism The Dutch painters Appel, Constant, and Corneille formed the Refex group in July, 1948, just a few months before the foundation of Cobra. The group and its eponymous journal both resonated with the theories of Jorn and Dotremont and brought new

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tension into Cobra. The neo-Marxist perspective of Jorn, Dotremont, and Constant was countered by a strong resistance to theory in Appel, Corneille, and the artists who joined Refex a few months later: Eugène Brands, Jan Nieuwenhuys, Anton Rooskens, and Theo Wolvecamp. Poets Gerrit Kouwenaar, Jan Elburg, and Lucebert also participated in the group’s meetings. Their poetry refected their unique engagement with Surrealist aesthetics and anti-colonial perspectives. Lucebert published his frst poem, “Love Letter to Our Tortured Bride Indonesia,” in the second issue of Refex in February, 1949. The poem is a powerful anti-colonial lament, colored with surreal imagery and brutal rhythms, in reaction to the Dutch military operation in the East Indies in December, 1948. An excerpt reads: I wrenched the snakes of my intenstines in the loudspeaker forests I pulled the sick helmets from the hatebirth no one cut, the pitchers gunpowder On all the draught kegs from liverpool to lisbon I sowed my lips gold And with the gulping of the stock exchange I poured the oilsyrupdrilled eastern blood Here it goes well here it goes well, the spices aroused our stomach cloves, it gurgled Gamelan […] my skin cried from your pepper […] sarina der dessa.156 Such visceral channeling of the violent realities of colonialism was worthy of the Surrealists, who repeatedly attacked the colonial violence of France starting with their collective protest against the war in Morocco in 1925. Equally relevant is Aimé Cesaire’s fercely critical 1950 Discourse on Colonialism (discussed in Chapter 1). In the context of Indonesia’s War of Independence against the Dutch, Lucebert decried the “fables about patriotism and the honor of soldiers” that made even some of his own friends “prepared to fght against the blacks,” meaning the colonized Indonesians.157 Lucebert also spoke memorably at the controversial opening of the Cobra exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1949, where his own “word-paintings” and parts of the poem to Indonesia were hung on the bars of the Poet’s Cage.158 Lucebert’s speech elaborated on the infuence of Surrealism, but more importantly, on the signifcance of capturing the new material realities of their time: We have been infuenced by the French Surrealists and by the various schools that started emerging in England during the war. But for us and for our work it is reality that is and remains the matter of true importance since it is not our intention to create a literary style but rather to stand naked in the literally absurd reality of late bourgeois-capitalist society, to live this hellish reality in all our fbres and reproduce it with all the expressive means we have acquired. […] We, dear listeners, are therefore, you might say, the very frst literary nudists.159 The Dutch poets of the Experimental Group, who later became known as the “Fiftiers” (Viftigers), took inspiration from the fantastic imagery of Surrealism but also the concrete rhythms and directness of popular rhymes and non-Western lyrics, producing a poetic equivalent to the brutal and childlike painting of Dutch Cobra. Surrealism never had as strong a presence in the Netherlands as it did in either Denmark or Belgium. Constant and Eugène Brands were the two Dutch artists most deeply engaged with Surrealism, including its political critiques of colonialism

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and ethnographic approach to non-Western art. Brands was the earliest adopter of Surrealism as shown by his profound interest in world art, music, masks, and his varied artistic methods, which included automatic drawing and painting as well as assemblages. Brands alternated between abstraction and Surrealism in his early career. He studied at the Arts and Crafts School (Kunstnijverheidsschool) and worked briefy as a poster designer in his native Amsterdam. In 1938, he was struck by the exhibition Abstract Art (Abstracte Kunst) at the Stedelijk Museum, which featured the work of Arp, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian in a landmark show. He also encountered Surrealism for the frst time that same year, through the catalog that accompanied an exhibition at Galerie Robert in Amsterdam, the famous Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism (Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme) produced in Paris. The radical assemblages and other art work featured there only cemented his sense that modern art and the art of colonized peoples around the world were strongly linked. He began producing Surrealist photomontages cut from mass-media journals. These culminated in The Mask of God, a 1944 montage of war imagery in the shape of a mask with hollow eyes, featuring torn photographs of Indonesian children alongside pictures of tanks and headlines proclaiming “death sentences.”160 He also published four antiNazi political cartoons in 1939 in the journal The Freethinker (De Vrijdenkar). He wrote for the journal in defance of his father’s rigid Catholicism.161 Brands’s views paralleled the anti-Catholic attitudes, rejection of Nazism, and critique of Western high culture that defned international Surrealism. Brands felt a kinship with non-Western artists and musicians since hearing the sound of Indonesian gamelan music on a British radio program at age ten, a revelation that he later says inspired “a feeling of coming home.”162 Although he studied graphic design, Brands was self-taught as a painter. He was inspired by artists who worked with natural materials and lived, as he said, “closer to nature.” Unlike earlier primitivists like Gauguin or the German Expressionists, however, he did not fetishize people of color so much as internalize what he admired in their cultures, based on the knowledge that he had, even if his ability to collect cultural products was determined by his own privileged access to non-Western objects brought by military and colonial employees to Europe. He collected art works from the South Pacifc and Africa starting in 1929, through friendships with several dealers, including Louis Lemaire. Lemaire was one of the earliest dealers of African and Oceanic art in the Netherlands. He bought much of his collection from sailors and people returning from the colonies in the ports of Rotterdam. Brands worked in Lemaire’s Tribal Art Gallery for a couple years in the late 1930s, becoming well-acquainted with the art works and developing his personal collection. By the 1940s, Brands had become an expert in world music. He owned hundreds of records from Thailand, Iraq, China, Indochina, Indonesia, Africa, and black American spirituals and jazz that he would share at local music salons. His article “Authentic Folk Music” (Authentieke Volksmuziek) in Refex rejects the Western confnement of music to Sundays and special occasions, asserting that “we want to live and experience the festival every day, not just on Sunday.” He believes that music should not be divided into serious and popular forms: “Living, working and singing fow from each other, in the same inspired regularity and rhythm.”163 He played his record of Pygmy songs recorded in the Belgian Congo at the opening of the 1949 Cobra exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum – he managed to save them from the melée during Dotremont’s speech by shutting the gramophone cover, only to have it lock until a warden could

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be found to “release” the music. He calls the singing “beautiful, deeply human and genuinely simple music” (prachtige, diep-menselijke en oprecht-eenvoudige muziek), in line with his interest in seeking a more fundamental expression of humanity across world cultures.165 His deep respect for non-Western art paralleled that of the Cobra artists Ernest and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (whom he did not know) at the same time. In 1945, Lemaire asked Brands to draw his ethnographic art collection for a planned book he was writing on masks from around the world. The resulting images Brands made to accompany the never-published manuscript present a fascinating catalog of masks from cultures on six continents, including Europe.166 Brands adamantly defended the value of traditional African and Oceanic art on a par with anything in the Western tradition, and noted the way designs on objects from New Guinea in his collection compared to the imagery of Paul Klee. “How dare they call this primitive art?” he exclaimed, as his daughter Eugenie Brands recalls. “That’s stupid and presumptuous, for this is of the purest beauty. Who could make something as beautiful as this nowadays?”167 Brands’s appreciation for Oceanic and African art would soon inspire his own Surrealist experiments. Like many artists during the Dutch occupation, Brands had to stop painting due to lack of materials. He turned to making clay beads with his wife Toos and selling them for money.168 He channeled the playful and performative aspects of Surrealism when he began making his own papier-mâché masks with Toos for fun. He allowed the papier-mâché to dry, placed the masks outside on the roof for a while to give them a weathered appearance, and then decorated them with crushed eggshells, chicken bones, anthracite, and feathers bought at Waterlooplein market (Plate 11). He then asked Lemaire’s son Frits, a photographer and close friend of his, to photograph himself and Toos wearing the masks and posing with them. Such performative actions anticipate photographic works made decades later by artists like Cindy Sherman, but also draw directly on Dada and Surrealist precedents. For the French Surrealists, wearing the masks they collected became a premise for playful actions and posing for the camera. A famous 1936 photograph by Roland Penrose depicts E. L. T. Mesens and Paul Eluard wearing a Congo Songye mask and a mask from Papua New Guinea, both masks featured in the London International Surrealist Exhibition.169 As photographer Man Ray observed, “I need more than one thing, at least two. Two things that are not related in any way. The creative act for me rests in the coupling of these two different things in order to produce a plastic poem.”170 Brands and Lemaire’s photographs indeed produce such poetic cross-cultural encounters. In one masked photograph, Brands holds his infant daughter Eugenie, who looks bemused at the enormous painted face looming over her.171 The display of men in suits or other signs of Western normalcy, in this case a baby, juxtaposed with radically out-of-place elements like the masks was characteristic of Surrealism as a whole, and informed Brands’s wide-ranging early experiments. Unlike Mesens and Eluard, though, Brands produced the masks as personal objects rather than appropriating objects from other cultures. Brands’s interest in the simplicity and materiality of non-Western art informed his evolution over the 1940s toward an abstract painting that expressed his own beliefs about spiritual connections between human beings and the larger cosmos. In the early 1940s, Brands exhibited detailed naturalistic drawings of objects found on the beach in the town hall at Zandvoort, arranged to suggest a poetic sense of the Surrealist uncanny. Also during the war, he made much freer automatic-Surrealist drawings of abstract forms in ink and charcoal. Willem Sandberg, who saw the show at Zandvoort, 164

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invited him to exhibit a few years later in the “Young Painters” exhibition with Appel, Corneille, and Rooskens at the Stedelijk in 1946. He dedicated an entire room to Brands’s work, featuring 60 objects including large drawings called “Cosmologies,” now destroyed. He painted these constellations of stars and cosmic imagery on huge sheets of wrapping paper on the foor of his apartment. The related gouache paintings that still exist from 1944 anticipate his later paintings in their glowing forms and abstract imagery produced spontaneously and without a model, yet suggesting the parallels of microscopic and macroscopic imagery and the mystical connections among people and things Brands attempted to convey in his art. “Soul, emotion is what’s important for me,” he says. “Even a violet and the tiniest fy have an existence. Scientists may be able to send an object to the Moon, but they can’t make a caterpillar.”172 Brands intuitively recognized the vital qualities of the inanimate world in a way that anticipated later theories of “new materialism.” A key proponent of this approach, political theorist Jane Bennett, proposes that a deep recognition of the “marvelous vitality of bodies human and nonhuman, natural and artifactual” can inspire an “affective attachment” to the world rather than a disconnected critique of its problems. Her proposal that “joy can propel ethics,” that wonder and exhilaration are directly linked to positive transformation in the world, seems to parallel the underlying beliefs of Cobra artists who attempted to animate artistic materials as a comment on contemporary society.173 None, perhaps, did so with such optimism and excitement as Brands. Brands became a part of the Dutch Experimental Group in 1948 despite his own reservations; Constant visited him no less than four times before he was convinced to join the group. He attended regular meetings and occasionally hosted the group, but would only be a part of Cobra from 1948 to the opening scandal in 1949 at the Stedelijk, when Brands’s Congo recordings were threatened. Brands was already having misgivings about Constant’s “dictatorial” behavior and the competitiveness of the three Dutch Cobra founders – especially Appel, who would often hang his work in the best places or take someone’s work off the wall and replace it with his own before the exhibition opened.174 The optimistic attitude Brands expressed in his Refex manifesto “To the Point” (quoted in the Introduction) contrasted directly with the critical Marxism of Constant’s own manifesto. After the 1949 show closed and Sandberg offered to share the profts with the artists, Brands recalls that Appel and Aldo van Eyck came to his house to convince him to donate all the funds to establish a house in Paris for the Experimental Group. When he disagreed, they shouted at him, and although he went along with their plan in the end, only Appel and Corneille would go to Paris.175 Brands, along with Wolvecamp, Rooskens, and the Dutch poets, decided to break with the Cobra group after the Stedelijk scandal, even if they would occasionally show in later exhibitions with Constant and the others. The dissenting artists and poets were not interested in politicizing their work. They objected in part to the fact that Dotremont decided to deliver a long theoretical lecture instead of the poems he was supposed to read by himself and Edouard Jaguer at the opening. In fact, Dotremont’s text makes reference to archaeological discoveries of ancient human cultures in the Soviet Union, declaring: Just as the Soviet scientists were seeking the traces of ancient Khorezmian civilizations, the experimental artists assembled here are seeking the oldest traces of

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humankind, footsteps effaced by the sands of the formalist desert. Like the investigations of the Soviet scientists into the ancient Khorezmian civilizations, the investigations of experimental artists may well not be of any immediate interest for the transformation of the world, but they are indispensable nonetheless.176 Dotremont was trying to defend the fundamental signifcance of Cobra’s investigations across the shallow political divides of the Cold War, but his speech shocked the Dutch audience for its repeated mentions of the Soviet Union in French. As Jan Elburg describes, the artists and poets Brands, Rooskens, Wolvecamp, Lucebert, Schierbeek, and Kouwenaar sent a statement to the newspaper De Telegraaf after the event declaring themselves opposed to Dotremont’s “Soviet” comments, “against a piece with this trend being read aloud in a benevolent public building.”177 They publicly distanced themselves from Cobra as an avant-garde of provocation, soundly decried in the Dutch press as a bunch of amateurs and daubers who, according to the headlines, incited a “Trotskyist riot.”178 Even if their dissent was based on a misunderstanding of Dotremont’s text, it was the result of ongoing tensions and competing ambitions, at a time when Brands was pursuing more harmonious goals in his art. Brands produced signifcant paintings, drawings, collages, and assemblages as part of Dutch Cobra. One of the most important works was his monumental painting Passion Written Down II (Plate 12). This banner-like painting, produced with canvas and materials donated by Willem Sandberg for the 1949 exhibition, both exemplifes Brands’s short-lived participation in Cobra and sets a precedent for the larger, more momentous scale of his abstract imagery from the mid-1950s onward. One of three large-scale paintings produced for the show alongside Constant’s Barricade and Appel’s People and Animals (see cover image), Passion Written Down II forms a much less strident, more contemplative impression that would come to exemplify Brands’s mature approach. Its composition is adapted from the easel painting Passion Written Down I (Plate 13), next to which it was shown in the 1949 exhibition, as if the painter cut a vertical swath down the center of the smaller canvas and enlarged it to monumental scale. The visible bits of red, yellow, and blue in the smaller work relate to the major impact on Brands of seeing Mondrian’s last, unfnished painting Victory BoogieWoogie in the Stedelijk in 1945. Mondrian’s energetic work breaks with the purity of his 1930s grid paintings by referencing American popular music, and features textured areas and collage elements that Brands – in contrast to fellow Experimentalists like Constant who rejected Mondrian – admired as a kind of “anti-painting.” Both paintings recall the non-Western art in Brands’s collection in their ochre, white, and black colors. The skull-like face at upper left in the smaller painting may be a direct reference to a shrunken head from New Guinea that was one of the artist’s most valued possessions, but the rest of the forms reference his collection only indirectly. The skull shape is not present in the large banner. In fact, Brands based the composition of the larger work on a relatively empty area of the smaller one, deliberately sidelining the ethnographic reference of the skull and making room, instead, for a greater fuidity and openness. He said later that “a completely new freedom of expression came to him” with the large painting.179 Its signifcant scale and the consequent magnifcation of compositional forms into more meditative, foating areas within it encouraged Brands to simplify his compositions over the next several years. His later work displays powerful forms in vivid, glowing colors that foat over and often seem to emerge out of the surfaces of his paintings like cosmological bodies.

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The later paintings express the continually changing relationships among materials and living beings that defnes existence according to the ancient Heraclitan concept of πάντα ῥεῖ (“panta rhei” or “everything fows”) that Brands referenced throughout his life. The birth of Eugenie in 1947 helped Brands move past the gloom of the war years and decide defnitively to produce an optimistic art inspired by the fundamental human connections among people. During the period when she was about three to ten years old, Brands made drawings with her and collected her drawings, appreciating their vivid color and simplicity. He even claimed that it was impossible to tell the difference between his work and hers.180 He produced in the early 1950s a colorful series of paintings of foating fgures, walking buildings, and fantastic creatures and birds that synthesize his interests in the visual patterns of non-Western art, the magical drawings of Klee, and the ongoing Cobra fascination with children’s art at a moment of increasing optimism not only for Brands, but also postwar Dutch culture more generally. Yet also in 1947, Brands published a text on Surrealism in a Dutch poetry journal proclaiming the movement’s importance. He writes, “Surrealism hides a little sense and a little madness, a lust for life alongside a craving for security in death, construction and destruction, the immortal urge to know: truth.”181 The publication of this text just before the formation of the Experimental Group suggests that the Dutch artists never defnitively broke with Surrealism, in parallel to the Belgian artists but for opposite reasons. Surrealism had never become dominant in the Dutch literary or artistic scene in the frst place, so the Dutch artists transformed it to their own ends. Unlike Brands, Constant explicitly condemned Breton’s Surrealism even as his painting evolved in dialogue with the Dutch Experimental Group (see Plate 9). Constant’s “Manifesto” in Refex 1 explains his view of the failures of the Surrealist movement: while Surrealism uncovered a “new source of inspiration” in the unconscious and the groundbreaking techniques of automatism, he writes, “Breton’s movement suffocated in its own intellectualism,” thus failing to accomplish its goals of social and artistic liberation. Constant was also critical of Surrealism’s class pretensions: “Surrealism was an art of ideas and as such also infected by the disease of past class culture, while the movement failed to destroy the values this culture proclaimed in its own justifcation.”182 When Dotremont writes to Constant in October, 1948, encouraging him to join the new Revolutionary Surrealist movement, he emphasizes that Belgian Surrealism was independent from Breton, and that not a single Surrealist in Belgium was not also a communist.183 Constant replies that his group is not against Surrealism properly speaking, but against the so-called Surrealism that has taken its name. Specifcally, he condemns Dalí, Magritte, and Yves Tanguy for their naturalistic, imitative form, praising instead the work of Miró and Klee.184 In their theoretical statements, both Constant and Jorn reframed the Surrealist movement’s emphasis on the liberation of desire in everyday life from a sexual to a neo-Marxist framework. Breton’s group foregrounded polymorphous sexuality as intimately linked to the liberation of a more general idea of “desire.” Their use of the term derived from the sexual impulse or “libido” described by Freud as the foundation of a wide range of human behavior formerly seen as divorced from sexuality.185 Constant breaks with the Surrealist psychoanalytic framework when he writes in “It Is Our Desire That Makes the Revolution” (C’est Notre Désir Qui Fait la Révolution) that no one in the 20th century understands desire. Only through experiment, he

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contends, can we begin to understand our desires, which can be satisfed only through the creation of new forms of life – in other words, revolution. When we say desire in the twentieth century, we mean the unknown, for all we know of the realm of desires is that it continuously reverts to one immeasurable desire for freedom. As a basic task we propose liberation of social life, which will open the way to the new world – a world where all the cultural aspects and inner relationships of our ordinary lives will take on new meaning.186 Jorn’s theory, evolving in close dialogue with his new friend Constant’s, replaces desire with the concepts of art as “agitation” and “inspiration.” He writes to Constant that art is a transmission of excitement given by the artist and received by the spectators, who “enjoy, feel, eat, disagree, identify with our oeuvre, that is to say, with us.”187 Art does not cultivate desire, Jorn continues, but rather produces new insights by breaking with people’s customary attitudes: Art cultivates the spirit, that is, it makes it act by denaturing the nostalgia, desires and elements loved by the artist, and since the artist is a man [sic], by humanity. This is the natural procedure of art, not the applause, the admiration, the celebrity of a weird wonder like the elephant [in the] year 300, but as a spiritual necessity able to agitate the viewer, to inspire them. That’s why all art is agitation and not description.188 Jorn believed art could affect people on a deep level, returning to its foundations in physical sensation not just in order to inspire them, but to move them. Jorn even proposed to Constant an entire second Cobra book series (in addition to the 15 monographs on each artist) about the artistic theories of each artist. He would write four or more volumes on social realism, popular art, the spiral, and the interpretation of drawings. Still, he reminds his friend that in the end the art matters more than the theory: “we must not forget that it is with our paints that we will break the walls, with our theories we will do nothing but remove broken bricks and dust.”189

Cobra, Surrealism, and Informel: Flexible Ties Through the artistic methods of the Danish and Dutch groups, Cobra established its clearest break from Surrealism. As Dotremont writes in Cobra 1, “The Danes have opened the door.”190 Constant echoes the Danish critiques of representational Surrealism in Cobra 2: “We condemn any so-called Surrealist art which relies on the old naturalistic methods and thus delays the destruction of the stifing infuence of the old masters.”191 The long experience of the Danish artists in claiming a space for spontaneous abstraction out of Surrealism, combined with the accomplishments of the Dutch artists in developing their uniquely brutal aesthetic in both painting and poetry, would distinguish Cobra from the naturalistic methods of prominent Surrealists. Dotremont writes of the Dutch Experimental artists that they enter “Through the Main Gate”: They are against ironic painting, which actually tries to express the organic joy of the universe, the historic joy of the world of 1949, but which is ashamed and

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Dotremont’s salvo was aimed directly at Magritte, known for his elegant bourgeois lifestyle as well as the arch humor of his paintings. At the same time, however, the Cobra artists repeatedly experimented with other Surrealist practices such as assemblage and modifcation – the addition of painting, drawing, or collage over found representational images. Cobra modifcations included Jan Elburg’s transformation of Titian’s Venus of Urbino in Cobra 4 and Karel Appel’s painting on found canvases in Paris in 1952, and culminated in Asger Jorn’s Situationistperiod “Detourned Paintings” of 1959 to 1962. Those were inspired directly by Surrealist practices. They could be called ironic gestures, in that they directly attacked the overly self-serious discussions around abstract painting in the 1950s.193 Cobra was one of many groups that described themselves as evolving beyond Surrealism, but, especially in the Belgian context, the break was never complete. The Cobra journal and the invitations to the 1949 and 1951 exhibitions refer in French to the “Cobra International of Experimental Artists.” The frst three issues of Cobra also feature the subheading: “Bulletin for the Coordination of Artistic Investigations. Flexible Tie Among the Danish (Høst), Belgian (RevolutionarySurrealist), and Dutch (Refex) Experimental Groups.” Cobra 4, edited by Corneille as the catalog for the 1949 Stedelijk exhibition, appropriately features the more militant title, “Organ of the International Front of Experimental Avant-Garde Artists,” foregrounding the politics but also the renewed emphasis on artistic practice that now separated the group from French Surrealism. Among all these descriptions and proclamations, the term “fexible tie” (lien souple) stands out as an appropriate descriptor of Cobra’s role as a meta-network spanning several overlapping circles of artists and poets. It also evokes the group’s ambiguous placement among various groups all vying for visibility around 1948, from Surrealism and Socialist Realism to lyric or geometric abstraction, which many critics in the early 1950s saw as the new “offcial modernism” in Europe.194 The editorial statement in Cobra 7 reads: Cobra […] counts on neither opposition nor uniformity, but on the greatest common denominator of men, of nations, of artists, of activities; which is the engine of differences themselves. […] Cobra likes to embrace, not kiss the hand; to hug, not to smother.195 Flexible best describes, frst of all, the relationship among the various groups that made up Cobra; and second, its relationship to the groups with which it overlapped: most notably Surrealism in Belgium, but also the painting known variously in Paris as art autre (“other art”), Informel (“Informal,” hereafter spelled after the French term), Tachism, or Lyrical Abstraction. Also relevant is the work of Jean Dubuffet (who was a part of art autre) and his idea of “raw art” (art brut) as a designation of outsider art or art made in mental institutions, established publicly in 1947 when Drouin Gallery began exhibiting the Foyer de l’Art Brut.196 What Dubuffet saw in outsider and psychopathological art, Cobra recognized in children’s and folk art: the fantastic and overlooked creativity present in regular people without artistic training. They viewed such expressions not as exotic or bizarre but rather as ordinary, ubiquitous but overlooked. In contrast to Cobra’s collectivism, the writing about Informel

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and Lyrical Abstraction, on the other hand, tended to celebrate the artists’ unusual talent. While the overlap with these movements makes Cobra harder to defne, the movement’s very fexibility explains its unique importance in the postwar scene, as an experimental link among tendencies that would later ossify into static “styles” and nationally condoned movements – just as Cobra later became institutionalized in its three “home” countries. In Belgium, Cobra and Surrealism continued to co-exist. Many of the explicitly Cobra texts by Alechinsky, Noiret, and others, as well as the single Cobra flm by Luc de Heusch could be interpreted as Surrealist products. Alechinsky’s book The Dolls of Dixmude (Les Poupées de Dixmude) is a perfect example. The text of Les Poupées de Dixmude develops a dream narrative of Alechinsky’s experiences in an abandoned chateau about to be sold by its owner, Mr. Goedler in Chaussée de Mons outside Brussels. Alechinsky describes a series of dreams and then interprets them himself within the text, with the help of his wife, Micky, in a kind of psychotherapeutic narrative. The book includes photographs of the chateau in ruins by Roland d’Ursel that recall the imagery of ruins common in Surrealist paintings by Paul Delvaux and others. It also re-publishes a photograph from the 1930s of Hans Bellmer’s life-sized Surrealist “dolls,” which Alechinsky compares to the eerie wax dolls of military fgures in the First World War museum in the Flemish town of Diksmuide (Dixmude).197 Bellmer, the German Surrealist renowned for his grotesquely sexualized doll sculptures as well as hand-colored photographs suggesting melodramatic narratives with them in various settings, also published a drawing and text in Cobra 6, likely on Alechinsky’s invitation (Jorn explicitly dismisses this drawing as a Surrealist “pin-up girl” in a letter to Constant).198 Alechinsky would remain connected to Surrealism throughout his career, and was instrumental in inviting former Surrealist artists like Giacometti to show in the 1951 Cobra exhibition in Liège. Older artists like Giacometti did not view Cobra as a threat or even as a break with their artistic concerns. Giacometti thanked Alechinsky for the invitation to participate in Liège, and hesitated only at the idea of producing a drawing for the group show’s catalog, as he had only ever produced a cover drawing for personal exhibitions.199 Bachelard praises both Les Poupées de Dixmude and Alechinsky’s text on Giacometti in Cobra in a letter to Alechinsky. He describes Les Poupées de Dixmude as a fascinating study of dreams.200 Others, meanwhile, considered the book too Surrealist. Hugo Claus, the Belgian writer who produced several artist’s books with Cobra artists and painted in a manner closely related to Cobra, criticized Alechinsky’s book as too Freudian and too obsessed with dreams.201 The postscript to Les Poupées de Dixmude called “Ereskigal: Allégorie,” written by Luc Zangrie (pseudonym of Luc de Heusch), reads like a typical Surrealist text. It describes the three women who formerly occupied the chateau as a “series of hostile goddesses,” and takes them as a point of departure for musings on the ancient goddesses of love, Aphrodite, and death, Ishtar. The fgure of Persephone, abducted by Hades to the kingdom of the dead according to classical Greek myth, unites the two poles. The narrative is reminiscent in style and tone of Breton’s own 1944 book Arcanum 17, a peripatetic commentary on Tarot cards, alchemy, the myth of Melusine, Osiris and Isis from the Egyptian book of the dead, and other stories.202 De Heusch’s description also reads as a key to the flm Perséphone, which he made in 1951, a work equally Surrealist in tone.

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The 18-minute Perséphone, featuring a musical score by André Souris, is known as the single Cobra flm and often overlooked in accounts of the movement outside Belgium. De Heusch published a description of flming it in Cobra. He emphasizes the flm’s creation of a modern ritual in which the mythic fgure of Persephone “abducts in the shadows the child, the lover of Aphrodite.”203 The scene to which he refers features a boiling cauldron, making the fgure of Persephone into a witch. De Heusch refers to her as a classic “terrible mother” (mère terrible) fgure, a legend also discussed in an article of the same name in Cobra as a Freudian archetype of the “phallic woman.”204 The way these characters follow traditional gender stereotypes and heterosexual tropes corresponds to the depictions common in Surrealist literature (including Dotremont’s own writing) and paintings by Delvaux, Dalí, and many others. While Cobra paintings and sculptures tend to break with gendered Surrealist tropes by turning to animal or childlike imagery, the heterosexual tropes of seduction and Oedipal obsession in the text and the flm by Luc de Heusch are typically Surrealist. The flm presents a dreamlike narrative of mythic goddesses interacting with soldiers and beer-drinking peasants in the chateau, with a self-serious tone and nostalgic voiceover narrative that recalls the mythic feature flms of Jean Cocteau (a friend of Dotremont’s) such as Orpheus (Orphée, 1950). What the aesthetics of a Cobra flm might be, in relation to the group’s interest in collectivity, spontaneity, playfulness, and materiality, was never really determined, although the artists likely would have made more flms if they had the means.205 The group’s active interest in flm is referenced in Cobra 3, an issue dedicated to avant-garde cinema; the flm presentation organized by Jean Raine at the 1951 Liège exhibition; and the article by Marshall McLuhan in Cobra 10 described in the Introduction. Perséphone remains aesthetically Surrealist in its narrative rehashing of established classical myths with Freudian psychosexual overtones. In fact, de Heusch as well as his mentor, Belgian flm pioneer Henri Storck, considered it unsuccessful precisely because of its “post-Surrealist” aesthetics.206 De Heusch would go on to produce a series of pioneering art and anthropological flms in the next few decades, after studying anthropology at the Sorbonne with Marcel Griaule. These include two signifcant experimental documentaries about Cobra artists, Alechinsky d’après nature (1970) and Dotremont Les Logogrammes (1972), both of which de Heusch presented as Cobra flms.207 De Heusch would consider himself a Cobra artist throughout his life, but his work could equally be called Surrealist, from his early flm Perséphone to his ethnographic feldwork. His career as an anthropologist built directly on the legacy of ethnography frst developed in relation to Surrealist ideas, as presented for example in the reports by Michel Griaule, Michel Leiris, and others of the Dakar–Djibouti expedition of 1931 to 1932 chronicled in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. In de Heusch’s own words, Surrealism fostered his interest in anthropology, after he encountered André Breton and Pierre Mabille in Paris in 1949. The Surrealist poet and trained doctor Mabille, he recalls, had just returned from Haiti, “flled with wonder at the diversity of the human race, whether seen individually or collectively,” and excited him with the idea of studying anthropology.208 De Heusch made the trip with Jean Raine, who later emphasizes that he had closer ties to Surrealism than Cobra since he decided to move to Paris after meeting Breton and Mabille.209 Raine would return to Belgium, however, to produce the Cobra Experimental Film Festival for the Cobra exhibition in Liège in 1951, and contribute several articles including “La mère terrible” to the Cobra journal. De Heusch would study anthropology with Griaule at the Sorbonne

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rather than going to London like most of his Belgian colleagues, “because it was the city where Surrealism was born.”210 De Heusch’s anthropological views and methods later evolved away from the early feldwork in the Congo that he found disappointing and toward the comparative methods of structuralist anthropology after a defning encounter with Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1955. Nevertheless, his early view of himself as a Surrealist is as important to his anthropological and flmic contributions as his involvement with Cobra. The stories of Raine and de Heusch, among other Belgian artists, are further reminders that Cobra and Surrealism cannot be differentiated in black and white terms. For the Belgian Cobra artists, Cobra distinguished itself from Surrealism more than anything else as a social network of young, experimental artists working outside the hegemony of the French art world. The idea of “fexible ties” equally characterizes the relationship of Cobra to the lineage of painting in Paris variously called Informel, Tachism, or Lyrical Abstraction that also developed out of Surrealism. These post-Surrealist movements all coalesced around the same time as Cobra, beginning with an exhibition at Galerie du Luxembourg in December, 1947, that showed Atlan’s painting with the abstract work of Informel artists Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Wols. In February, 1948, the exhibition Prises de Terre curated by Jaguer and Madeleine Rousseau at Galerie Breteau included French Revolutionary Surrealists Atlan and Doucet, Danish Linien II artists Richard Mortensen and Robert Jacobsen, and Informel painters Pierre Soulages and Gérard Schneider. René Passeron remembered the exhibition for “passing the spirit of Surrealism into lyrical abstraction.”211 A plethora of further group shows featured Cobra painters alongside European expressive-abstract and American Abstract Expressionist artists. These were curated by critics Edouard Jaguer and Michel Ragon, who wrote for Cobra; Michel Tapié, who coined the term “Informel” in 1951; and Charles Estienne, who became known for his defnition of “Tachism” (Tachisme, literally “Stain-ism”) as a positive term for contemporary painting.212 Jaguer’s movement Phases and its eponymous journal, founded with Simone Jaguer in 1952, promoted several Cobra artists including Alechinsky and Jorn along with other Lyric-Abstract painters and positioned Cobra as an important postwar movement. Ragon, Tapié, and Estienne would become increasingly individualist in their focus, in Ragon’s case related to his evolving anarchist politics.213 Tapié and Estienne attempted to divorce aesthetics from politics, in a manner comparable to the writing of critic Clement Greenberg in the U.S., but in a much more poetic and subjective form of criticism infected with the alienation of Existentialist philosophy. Estienne, who also had close ties to Breton in the mid-1950s, describes the gestures of painter Hans Hartung, for example, as “the most naked and natural gesture through which a man would escape the anguish of his condition.”214 Such hyperbolic language operates to mystify and pacify rather than animate the observer as Cobra attempted to do. Hartung was a major infuence on Cobra artist Karl-Otto Götz, who after editing Cobra 5 would begin visiting Paris regularly and become a major proponent of Informel painting in West Germany. Götz evolved from the Surrealist spray paintings and hand-colored photograms he made with Anneliese Hager in the 1930s through a brief Cobra phase (Figure 2.4). He produced spontaneous colorful paintings and prints featuring organic-expressive forms that were featured in the 1949 and 1951 Cobra exhibitions. In 1952, infuenced by Informel developments in Paris, he had a breakthrough while painting with his young son, when he discovered the possibilities

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of producing a pure abstract image by pulling a squeegee through a surface of layered wallpaper paste and casein paint to produce dramatic yet impersonal gestures.215 These methods became his trademark Informel approach. Götz pushed beyond Surrealism to a new, more conscious focus on the material effects of paint on the canvas: I stuck to the old program of the Surrealists: to grab this wonder by its horns by means of pyschic automatism and paroxysm. For my painting, this meant: after prior meditation on a simple pictorial schema – the greatest increase of subjective expression through the speed of the painting process in order to break open the boundaries of my own subjective idea.216 Götz continued to explore the psychological impact of painterly composition, but divorced his approach entirely from politics or collectivism. His turn away from the political implications of painted imagery, as well as his rejection of the personal touch of the artist’s hand in favor of an impersonal technology of mark-making, ultimately distanced him from Cobra. Michel Tapié produced some of the most extravagant writing on what he called an “other art” (art autre) or Informel. The latter name would become most widely recognized thanks in part to a later book on Art Informel by Jean Paulhan.217 This was less a movement than a phenomenon of highly talented individuals. Tapié, hostile to Surrealism since his involvement with Les Réverbères in the 1930s, became a prominent painting critic in the 1950s, contributing to Jaguer’s publication Phases and curating several key exhibitions. His often bombastic writing rejected the Surrealist and Cobra ideas of collective experiment in favor of a dramatically solitary “adventure” involving “unleashing Force” on the canvas.218 Ragon observes that Tapié’s advocacy of Informel originated with Dubuffet, who wrote about the “formless” (informe) in his writings of the 1940s.219 It was also indebted to the writing of Georges Bataille who made the term “formless” famous as a description of the force that resists all form and mathematical order.220 Tapié’s writings consider abstract painting the ultimate means of channeling the inchoate forces of the universe. He revives the most Nietzschean aspects of German Expressionism combined with the celebration of the visionary outsider characteristic of Dubuffet’s art brut. His writing describes expression as ultraindividualist and adamantly rejects communism and Socialist Realism.221 Tapié exhibited the work of Jorn, Appel, Corneille, and other Cobra artists as part of his promotion of Informel, but had zero interest in Cobra as a movement. He included Jorn’s work in a 1954 group exhibition in Rome.222 He also curated the frst retrospective of Karel Appel’s work in Brussels in 1953, writing: No more experimental works, our time can only genuinely be interested in a few exceptional individuals capable of developing complete oeuvres, where the message is total, where the range of means and inventions is infnitely vast and complex.223 In the 1950s, Jorn praised Tachism and Informel as revolutions in artistic method based on the primacy of process and the dissolution of form.224 Jorn acknowledged their shared artistic investigations, but he accused Tapié of substituting a new ideology of Informel abstraction for the geometric abstraction prominent immediately after the war.225 When Informel came to mean only pure abstraction couched in an

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exaggerated, artifcial, transcendent, and individualist critical discourse, Jorn rejected the term altogether.226 Alechinsky came to a similar conclusion regarding Estienne and Tachism. After inviting Estienne to write the catalog text for the 1951 Cobra exhibition in Liège, he would reject the French critic’s later writing on Tachism for overlooking Cobra’s impact on the French art scene. In a key text detailing Tachism’s break with the postwar School of Paris, Estienne mentions Cobra as well as artists Atlan and Corneille, but only briefy. Worse, his account makes exaggerated claims for the “tache” (“mark” or “stain”) as the “zero degree of plastic writing, the zero degree of the birth of the work.”227 In such statements, Estienne’s theory becomes a kind of new formalism shaped by Existentialist rhetoric. His 1951 text for the Liège exhibition already introduced a grandiose tone that contradicted Cobra’s open-ended principles of spontaneous experiment, praising the “imperious and virile line, clear and strong like a sword,” in the painting on view.228 In 1953, Estienne established his “Salon d’Octobre,” initially an open-ended meeting place for a variety of artists that quickly turned into a Tachist artist’s group. In a 1954 letter to Estienne, Alechinsky takes his former colleague to task for overlooking Cobra’s importance for Tachism. Alechinsky asserts that while Estienne’s account dismisses Cobra as “scribbling” (barbouillage – that old term used to dismiss the movement since the strident Dutch newspaper reviews of the 1949 Stedelijk exhibition), that only proves that Cobra is closely related to Tachism. “We spoke,” he reminds Estienne, “of spontaneity, of experimental research, of liberty, of a fexible tie among a certain Surrealism and a certain abstraction, of painting on the margins of great aesthetic currents.”229 Feeling betrayed, Alechinsky resigns from Estienne’s Salon d’Octobre and rejects all use of the word “Tachist.” These polemics were perhaps necessary in an art world dominated by poetic texts that refused to draw boundaries between movements, but rather depended on a certain poetic ambiguity to allow critics to promote their favored artists individually. As Serge Guilbaut observes: Art criticism became a lucrative, witty, poetic exercise where differences were not clearly perceived or discussed. Rather, they were erased in order to ft them – not into a crisp, coherent ideological structure as in America – but into amorphous, luxurious, market-oriented commodities.230 In an increasingly commercial environment, it was up to the artists to decide with whom to associate, or when to withdraw their support when a critic misrepresented their work. By the mid-1950s, even André Breton began to recognize the relevance of abstraction for the contemporary moment, making it possible for Cobra artists like Alechinsky and the Swedish Imaginists to associate with his movement again. In 1954, Breton read a key book by Lancelot Langyel, The Gallic Art of Medals (L’Art Gaulois Dans les Médailles), on Celtic coins that struck him as a defense of the uniqueness of Gallic tradition as a sort of French counter-culture.231 With Lengyel and Estienne, he organized an exhibition that combined Celtic coins and abstract painting by Tachist artists like Jean Degottex, Marcelle Loubschansky, and Jean Messagier at the Étoile Scellée gallery. The collaboration helped Estienne frame Tachism as a sort of “abstract Surrealism.”232 As Serge Guilbaut describes, the exhibition was an attack not only on the traditionalism of the postwar School of Paris, but also on Socialist Realism, as

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well as a response to the American idea that Abstract Expressionism was born in New York.233 Estienne and Breton kept the debate focused on Paris, however, emphasizing the new art’s local ties in opposition to Tapié’s framing of Informel as an emphatically international movement that stretched from New York to Japan.234 Like the painting critics, Breton was by the mid-1950s more interested in the contemporary plight of the individual as a signifer of dissent from the increasingly market-oriented and American-dominated art world. The discussions among the most prominent art critics in Paris and New York in the 1950s celebrated the importance of abstract painting in Cold War terms as the paragon of Western freedom of expression. By contrast, Cobra believed that it was important not to leave imagery behind as a means to connect with people – a view it shared with postwar Surrealism. Alechinsky writes in Cobra 10: The work provoked by sensibility, emotion, spontaneity, will never be abstract; it will always represent humanity. And if we agree that a painting must create in us a spontaneous emotion, we can all, painters and spectators, pass beyond the external representation of things in order to communicate.235 Constant would later write that “Art without an image is like a stuffed animal: a shape without rippling muscles, without the glinting eye.”236 The art of both Cobra and Surrealism in the 1950s makes clear that human subjectivities are shaped by history, culture, and society and connected by common perceptual and emotional experiences. Cobra’s choice of images, however, diverged from the typical Surrealist psychosexual and mystical imagery. Cobra preferred explicitly populist and collective images, translated into vivid sensory forms. Cobra’s conscious use of everyday images, from animals to human fgures and landscapes, aims for a broader understanding among its audiences. Its art relates to ordinary human experiences such as childhood, play, or farming. It avoids the potentially alienating esoteric motifs that populate the mid-century paintings of Salvador Dalí, Victor Brauner (a Surrealist excluded by Breton in 1948 but reintegrated later), Max Walter Svanberg (whose work was shown in the context of both movements), or Wifredo Lam (a Surrealist who was also a friend of the Cobra artists). Cobra texts discuss mythic symbols in a way that reveals their ubiquity in contemporary life. Jorn’s book The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune, for example, written and designed around 1948 (see Figure 1.2), includes contemporary photographs of a Swedish alderman playing a horn to call a town meeting and a Danish midsummer bonfre alongside astrological symbols, petroglyphs, heraldic symbols, and other motifs.237 Images are grouped to show the continuity of ancient collective symbols into the present. The artistic expression of health, an important part of Surrealism’s call for a more open and less repressive society, particularly for the Linien group, returns in Cobra as images of children or agricultural experience suggesting connection to the eternal cycles of the land. In response to a 1951 exhibition of the Ateliers du Marais in Belgium, which featured Reinhoud’s copper rooster sculpture among other works, a reviewer notes that “these artists have in common an almost peasant health.”238 Europe was still suffering into the early 1950s from food shortages and debating how best to reconstruct both industry and agriculture.239 The Cobra artists responded by emphasizing the immediacy of artistic symbols and their physical impact on the observer. Rather than simply appropriate images from non-Western

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art or religion, Cobra combined them with everyday references in new forms shown in the process of emerging out of raw materials. Naturalistic Surrealist paintings, by contrast, tend to read as virtual images. Cobra remained embroiled with Surrealism throughout its short existence and its long afterlife. Surrealists Lam and Matta participated actively in Jorn’s mid-1950s “International Ceramics Encounters” in Italy and remained lifelong friends with Jorn and Alechinsky. Surrealist poet and flmmaker Jacques Prévert wrote important texts on Jorn’s later work, re-introducing him to the French art scene in the mid-1950s.240 Jorn also reconnected with Noël Arnaud by the early 1960s. Arnaud and Prévert along with Jean Dubuffet were all part of the College of Pataphysics, the irreverent antiorganization inspired by the Dada writings of Alfred Jarry, which awarded Jorn the Order of the Grand Gidouille on Arnaud’s recommendation. Dotremont and Alechinsky maintained close ties to Belgian Surrealist writers and artists throughout their career despite Cobra’s public stance against Surrealism.241 Dotremont considered Cobra’s unique contribution to be its emphasis on interdisciplinary and collective artistic experimentation; the “word-paintings” he produced with Jorn at the start of the movement were a key example of this. The blue one called I Rise, You Rise, We Dream (Plate 5) remains in Alechinsky’s personal collection. It may have directly infuenced the particular visual language he developed over the course of the 1950s, so strongly indebted to Jorn’s painting as well as modern Japanese calligraphy and Belgian art from Bosch to Tintin. When Breton and José Pierre invited him to exhibit in the 11th International Exhibition of Surrealism at L’Oeil Gallery in Paris (the last one organized by the French Surrealist group), he submitted his monumental 1965 painting Central Park (Plate 7), a spontaneous animal image surrounded by his trademark “marginal remarks” described in Chapter 1. The painting indicates the extent to which both Cobra and Surrealism remained open to new aesthetic and cultural developments in the postwar period.

The Imaginists and Surrealism at Mid-Century Another of Breton’s favored painters of the 1950s and 1960s was Swedish artist Max Walter Svanberg, a former Imaginist and Cobra artist. Svanberg had declared himself a Surrealist as early as 1935 in a letter to his painting teacher Otto Sköld, attesting that, “I have always wanted to immerse myself in my own mysterious world.”242 He began making compelling, often grotesque drawings and deliriously complex collages using self-taught methods in the late 1930s. In 1943, he became part of the short-lived Minotaur group in Malmö along with Carl-Otto Hultén, an artist infuenced by the writing of Freud and Dalí, and the abstract Surrealism of Miró, Ernst, and Masson. Also part of the group was Anders Österlin, a younger artist who met Hultén at the ad agency where both worked as graphic designers in 1944. A year later, Hultén suggested they form a new group, the Imaginists (Imaginisterna, 1945–1956). They became actively involved with the Cobra movement after meeting Jorn through the Spiral (Spiralen) exhibition society in Copenhagen. Through Jorn, they soon met Dotremont, who visited Malmö in 1949, eager to develop a Swedish faction of Cobra. Like Cobra, the Imaginist group rejected postwar Surrealism’s turn toward myth and magic. Hultén believed that the movement’s emphasis on the unconscious allowed an opening onto destructive or Fascistic impulses.243 The Imaginists attempted to develop a new, less dogmatic and more materialist approach connecting imagination

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to conscious experimentation. Svanberg writes in his manifesto-like text on the Imaginists in 1948 that imagination was the basis of the group’s free and revolutionary art: Imaginism cannot be limited to the general classifcation of Surrealism, and it is not Surrealism that is the actual origin of Imaginism, but rather the personal relationship with all visionary obsessed art.244 The Imaginists were closer to Surrealism than the Danish spontaneous abstract artists, given their interest in Surrealist methods of collage, overpainting, frottage (an automatic method of painting by scratching over a textured surface), and the depiction of psychosexual imagery. Yet they also attempted to move beyond the dominance of the French group, establishing their own network of exhibitions and public interventions, some of them in collaboration with Danish Surrealist Wilhelm Freddie, in Sweden. The materiality of their works emphasized their immediate sensory impact, recalling Dotremont’s statement that the most important qualities of Cobra work are “the imagination of the hand and the imagination of matter (of which Bachelard speaks so fttingly) more than the imagination of the painter.”245 Thick texturality, quick and dirty paint application, intense colors, and densely patterned compositions all emphasize the materiality of the creative imagination in Imaginist art works, as opposed to the naturalistic representation of fantastic scenes in, for example, the Surrealist painting of the Swedish Halmstad Group in the 1930s and 1940s. The younger Österlin’s paintings demonstrate the Imaginist interest in visionary outsider art (Plate 14). They include dreaming human fgures, animals, and vegetal imagery in abstract forms related to the compositions of Miró but more gridlike and fat. Such works merge the aesthetics of oil painting with those of collage. In Imaginary Red, the artist uses a vivid red overpainting to develop forms out of layers underneath, refecting an interest in pattern that he shared with Svanberg. Patterning and vivid compositions enliven the surfaces of Österlin’s and Svanberg’s works. Jaguer writes that Österlin’s paintings suggest games, comparing his fgures to the graphic images in a deck of cards.246 The paintings of Hultén from this period are more textural, closer to the Dutch Cobra artists and Jorn in their use of expressive marks and rough scratching into the paint.247 Jaguer praises Hultén’s “singularly dazzling color” and his marks as a unique evolution of Surrealist frottage in a text from 1949 written just after he met the Imaginist artists at the Bregnerød Congress in the Danish countryside.248 The Imaginist artists collaborated directly with Appel, Constant, and Corneille when the Dutch artists visited Malmö in 1949. Together they made the collective lithograph Some of These Days, reportedly in only 50 hours and printed in only 9 copies. They participated in the Cobra Congress at Bregnerød the same year; several ceiling panels by Hultén and Österlin are preserved at Sophienholm Art Museum from the otherwise destroyed summer house. Österlin exhibited in the two key Cobra exhibitions in 1949 and 1951. Cobra painter Carl-Henning Pedersen was included in the frst major exhibition of Imaginist art featuring Hultén, Gösta Kriland, Svanberg, and Österlin at Malmö Konstmuseum in 1952. The catalog cites Svanberg’s typically Cobra description of Imaginist methods as “dreaming through the material itself, letting material dream itself,” and quotes Dotremont’s Cobra monograph on Pedersen,

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who “wills waking things to dream.” The show also included Surrealist guests Victor Brauner and Wifredo Lam, demonstrating how the Swedish group situated itself between Surrealism and Cobra. Svanberg was the least involved in Cobra of the Imaginist group, which he left in 1953. The same year, Breton saw an exhibition of his work curated by Jaguer in Paris and contacted him. Breton wrote that he viewed “the encounter with Max Walter Svanberg’s art as one of the greatest encounters of my life, for it gave me insight into the essence of fascination from the inside.”250 As a result, Svanberg’s work would become central to mid-century Surrealism. (While postwar Surrealism is often dismissed as “late” in histories that favor the glory days of Surrealism’s frst two decades, the term “late Surrealism” is misleading as the movement continues to develop in the 21st century.) Breton wrote an homage to Svanberg in the Surrealist journal Médium in 1954 and gave the artist a solo show at the Etoile Scellée gallery in 1955.251 Breton along with Czech painter Toyen, writer José Pierre and other Surrealists warmly welcomed Svanberg and his family to Paris for the frst time ten years later. Their memorable encounter involved hours of genial discussion despite the language barrier.252 Svanberg’s work became renowned in the French and Swedish art worlds in the 1960s, as it perfectly suited the Surrealist ideas of esotericism and fantastic art described by Breton and followers like Pierre, author of a 1962 monograph on the artist.253 In his more abstract paintings, Svanberg’s imagery provides a fascinating transformation of historical motifs from Islamic and European heritage, and a provocative reevaluation of traditional ideas about artistic training and decoration in art. But his fgurative works are much more retrograde in their representation of gender because of the visionary clarity of their exoticism (Plate 15). Pierre praises the “internal tension, taste for the marvellous, and profound disorientation” in Svanberg’s work.254 However, the paintings suggest touristic perspectives and objectify veiled women by combining them with animal imagery and Islamic ornamentation. Their fantastic and hyper-sexualized scenarios play out entirely on a mythically perfect and decoratively immaterial, white female body. What Pierre calls Svanberg’s “feminine reign” is so entirely based in the mythical realm of heterosexist fantasy that it acts against any possibility of female agency in society, and it reduces Islamic cultural traditions to a personal reverie. Its over-investment in the fetishistic tradition of passive white feminine beauty revisits Breton’s sexist idea of the “girl child” (femme enfant) from the 1930s. While many Surrealist artworks and provocations had a signifcant impact in Europe in the 1960s, and this phase of Surrealism is still undervalued and understudied, Svanberg’s outmoded images of women do not help revive the movement’s reputation today. Both Surrealism and Cobra produced late work in art-historical terms, meaning work that fails to produce new insight, in which artistic liberties become heavy-handed, predictable, and even socially regressive. This can equally be seen in Corneille’s sexually and racially fetishistic views of women in a tropical paradise from the 1970s and 1980s. Corneille, too, found an audience in mid-century Surrealism, with works included in the 1960 Surrealist exhibition in New York, “Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter’s Domain,” organized by José Pierre and Jaguer. Where the earlier works of Corneille and Svanberg used aesthetic qualities of animalistic rawness or bizarre juxtapositions to attack classical ideas of artistry and fnish, allowing signifers of identity to circulate and transform in the process, the decorative fnish and passive feminine 249

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fgures of their mature works operate very differently. Bodily borders are graphically maintained by their solidity and clarity, and sexual and racial stereotypes are reinforced rather than questioned. Such works problematically reinforce outmoded tropes of feminine sexuality viewed through a male gaze.

A Toast to Cobra The Cobra movement emerged out of Surrealism marked by its artists’ formative experiences in the movement – but the emergence was never fnal or conclusive. Cobra’s break with Surrealism was more polemical than anything else. Yet even though Cobra maintained ties of friendship and shared overlapping visions of aesthetics and politics with the movement, proclaiming its divorce from Surrealism was necessary for a new and younger network of artists to claim their space and make their mark on postwar culture. It was precisely the interdisciplinary complexity of international Surrealism, with its explorations of photography, photomontage, and assemblage alongside painting and sculpture, its fraught relationship with communism, and its interest in other disciplines from nuclear physics to ethnography, that made the movement such an important ferment for Cobra. What emerged was a turbulence of frenetic, international activity that some artists, like Dotremont and Alechinsky, regarded as foundational for the rest of their careers. Others, like Ferlov, Bille, Jorn, and Constant, would prioritize their involvement with earlier or later movements over Cobra as their collaborations continued to evolve. Like Surrealism, Cobra emphasized the importance of reaching beyond art to political or philosophical investigations, collaborations with other felds, and renewing art’s place in society. According to José Pierre, it was the vitality of Cobra that made it unique – despite what he calls the movement’s deliberate mischaracterization of its own roots as a break from Surrealist automatism. Pierre believed automatism was closer to spontaneity than Cobra wanted to admit. Cobra introduced a “breath of liberty, poetry, joy and provocation” into the sterile postwar confrontation of Socialist Realism and formalist abstraction. Cobra was an “explosion of joy, of anger, of hope” and it wanted to change the world. Above all, Pierre writes, it was a movement about health – which is why the open-ended and materially vivid transformations of imagery it produced in the 1940s and 1950s are literally better for us than the canned stereotypes of late Cobra (or exoticist Surrealism). I can only end this discussion with his closing toast: “Cobra, to your health!”255

Notes 1 See, for example, Joan Miró, Hirondelle amour, 1933–1934, oil on canvas, 6 feet 6-1/2 in. x 8 feet 1-1/2 in., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 723.1976, www.moma.org/ collection/works/80315. 2 Andre Breton, “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane, in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 26. 3 Dotremont, paraphrasing a line from “Le grand rendez-vous naturel,” in Lambert, Grand Hôtel des Valises, 110. 4 Dotremont, “Cobra Écriture Peinture,” in Descargues, Cobra Singulier Pluriel, 7. 5 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.5.167–8). 6 Atkins, Jorn in Scandinavia, Cat. 547. Atkins notes that the larger word-painting, Cat. 584, may have also been painted in Tunisia, but does not provide evidence. 7 See Jorn, “Flertydige billeder.”

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Jorn, “De profetiske harper,” 145–6. Dotremont, J’écris, donc je crée, n.p. Ibid., n.p. Jorn, Pour la forme, 55. Asger Jorn, “Discours aux Pingouins,” 8, trans. in Hovdenakk, ed., Danish Art, 183–6. Ibid., 184. Ibid. Ibid. Italics in original. Breton, “Surrealism and Painting,” 2. Alfelt et al., “Den ny realisme,” n.p. Jorn, “Abstrakt kunstnerkoloni i Silkeborg.” See Godet, Dotremont et les surréalistes on Dotremont’s early relationship with the Brussels group. Dotremont, “Le grand rendez-vous naturel,” 4. Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 178. Breton, “The Legendary Life of Max Ernst.” See Kristoffer Noheden, “Myth,” in Richardson, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 1, 259–61. Breton, Arcanum 17. See Waldberg, Lebel, and Duthuit, “Vers un nouveau mythe?”; and Rosenberg’s more critical text “Breton—A Dialogue.” Mariën, L’Activité Surréaliste en Belgique, 393, trans. in Michael Richardson and Steven Harris, “Belgium,” in Richardson, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 1, 11. “Before the Curtain,” in Breton, Free Rein, 87. “Speech to the Congress of Writers,” in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 241. Italics in original. “Political Position of Surrealism,” in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 210. Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky, “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” 49–53. Adolphe Acker, et al., “Inaugural Rupture” (1947), in Richardson and Fijalkowski, eds., Surrealism Against the Current, 42–8 (all quotations are from these pages). See also the discussion of Surrealism after the war in Noheden, Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth, 1–29. Acker, et al., “Inaugural Rupture,” in Richardson and Fijalkowski, eds., Surrealism Against the Current, 43. On the punitive nature of Party-supported retribution against collaborators, Germans, and many other people innocent of collaboration, see Lowe, Savage Continent. Dotremont, “Historique de Cobra en Belgique,” 4. Noël Arnaud, letter to Willemijn Stokvis, 1965, cited in Stokvis, Cobra, 65–6. Christian Dotremont, letter to Félix Labisse, January 14, 1947, AML, dossier CDMA 01408/0001. Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir,” n.p. Passeron, “Sur le Surréalisme révolutionnaire,” 20. Dotremont, “Historique de Cobra en Belgique,” 2. Ibid., 1. Jaguer, “Le moment ‘Cobra’ et le surréalisme,” 4; see also Pierre, “Penhague – Uxelles – Msterdam,” 23–9. Jaguer, “Le moment ‘Cobra’ et le surréalisme,” 3. Dotremont and Edouard Jaguer both describe the relationship as “Oedipal” at different points, as mentioned in Vovelle, “Cobra/ surréalisme,” 33. Dotremont, Ancienne éternité (1940). Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir tout à fait,” n.p. The title comes from Rimbaud’s line “The hand that writes is as good as the hand that plows.” Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, 7. See Vernay and Walter, La Main à Plume. Noël Arnaud, “L’image dans la poésie collective,” and Christian Dotremont, “Notes techniques sur L’image dite surréaliste,” in La Conquête du Monde par L’image, 8–11 and 18–19.

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47 Dotremont, “Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire,” 3–33. On the journal’s history, see Edouard Jaguer, “Le corsage des deux soeurs,” Les Deux Soeurs, facsimile edition, v–xxxii. 48 Dotremont, “Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire,” 8. On the Surrealist experience during the war, see Noel Arnaud et al., “Letter to André Breton,” July 14, 1943, translated in Richardson and Fijalkowski, ed., Surrealism Against the Current, 29–32. 49 Dotremont, “Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire,” 9. 50 Canonne, Surrealism in Belgium, 52. 51 Ibid., 11–12. 52 Ibid., 12. 53 Ibid., 22. 54 These include Bruno Latour’s reframing of scientifc issues like climate change as not “matters of fact” but “matters of concern,” and Steve Duncombe’s writing on the role of desire and creativity in political activism to envision a better world. Latour, “Emancipation or Attachments?” 309–23; Duncombe, Dream. 55 Ibid., 33. 56 Christian Dotremont, “Jean Cocteau,” 19. See Radrizzani, L’Écriture dessinée, 15; and Canonne, Surrealism in Belgium, 46. 57 The catalog is reproduced in Mariën, L’Activité Surréaliste en Belgique, 359–65. See also Godet, Dotremont et les surréalistes, 44–53. 58 Rene Magritte, La moisson, 1943. Oil on canvas, 59, 7 x 80 cm. Musée Magritte, Brussels, inv. 11688. These works anticipate Magritte’s even more polemical 1948 “Serie Vache” (“Boorish” or “Cow Period”), his own response to the postwar revivial of Fauvism in Paris. See Schlicht and Hollein, eds., René Magritte 1948. 59 Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir tout à fait,” n.p. 60 Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 171. 61 On Ubac’s photography, see Canonne, La Chair de L’Image; and Krauss, Livingston, and Ades, L’Amour fou. 62 Ubac, “Les Pièges de la lumière,” n.p. 63 Raoul Ubac, quoted in Raoul Ubac: Photographies, peintures, sculptures, 10. 64 Raoul Ubac, letter to Georges Hugnet, Brussels, March 22, 1940, AAC. 65 Charles Juliet, Entretien avec Raoul Ubac (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1994), 17, quoted in Aubert, “Christian Dotremont – Raoul Ubac,” 28. 66 Ubac, quoted in Ubac, 11. 67 Ubac, letter reprinted in Faure, Histoire du surréalisme sous l’occupation, 199–201, quoted in Aubert, “Christian Dotremont – Raoul Ubac,” 29. 68 Raoul Ubac, letter to Rene Magritte, Paris, October 20, 1946, AAC. 69 Raoul Ubac, “Mes gravures,” 51. 70 Raoul Ubac dessins. 71 Ubac, “La Beauté aveugle,” 1946, reprinted in Ubac, 40. 72 Ubac, “Note sur l’ardoise,” 1968, reprinted in Ubac, 137. 73 Ubac, “Mes gravures,” 51. 74 Jorn, Signes gravés. 75 Ubac, letter to Magritte, October 20, 1946, op cit. 76 Raoul Ubac, letter to Christian Dotremont, Paris, April 23, 1951, AAC. 77 Dotremont, La pierre et l’oreiller, 64–5. 78 Asger Jorn’s personal library in Silkeborg includes, among others, Bachelard’s books L’eau et les rêves; Le matérialisme rationnel; La poétique le l’espace; and La psychanalyse du feu. 79 Italics in original. Dotremont, “Le grand rendez-vous naturel,” 5. 80 Joseph Noiret, “Gaston Bachelard et Henri Lefebvre Dans Cobra,” in Draguet, ed., Cobra en Fange, 47. 81 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 1. 82 Bachelard, Lautréamont, 11. 83 For an image of Equilibristes (Tightrope Walkers), see Cobra 1948–1951 (1982), 146. 84 Laude, Doucet, n.p. 85 Andrée Doucet, “Through the Main Gate,” in Jacques Doucet: Le Cobra français, 37. 86 Bachelard, “Notes d’un philosophe pour un graveur,” 15. 87 Bury, “De la pièce montée à la pierre,” n.p.

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88 See Jacques Doucet, Untitled, 1952, oil on canvas, 19-3/4 × 25-1/2 in., Golda and Meyer Marks Cobra Collection, NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale. 89 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 108. 90 See Draguet, ed., Cobra en Fange, 82–90. 91 “Pas de quartiers dans la révolution!” 1947, reproduced in Stokvis, Cobra, 67. 92 “La Cause est entendue,” 1947, reproduced in Mariën, L’Activité surréaliste en Belgique, 412. 93 “Declaration Internationale,” Bulletin international du surréalisme révolutionnaire 1 (January 1948), reproduced in Mariën, L’Activité surréaliste en Belgique, 419. 94 The Belgian Contribution to Surrealism, 12, cited in Patricia Allmer, Jan Dirk Baetens, and Hilde Van Gelder, “Introduction: Surrealism in Belgium,” in Allmer and Van Gelder, eds., Collective Inventions, 27. 95 Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir tout à fait,” n.p. 96 Lorenc, “Declaration du Groupe Ra,” 12. 97 Godet, “From Politics to Painting,” in Gingeras, ed., The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up, 63. 98 Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir tout à fait,” n.p. See also Steven Harris, “The End of Surrealism in Belgium,” in Allmer and Van Gelder, eds., Collective Inventions, 58–9. 99 Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir tout à fait,” n.p., note 20. 100 Jorn, “L’art sans frontières,” 6. 101 Jorn, “Déclaration du groupe expérimental danois, ” 9. 102 Dotremont, “La porte va enfn s’ouvrir tout à fait,” n.p. 103 Alfelt, et al., “Den ny realisme,” n.p. 104 Jorn, “Helhesten og Richard Mortensen,” Information, April 26, 1951, cited in Jespersen, De Abstrakte, 126. 105 Jorn, “Notes from the Surréalisme Révolutionnaire congress, Brussels,” 55. 106 Ibid., 55–6. 107 Lergaard, “Myten,” 65. 108 Asger Jorn, “Nya tendenser i Pariskonsten.” 109 “Surrealist Comet,” in Breton, Free Rein, 95–7. 110 Noheden, Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth, 2. 111 S.Y., preface to Dotremont, “La Fin et les moyens,” 8a. 112 “La Fin et les moyens.” 113 Christian Dotremont, “Max Ernst,” n.p. 114 Dotremont, “La fn et les moyens,” 8a. 115 Alechinsky, “Cobra dans le rétroviseur,” 12. 116 Dotremont, “La fn et les moyens,” trans. in Godet, “From Politics to Painting,” 64. 117 Christian Dotremont, letter to Joseph Noiret, July 12, 1964. AML, document CDMA 02210/0007. 118 Dotremont, “La fn et les moyens,” 8a. 119 Godet, “De l’’objet bouleversant’ à L’Objet à travers les âges,” 31–49. 120 Vandercam, Conversation avec Joseph Noiret, 34. 121 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. 122 Dotremont, in Lambert, Grand hôtel des valises, 115. 123 Joan Miró, The Potato, 1928, oil on canvas, 39-3/4 x-32 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, online at www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490004. The Brassaï photos appear in André Breton, “La Beauté sera convulsive,” Minotaure 5 (1934), reproduced in Krauss, Livingston, and Ades, L’Amour Fou, 182–3. 124 “A ceux qui doutent encore de l’étrange faculté de dépassement du surréalisme, faculté de dépassement qu’une guerre dont l’horreur l’a disputé à l’absurdité, a laissée étonnement intacte […] l’exposition de 1947 dont les portes viennent de s’ouvrir huilées par ce mystère très spécial dont j’ai le secret ne manquera pas de porter un coup mortel.” Normand [Christian Dotremont], “En plein rideau,” n.p. My thanks to Patrick Lennon for translation assistance. 125 Paul Nougé, “Les Points sur les signes,” in Exposition Magritte (Brussels, Galerie Dietrich, 1948), translated in Canonne, Surrealism in Belgium, 65. 126 Rita Kernn-Larsen, quoted in Jyllands Posten, May 26, 1985, cited in Hesselund, Rita Kernn-Larsen, 35.

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127 Jorn, “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” 65. 128 Passeron, “Sur le Surréalisme révolutionnaire – témoignage,” 20. 129 Arnaud, C’est tout que j’ai à dire pour l’instant, 88–91, cited in Steven Harris, “Revolutionary Surrealism,” in Richardson, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 1, 529. 130 Internal document circulated by Noël Arnaud and René Passeron for the French Revolutionary Surrealist group, quoted in Stokvis, Cobra, 73. 131 Joseph Noiret, quoted in Lambert, Grand Hôtel des Valises, 74. 132 Nougé was a lifelong member of the Belgian Communist Party after 1945. Scutenaire was a lifelong sympathizer without being a member, as was Mariën until he became disillusioned on a formative visit to Maoist China in the early 1960s. 133 Lefebvre, “Pour nos peintres aussi la voie est tracée!” quoted in Abadie, ed., Alechinsky, 157. 134 Lefebvre, in Le Drapeau rouge, 1947, quoted in Abadie, ed., Alechinsky, 156. 135 Alechinsky, “Cobra dans le rétroviseur,” 20. 136 Lefebvre, “Pour nos peintres aussi la voie est tracée!” quoted in Abadie, ed., Alechinsky, 157. 137 Lalande, Christian Dotremont, 131. 138 Alechinsky, Le tout petit Cobra 4. 139 The last two phrases reference the titles of key texts by André Breton and the Belgian Surrealist group Rupture, formed by Achille Chavée and others in 1935. Dotremont, Le réalisme-socialiste contre la revolution, n.p. 140 Alechinsky, “Cobra dans le rétroviseur,” 21. 141 Dotremont, unpublished manuscript prepared for the Conférence nationale des artistes communistes et sympathisants of November 27, 1949, quoted in Lalande, Christian Dotremont, 133. 142 Alechinsky, letter to Jean and Nadine Raine, September 1, 1949. AML, dossier ML 08501/0003. 143 Alechinsky, letter to Fernand Lefebvre, October 20, 1949. AML, dossier ML 08501/0003. 144 Alechinsky, letter to Paolo Marinotti, August 15, 1965. AML, document CDMA 02220/1965/001. 145 See Morten Thing, “Asger Jorn and Communism,” in Friis Herbsleb and Kurczynski, eds., Expo Jorn, 34–9. 146 Constant, letter to Jorn, cited in Lalande, 134. 147 Asger Jorn, letter to Constant, March, 1950, letter 21, RKD. 148 Ibid. 149 Asger Jorn, “Sozialistische Heringe,” n.p. 150 Alfelt et al., “Den Ny Realisme,” n.p. 151 Italics in original. Jorn, “Les formes conçues comme langage,” 7. 152 Italicized phrase is underlined in letter. Asger Jorn, letter to Constant, 1950, letter 26, RKD. 153 Michael Richardson, among others, contests that there is any relation between Surrealism in general and realism. “Introduction,” in Richardson, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 1, xiv. 154 Jorn, “Les formes conçues comme langage,” 7. 155 Asger Jorn, letter to Constant, early 1948, letter 4, RKD. 156 Lucebert, “Love Letter to Our Tortured Bride Indonesia,” 1948, in Lucebert: The Collected Poems, vol. 1, 427. 157 Lucebert, letter to a friend, January, 1946, quoted in Anja de Feijter, “Introduction,” Lucebert: The Collected Poems, 31. 158 See the description of the opening events in Elburg, Geen letterheren, 142–50. 159 Lucebert, 1949 Stedelijk speech, quoted in de Feijter, “Introduction,” in Lucebert: The Collected Poems, 27–8. 160 Stokvis, De verborgen wereld van Eugène Brands, 83. 161 Stokvis, “Carl-Henning Pedersen and Eugène Brands,” 90. 162 Brands, interview with Willemijn Stokvis, 1979, quoted in Stokvis, “Carl-Henning Pedersen and Eugène Brands,” 77. 163 Brands, “Authentieke Volksmuziek,” n.p.

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Hartog Jager, Imaginair, 15. Brands “Authentieke Volksmuziek,” n.p. Stokvis, De verborgen wereld van Eugène Brands, 113. Eugenie Brands, “Preserving His Heritage,” in Lapré, ed., Eugène Brands, 29. Hartog Jager, Imaginair, 62. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 103. Man Ray, in Pierre Bourgeade, Bonsoir, Man Ray (Paris, 1972), 64–5, quoted in Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 82. Stokvis, De verborgen wereld van Eugène Brands, 123. Eugène Brands, quoted in Hartog Jager, Imaginair, 178. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 3–4. Hartog Jager, Imaginair, 81; and Trudy Nieuwenhuys-van der Horst, conversation with the author, Utrecht, December 11, 2018. Hartog Jager, Imaginair, 83–4. Dotremont, “Le grand rendez-vous naturel,” 3–5. Dotremont references the book by “C.P. Tolstoff,” Sur les traces des antiques civilisations chwasméniennes, 1948, in the pamphlet “Et je ne vais dans le musées que pour enlever les muselières…” reprinted in Cobra (1980), n.p. The book is translated as Tolstov, Following the Tracks of Ancient Khorezmian Civilization. Elburg, Geen letterheren, 162. Stokvis, Cobra, 162. Eugène Brands, “Omkijken naar Cobra. De beet van Cobra,” in Eugène Brands 1949 Cobra 1951, quoted in Stokvis, De verborgen wereld van Eugène Brands, 165. Hartog Jager, Imaginair, 251. Eugène Brands, “Het surrealisme,” De Goede gedachte, 1947, reprinted in Stokvis, De verborgen wereld van Eugène Brands, 216. Constant, “Manifesto.” Dotremont, letter to Constant, October 7, 1948, AML, dossier CDMA 02331/0001. Constant, fragment of a letter to Christian Dotremont, n.d., AML, document CDMA 02331/0002/002. Freud, Three Essays, 8. Constant, “C’est notre désir qui fait la révolution.” Asger Jorn, letter to Constant, summer 1948, letter 5, RKD. Ibid. Jorn, letter to Constant, March 8, 1950, letter 15, RKD. Dotremont, “Impressions et expressions du Danemark,” 2. Contribution by “Groupe Expérimental Hollandais” in “Comment ils s’encadrent,” n.p. Christian Dotremont, “Par la grande porte,” translated in Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 251. See Kurczynski, “Ironic Gestures”; and The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn. Charles Estienne critiques geometric abstract art as a new academic approach in L’art abstrait est-il un académisme? Unsigned editorial statement, Cobra 7 (fall, 1950), 5. Thanks to Michel Ragon, Dubuffet contributed a lithograph and published a letter to his Belgian dealer Geert van Bruaene in Cobra, explaining his interest in joy and the celebration of the everyday. “Correspondance,” 10. The same issue, devoted to popular art, featured texts by Gaston Chaissac, one of the best known art brut artists praised by Dubuffet. Chaissac, a self-taught but well-connected working-class artist, challenges the categories of insider and outsider, popular versus high art. Alechinsky, Les Poupées de Dixmude. Hans Bellmer, untitled text and drawing reproduced in Cobra 6 (April, 1950). 13. Jorn, letter to Constant, 1950, letter 27, RKD. Alberto Giacometti, letters to Pierre Alechinsky, May 22, 1951 and September 4, 1951. AAC. Gaston Bachlard, letter to Pierre Alechinsky, May 25, 1950. AAC. Hugo Claus, “Les Poupees de Dixmude. Het bock van een abstract schilder,” Vooruit (July 14, 1950), cited in Jacobs, “Hugo Claus, Un artiste experimental?” 77.

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Surrealism into Cobra Breton, Arcanum 17. Zangrie, “Perséphone,” 22. Raine, “La mère terrible,” 9. See Bodien, “Cobra et le cinéma: une histoire belge.” Heusch, “Les années d’apprentissage.” See Steven Jacobs, “Cobra, Canvas, and Camera.” Heusch, Why Marry Her?, 1. Jean Raine, “Correspondance à un anonyme qui désire écrire un livre sur Cobra,” undated letter, AML, document ML 08500/0130. de Maret, “An Interview with Luc de Heusch,” 290. Passeron, “Sur le Surréalisme révolutionnaire – témoignage,” 19. Michel Tapié, “Ainsi voit-on le celte Camille Bryen transcender l’informel,” News Post Paris, June 1951, cited in Paulhan, L’art informel, 20; Estienne, “Une révolution: le tachisme.” See Guilbaut, et al., eds., Colloque Michel Ragon. Charles Estienne, “Hans Hartung,” Art d’aujourd’hui 4 (March 1951), quoted in Lambert, ed., Charles Estienne et l’art à Paris, 44. Roth, ed., Inventur, 373. Karl-Otto Götz, Erinnerungen und Werk (Dusseldorf, 1983), 516, trans. in Jäger and Kittelmann, eds., K.O. Götz, 27. Tapié, “The Necessity of an Autre Esthetic”; Paulhan, L’art informel. Tapié, Véhémences confrontées, n.p. Ragon, Dubuffet, 51. Bataille, “Informe,” Documents 1, (1929), 382, trans. in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 31. Tapié’s essay for a 1948 group exhibition at Galerie des Deux Iles reads as a manifesto against the Communist Party and Socialist Realism, questioning the use of the term reality in what Serge Guilbaut calls a “fairly traditional surrealist manner.” Guilbaut, “Squares and Stains,” 69. Tapié included Jorn’s Raft of the Medusa in “Caratteri della pittura d’oggi” at Galleria di Spazio in Rome in 1954. Michel Tapié, “L’aventure totale d’Appel,” n.p. Jorn discusses Tachism and Informel in “Untitled (Om Kunst i Europa og Danmark efter krigen)”; “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm”; and “Asger Jorn hjemme.” Asger Jorn, “The Meaning of the Nuclear Plastic Experience,” a 1954 manuscript quoted in Sauvage, Arte nucleare, 36. Jorn, Pour la forme, 135. Estienne, “Une révolution: le tachisme,” trans. in Guilbaut, ed., Be-Bomb, 557. Estienne, Prélude aux Noces. Alechinsky, letter to Charles Estienne, May 9, 1954, AML, document CDMA 02220/1954/001. Guilbaut, “1955,” 177. Breton, “Le présent des Gaules.” See Adamson, “The Critics of the École de Paris,” in Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 165–215. Guilbaut, “1955,” 171. Tapié, Georges Mathieu, and Sam Francis made a high-profle visit to Japan in 1957, and some scholars credit Tapié with introducing the Gutai group to European critics. See Kee, “Situating a Singular Kind of ’Action,’” 121. Alechinsky, “Abstraction faite,” 4. Constant, “De Honden Blaffen, de Karavaan Trekt Verder,” in Schilderijen 1969–1977 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1978), translated in Hummelink, “An Animal, A Night, A Scream, A Human Being,” 34. Jorn, Guldhorn og Lykkehjul, illustrations 14 and 56. Young, “Première exposition d’ensemble des Ateliers du Marais,” 4. On the relationship of industry to agriculture in European reconstruction, see Marshall, “European Initiatives Essential to Economic Recovery.”

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240 Prévert, preface to Arnal et Jorn and Nouvelle Défgurations de Asger Jorn. See Atkins, Asger Jorn: The Crucial Years, 37. 241 Dotremont remained close to French representational Surrealist painter Felix Labisse, even referring his work to Breton for consideration for the International Surrealist exhibition in 1947. In 1950, Dotremont writes that his support for Cobra spontaneity in poetry and in painting does not keep him from being Labisse’s friend (ami). Christian Dotremont, letter to Felix Labisse, December 28, 1950. AML, dossier CDMA 01408/0001. 242 Svanberg, quoted in Von Holten, Max Walter Svanberg i världen, 8. 243 Millroth, CO Hultén, 50, cited in Noheden, “Expo Aleby, 1949,” 837. 244 Svanberg, in Von Holten, Max Walter Svanberg i världen, 28–34. 245 Dotremont, “La fn et les moyens,” 8a. 246 Edouard Jaguer, “Tour à terre: Le groupe de Malmø,” manuscript, September 1949, reprinted in Cobra (1980), n.p. 247 See for example, Carl-Otto Hultén, Fågelmöte, 1950–1951, mixed technique on paper, 69 × 100 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, NM 6264. 248 Jaguer, “Tour à terre,” reprinted in Cobra (1980), n.p. 249 “Imaginisterna 1952,” Malmö Museum Månadsblad 154 (October, 1952), 6 and 11. 250 Breton, quoted in Von Holten, Max Walter Svanberg i världen, 108. 251 André Breton, “Hommage à Max Walter Svanberg.” 252 Von Holten, Max Walter Svanberg i världen, 106. 253 Pierre, Max Walter Svanberg et le règne féminin (written in 1962). 254 Pierre, Max Walter Svanberg et le règne féminin, 18. 255 Pierre, “Penhague, Uxelles, Msterdam,” 29.

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A small black and white photograph by Serge Vandercam creates a micro-landscape that fts between our hands, intimately, like a scroll (Figure 3.1). It could also be a haiku, consisting of three parts: a small ground of sand captured by the specifc aperture of the lens set to a middle distance; a broken metal ring with tattered edges accompanied by its shadow; and a blurred pyramidal shape or pile of something in the background. This form situated at left balances the implicit forward motion of the metal piece, which seems to have rolled to a provisional rest at center right. It will continue on its path, perhaps, when the wind next stirs. The lower part of the circle where it meets the sand is out of focus, part of a blurry stripe across the photograph’s bottom edge, an odd effect that only adds to the sense of mystery. The scene suggests a harmony of organic and inorganic matter. The pyramidal form may be a pile of seaweed or other pieces of metal. The shadow of the circular object takes the accidental form of a sea purse. The object must be manufactured, but it seems to sprout a leaf at left, new growth simulated by a remnant of war in a landscape of ruin. Symbolic readings accumulate: the circle as infnity, the broken circle as death, the obsolescence of technology, the cycle of history. The tattered metal stands in for a missing human presence, implying loss and death. The original body of this skeleton must have been a cylinder of which only one end ring remains. Maybe it was a can of food? Maybe it was a tear gas canister. The photograph was taken at Nieuwpoort, Belgium, in 1948 as the beach was offcially closed for landmine removal and demilitarization. Vandercam had himself just been demobilized, having volunteered for the British 21st Army Group after returning from 10 months in a forced labor camp in Poznán, Poland. He was sent there in 1943 at age 19, despite working as an assistant to a photogravurist in Belgium partly to avoid such conscription by the Germans. After the war, he did street photography in Antwerp and briefy attended the Belgian School of Photography and Cinematography in Brussels. He left quickly, more interested in experimentation than commercial techniques, although he would make a living as a professional photographer and television cameraman for the next several years. Vandercam had learned photography as a teenager before the war, from a friend whose brother had a box camera that made contact prints. He soon began taking his own prints of trees and other objects with his mother’s box camera, around the neighborhood and in the Cinquantenaire park in Brussels. Vandercam was immediately fascinated by the process of watching an image appear in a dark room as if by magic.1 When he returned to photography after the war, he taught himself a range of compositional and printing techniques mostly through experimentation. Thus, his friend,

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Figure 3.1 Serge Vandercam, Mer du Nord, Nieuport (North Sea, Nieuwpoort), 1948. Gelatin silver print, 7.2 × 23.9 cm. Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels.

the critic Selim Sasson, would claim that he was a “perfect autodidact” in photography – and arguably, the perfect photographer for a movement that valued spontaneity and experimentation over specialization.2 As Vandercam later recalled, he didn’t know any photographers at the time, only artists.3 First, he became involved with the Surrealist circle in Brussels in 1948, attending regular gatherings at the home of Louis Scutenaire along with Achille Chavée, René Magritte, Marcel Mariën, Paul Nougé, and others.4 Then, in 1949, he met Christian Dotremont and began attending the informal Cobra “salons” at 10, rue de la Paille. Dotremont’s 1950 exhibition of Cobra photography, “The Developments of the Eye” (Les Développements de L’Oeil) at Galerie St-Laurent in Brussels, framed Vandercam’s photographs as manifestations of the poetic materialism of Cobra. The relationship between photography and reality, Dotremont writes, does not just involve the photograph’s transmission of an external reality, but also manifests the way appearance creates reality. “Photography not only offers, keeps, transforms the appearances of reality, but also manages to reverse the situation,” he writes, “and rather than going from the piece of reality to the piece of paper, it goes from the latter to the former.”5 Photography “develops the eye,” with the goal not of decorating the walls, he concludes, but of denuding the eye – stripping it of its illusion of comprehension in order to create new and more profoundly real experiences. In this framework, the ruins of war photographed on the Belgian beaches become images of another emerging reality. Such scenes, in retrospect, seem well suited to a society trying to start over again, even as it struggled to clear away the rubble. Cobra arose out of the conditions of deprivation and the burgeoning hope of recovery that characterized the immediate postwar period in Europe. The different Cobra artists’ study, work, and living conditions during the war were disrupted to varying degrees in each occupied city. The Dutch academies were closed down, and artists were culturally isolated, while the Danish Linien-Høst group (most of them back in Denmark after living in Paris in the late 1930s) experienced relative freedom despite their promotion of “degenerate” art in defance of Nazi cultural policies. The Belgian artists, writers, and photographers were able to travel between occupied Brussels and Paris, but some, like Vandercam, were sent away to forced labor camps. The end of the war allowed most of the artists, eager to reconnect with international developments, to come together in Paris, still considered the primary European center of avant-garde activity. The continent, crossed by hundreds of thousands of refugees, would suffer

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long after the offcial end of the confict as it struggled to rebuild the peacetime economies and reestablish trade networks and agricultural production amid continued food rationing. For several years, the brutality of forced displacements and violent retributions perpetuated the horrors of the war.6 Observers and victims alike were appalled by the U.S. deployment of the atom bomb in Japan and the inhuman atrocities of the concentration camps, which would soon lead to the prohibition of genocide and the enshrinement of universal human rights in international law.7 These events would not fgure directly in the art of Cobra, but are alluded to symbolically, in the blunt materiality of the beach installations captured in Vandercam’s photographs, the staring faces in Karel Appel’s “Questioning Children” works, and the abstractions of weapons and armor in Tajiri’s “Warrior” sculptures. This chapter investigates all three artistic series, which respond to social conditions in a particularly vivid and material way. The specifc experiences of each artist would inevitably shape their decisions and approach. As a movement, Cobra’s interest in play, spontaneity, and materiality registered frst of all the artists’ experiences of material deprivation and the necessity of resourcefulness and adaptability during the occupation; and secondly, proposed new values for a better – more open and ultimately more compassionate – life. Their rejection of artistic skill and specialization responded to the inhumanity of the new technologies of destruction that continued to be developed on a global stage during the Cold War. Their celebration of experimentation and collectivity suggested an alternative to the common desire for individual normalcy and security – the classic bourgeois values so decried also by the Surrealists – after the years of wartime upheaval. These Cobra art works bear powerful “material witness” to the crimes against humanity perpetrated in the war and continued in many ways afterward – in the purifcation campaigns, in the social relations reduced to brutal transactions in cities torn apart by the war, in the treatment of refugees as well as colonized peoples starting to demand their rights and sovereignty. The art works do not present literal witnesses for any particular trial – it would not be until the Eichmann trial in 1961 that the stories of actual witnesses would be politically mobilized to bring the horror of events like the Holocaust to life. In the 1950s, reconstructing the bombed-out cities and repairing the social fabric of each community were the more fundamental matters at hand. Resisting the polemical optimism of postwar politics, the Cobra works produce symbolic provocations demanding that observers remember what happened, by means of popular imagery and intensely material forms, for a shell-shocked public that did not always want to be confronted with what they had just lived through. The Cobra artists, for their part, did not want the deeper questions raised by the war of why people would do such things to each other in the frst place to be simply swept back under the rug. Instead, they proposed a recognition of the active relationship between the past and the present that acknowledged the complexity of ethical decisions. The Cobra art works discussed here address the observer as what Michael Rothberg terms an “implicated subject” rather than a passive spectator. Such a subject recognizes the connections between past and present injustices, in this case through a material and emotionally moving encounter that goes beyond empty platitudes about commemoration that do not actually redress what caused the violence in the frst place. Such artistic encounters are uniquely able to connect what Rothberg terms “differently situated subjects” in a joint recognition of the responsibility of privilege, or what it means to have survived political violence.8 The implicated subject is one

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whose group has in many cases benefted from that violence whether they acknowledge it or not. This includes the white European citizens who were not persecuted or killed for their religion or their racial identity during the Second World War, including most of the Cobra artists. Artists like Vandercam or Appel may be privileged subjects in that they survived the war physically unscathed, but they were deeply affected by what they saw and experienced. Along with Tajiri and the other Cobra artists, they devoted their work to creating a vigorous recognition of the connections between cultural identity and political violence that encourage a more productive refection for the future. Cobra rejected the simplistic “settling of accounts” like the inhumane public calculations of guilt or innocence decried by German philosopher Theodor Adorno in his famous critique of the failure of postwar culture to truly “come to terms with the past.”9 Adorno recommended that postwar observers could avoid a repeat of the popular turn to Fascism precisely by “reinforcing a person’s self-consciousness.” His position bears consideration here because it echoes what the Cobra artists were trying to accomplish through their works. He writes: If one wants to oppose an objective danger objectively, then a mere idea won’t do, not even that of freedom and humanity, which in its abstract form […] doesn’t mean all that much to people. If the potential for Fascism is linked to human interests […], then the most effective antidote remains an appeal to whatever truly illuminates those interests, and the most immediate of them. […] Let us remind people of the simplest things: that open or disguised revivals of Fascism will bring about war, suffering, and poverty within a coercive system, and […] lead to a politics of catastrophe.10 Adorno’s advice to educate people through their own subjective interests was echoed by Asger Jorn. Jorn writes in 1955 of the importance of understanding people’s “desire for sensation” in order to avoid the risk of easy solutions. Jorn describes a new aesthetic “theory of wonder” that embraces the unknown, not in order to fascinate people into passivity but rather to enhance “our contact to nature and the elements that surround us and further social harmony between men.” For Jorn, “the purpose of art is to express what is of interest to us, our concepts of value.”11 To recognize the importance of sensation in changing our social values is to promote the fundamental power of art as a material medium to alter not only our personal perceptions, but the larger world we share. The art works of Cobra participate in their own way in the broader desire to move forward after the tragedies of the war, precisely by reminding observers of the longer trajectory of the past – especially the minor and popular cultures that are often overlooked. Such works encourage us to recognize the ways humanity has evolved over time, and to re-envision how we connect to other people and other entities in the world, both living and non-living. These are themes fundamental to all art, but they took on a particular urgency in mid-century Europe, when memoirs, monuments, and commemorations increasingly represented events through the heroization of some people and the demonization of others. In the violent postwar purifcation campaigns, people were simplistically blamed for the ordinary faws that the Cobra artists viewed as a basic aspect of the human animal. It was precisely this fallibility that makes possible our sense of moral responsibility, and so the Cobra artists demand that we pay attention.

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These artists made their way on virtually nothing, whether giving the little food they could secure to their children as Jorn and Constant did in Paris in 1949 or sharing costs in communal living situations like the Ateliers du Marais founded by Pierre and Micky Alechinsky in Brussels in 1950. The Dutch artists Appel and Corneille occupied an old tanning facility, permeated by appalling odors, on the rue Santeuil in the 5th arrondissement of Paris in 1950.12 (Because he was living with his son Victor at the time, they wouldn’t allow Constant to join them there.)13 They used blackout curtains at night as if it were the height of the war, lest they be evicted for living in a factory space. Appel’s paintings from that time (see Figure 1.5) embody their furtive yet optimistic life there. Their brutal simplicity, inspired by children’s and outsider art, channels the artists’ hand-to-mouth existence and the broader postwar interest in returning to the foundations of human creativity in the methods of the untrained. Appel’s painterly methods – spectacularly decried as “graffti, bluster, and blobs” in the Dutch press after the 1949 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam – appeared shocking to a broader public that craved images of calm after the political storm.14 They also produced a productive notoriety for the young artists, especially Appel. Cobra pushed its still mostly negative or indifferent public to face the savage realities, and the reality of European savagery. Appel later recalled, “war, crimes, concentration camps, famines, genocides, etc. were realities that I more or less put straight into my canvases with a welter of detail. It was all anguish, drama, and fear.”15 The artists recognized, too, that the end of the Second World War did not mean the end of war. The French and the Dutch were fghting colonial wars in Indochina and Indonesia from 1947 to 1948; the frst Arab–Israeli war began in 1948; NATO was formed, with its headquarters in Brussels, in 1949; the Korean War began in 1950. Europe struggled to reconstruct its shattered societies while the rest of the world, increasingly divided between the two postwar “superpowers,” haggled over the future of its colonial empires. As communists, the Cobra artists sympathized with the colonial struggles for liberation as well as those of the working classes – most of the artists, after all, were from working-class backgrounds themselves. Appel was a son of a barber from Dapperstraat in Amsterdam, a neighborhood where Yiddish was the main language (his knowledge of Yiddish would later endear him to New York taxi drivers, just as he would befriend working-class New York painters like Willem de Kooning, the son of a single mother who owned a bar in Rotterdam). When Appel’s father found out he wanted to be a painter, he was thrown out of the house with nothing. He slept under a bridge until he could fnd a place to stay. “You do not forget poverty,” he later recalls. “I can remember on the spot the feeling that I had as a hungry homeless man at the time.”16 The claims for liberty expressed so often by the Cobra artists and their critics, then, were not transcendent or existentialist but rather were about rejecting the political and economic oppression that they themselves had experienced, as well as the politics of an art world that refused to recognize class divisions. Constant declares in Cobra 4 the production of Cobra’s desire for experiment out of the realities of economic inequality compounded by war and material deprivation: This culture has never been capable of satisfying anyone, neither a slave, nor a master who has every reason to believe himself happy in a luxury, a lust, where all the individual’s creative potential is centered. […]

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Conscience depends upon social circumstances, and when these prevent us from being satisfed, our needs impel us to discover our desires. This results in experiment, or the release of knowledge. […] So if society turns against us and against our works, reproaching us for being practically “incomprehensible,” we reply: 1. 2. 3. 4.

That humanity in 1949 is incapable of understanding anything but the necessary struggle for freedom. That we do not want to be “understood” either, but to be freed, and that we are condemned to experiment by the same causes that drive the world into war. That we could not be creators in a passive world, and that today’s strife sustains our inventiveness. Finally, that humanity, once it has become creative, will have no choice but to discard aesthetic and ethical conceptions whose only goal has been the restraint of creation – those conceptions responsible for man’s present lack of understanding for experiment.17

The experimental and spontaneous attitude of Cobra stood in direct opposition to the mainstream focus on recovery and reconstruction at the time. Within a few years the predominant European mood of trauma, deprivation, and destruction would transform into its opposite: the reconstruction of society and culture in terms overtly future-oriented, optimistic, rational, and commercial. Cobra’s approach to symbolizing political and social events through organic or animal imagery was unusual for the 1950s, when painting became dominated by abstraction, a move that largely isolated art from discussions of history and memory. In memory studies, the postwar period appears as a caesura, a decade of shock or disavowal in which the recent events of the war seemed unassimilable into the social discourse of reconstruction and technological progress that dominated the 1950s.18 In that decade, the most well-known painters of Abstract Expressionism and its European counterpart Informel, such as Jackson Pollock in the U.S. and Georges Mathieu in France, heroically attempted to produce a monumental abstract painting (or “action painting”) to replace the old reverence for “History Painting.” Their virtuosic gestural paintings situate viewers entirely in the moment. All social and political references are erased in the name of the painter’s own human presence. The only reality in Pollock’s drip paintings or Mathieu’s abstract paintings titled after historical battles was that of the paint itself as a trace of an exemplary individual action on the canvas. Such works divorce humanism from existing historical referents and re-envision it as an abstract representation of individual heroism. Informel and Abstract Expressionist artists developed a fction that their practice reached back before the institutionalization of painting in modern society: the handprints in several of Pollock’s drip works referenced the untrained hand of the cave painter, while Mathieu’s Lyrical-Abstract marks proposed that, in the painter’s words, “signs precede their signifcation.”19 These practices ft well in the wider postwar emphasis on reconstruction that looked to the present and the future in the attempt to move beyond the traumas of the recent past – but they do so by isolating humanism from political realities. Cobra’s political and materialist approach was a direct critique of the emphasis on individual virtuosity, purity, and transcendence in the most prominent painting practices in Paris and New York. Cobra opposed the professional art world’s nationalist

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stance, as in French attempts to revive the School of Paris, or the international humanism that only recognized individual artists according to European models, as in the writing of Andre Malraux.20 Asger Jorn called action painting a narcissistic act “in which there is no more communication with the audience.”21 He rejected the way it was framed as a demonstration of individual virtuosity. Jorn believed that painting always had a social function. Jorn and his Cobra colleagues attempted to reformulate the most pressing political and social realities in symbolic ways, and aimed to activate the observer to reimagine their own role in relation to current events. The Cobra artists responded to the return to triumphant narratives of victory and progress with their tongues out – as embodied in the still from Wilhelm Freddie and Jørgen Roos’s Surrealist flm The Defnite Rejection of a Request for a Kiss on the cover of Cobra 4. To Dotremont, Cobra exemplifed a “spontaneity radically opposed to the measures, mechanisms, conditionings, and tricks applied by the bourgeoisie with increasing oppressiveness.”22 In the 1950s Cobra art reminded Europeans eager to rebuild a humanist civilization that human nature still had its irreverent and savage sides, aspects that could not simply be sublimated into a triumphant postwar culture. The uniquely human violence which led to the war, the Bomb, and the Holocaust would not simply evaporate in a puff of Citroën exhaust. They could only hope it would not all go up in smoke again, this time for good. Cobra was both a product of its immediate history and an attempt to return to the fundamental symbols and images that have defned human communities, and become totems of its social divisions and conficts, over the centuries. Rather than focus on death and commemoration, they turned to ancient images, popular culture, and childlike methods in order to reanimate European art. Cobra produced a polemically colorful and at least superfcially cheerful art as a deliberate refusal to reinscribe the traumas of war and occupation. Dotremont writes in his Cobra monograph on Constant that the Dutch artist’s painting “must be cheerful for serious reasons.”23 Some historians take Cobra’s playfulness at face value and do not consider it “serious” enough to address history after the human tragedies of the war. “Seriousness” is one of the most important critical terms for Abstract Expressionism, and marked mainstream aesthetic theory and Existentialist philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s. Presenting art as serious and solemn is one response to art’s social and economic marginalization. Art is an activity without a function or “scientifc” justifcation in a capitalist and technologically advanced society where all activities are expected to have outcomes, all expenditures of time accounted for. Like the Surrealists, the Cobra artists adamantly rejected these attitudes. Jorn later reproached the philosophers Suzanne Langer, C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, and John Hospers, whose aesthetic theories are closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, for their “fear of the superfcial and the hollow,” and for “taking things too seriously.”24 Cobra instead openly invited conficting interpretations by foregrounding spontaneity and humor. They replaced the truth of authentic expression with the concrete reality of materials that sets in motion an intersubjective play of interpretation. Cobra takes a childlike approach to charged political imagery, in order to create an experimental history painting appropriate to an increasingly global and mediated society, in which values are constantly shifting and perspectives on events are multifaceted. It acknowledges that painting cannot solve society’s problems. As Pierre Alechinsky observes, “Neither the world’s shame and guilt nor one’s own guilt and shame can be cured by some kind of abracadabra. Suffering cannot be paid for in the currency of a few

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pictorial ‘good deeds.’” Painting cannot solve society’s problems – but people can. The painting of Cobra pushes people toward renewed recognition of their position in their larger society and culture, providing them the means to confront their own attitudes and insights, to reexamine the world and their agency within it from new angles. Alechinsky explains why he prefers the cheerfulness of color to the artistic wallowing in doom and gloom: 25

I do not speak of the occupation, the arrests, the deportations; only the occultation: windows covered in Prussian blue, muffed lanterns, dark streets. During the Second World War, Brussels had a northern, rather Baltic aspect. […] In Denmark, the less sunny it is the more intensely painters glorify color.26 Alechinsky’s apparent move away from political questions and into aesthetic ones has a deeper political meaning. Color, an important feature of modern Nordic art, has also been linked in art history to emotional expression and children’s art – in other words to human experiences considered less important than adult mastery over the emotions and, ultimately, control over one’s fate (or the fates of others). The Cobra artists explored the way color relates to ideas of relinquishing or actively resisting control in everyday life. They celebrated the direct intensity of color in everything from the decorative wall paintings produced at Bregnerød in the summer of 1949 to the popular festivals they discussed in the Cobra journal. Neo-Marxist critic Henri Lefebvre, a major infuence on Dotremont and Cobra, considered such festivals instances where collective popular culture rejected the alienation of modern capitalist society.27 The frst Carnival of Binche after the war took place in 1946 in Belgium, providing an explosion of collective activity in the town. Alechinsky and Pol Bury went to the Carnival together that year, and an account of the festival appears in Cobra 7. There, Samuël Glotz, a professor of folklore who later founded the International Carnival and Mask Museum at Binche and published a history of the festival, disrupts the primitivist myths that have surrounded its origins since the 19th century. He argues that the Carnival did not originate, as previously claimed, with an exotic spectacle of Inca dancers performing for Maria of Hungary in 1549. Instead, it is a local Belgian embodiment of a common and widespread tradition of collective masked dancing as a cultural ceremony celebrating the renewal of nature and the fertility of the earth.28 The annual daylong ceremony involves the cheerful chasing away of winter by troops of male drummers and masked Gilles, stomping in clogs and throwing armfuls of oranges at onlookers, followed by men dancing in plumed headdresses. The Cobra artists celebrated the Carnival as an example of the vibrant survival of popular tradition. Beneath a large photo of Carnival celebrants in Malmédy on the frontispiece to Cobra 6 appears a description by the Belgian Commissariat of Tourism: “Folklore is of a profoundly popular character in Belgium and, by its very richness, eloquently conveys the joy of life and the respect for traditions, as much in Flanders as in Wallonia.”29 In this case, the offcial discourse of the Tourism board aligned with Cobra’s avant-garde and neo-Marxist interests in celebrating the popular festival, which took on a special exuberance in the year after the war ended. Attending the Carnival of Binche in 1946, Alechinsky was struck not only by the dancing and festivity but also by the sight – and taste – of the frst oranges he and Bury had seen in years. “We had just come through fve years without oranges,” he later recalls, and here they were “dedicated to this festival, for the sole pleasure of seeing

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them crushed, full of juice, against the walls.”30 The Carnival imagery of Binche, including the masked faces, the orange peels, and the plumed feathers that resemble serpents and other images, appear and reappear over the years in Alechinsky’s art. In 1948 Alechinsky references the Carnival in a small, childlike fgure on a linocut illustrating Apollinaire’s novella The Poet Assassinated, a tragicomic story written from a hospital bed in 1915 as the poet recovered from combat wounds suffered in the First World War (Figure 3.2). Alechinsky’s updated Saint Sebastian image becomes a Carnival fgure, its mask reduced to a monochrome grimace with outlined eyes and lips suggesting the characteristic green glasses and expressionless mouth of Gilles. Alechinsky combines the dancing performer with a sideshow knife-throwing act. He shows the artist brutally pierced by the public’s daggers while an umbrella – that powerful Surrealist symbol of the complacent bourgeoisie – cuts into his eye. The image is reproduced in the catalog for an exhibition at Galerie Apollo in Brussels titled “Festivals and Killjoys: Paintings etc.” Luc de Heusch writes in the catalog text that as the artist “sails at his risk and peril through some etchings [eaux-fortes,

Figure 3.2 Pierre Alechinsky, Le Poète Assassinée (The Poet Assassinated), 1948. Linocut, reproduced in Pierre Alechinsky, Fêtes et trouble-fête (Brussels: Galerie Apollo, 1948), frontispiece. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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literally “strong waters”] he laughs loudly on his raft: do not take him for shipwrecked because he bites.”31 By the 1960s, the plumed headdress of Gilles de Binche becomes a carnivalesque image of androgyny and sexual liberation in Alechinsky’s gestural paintings.32 Yet the headdress also remains an emblem of the giddy feeling of freedom he and his friends experienced just after the war, during what Jean Raine calls “this marvelous and unforgettable Liberation.”33 This chapter explores the relationship of Cobra to the legacy of the Second World War, questions of collective memory and commemoration, and Cobra’s response to new international conficts in the 1950s. Cobra developed an art driven by symbolic imagery, but instead of clearly defned symbols, its art confronts viewers with a material transformation that suggests an image’s prior meanings and its potential future ones. Layers of personal and cultural memory unfold before our eyes. Rather than dwell on memory itself, Cobra polemically celebrated a physically accessible but newly unpredictable world where symbols and the collective meanings they signify are subject to perpetual redefnition. Cobra’s scenes of carnivalesque celebration often conceal darker undertones. Serge Vandercam’s photographs of ruined bunkers on the Belgian beaches recall the violence of a war that reduced European citizens to a struggle for survival, yet the objects they foreground transform into poetic forms seen through a new and hopeful lens. Appel’s “Questioning children” responded to the haunting vision of starving children begging by the side of a train passing through Germany just after the war, yet their playfulness suggests the ability to build a better future. Shinkichi Tajiri’s “Warrior” sculptures were a response to his own harrowing experiences as a soldier. Some of the works are welded together from discarded metal pieces reminiscent of those found by Vandercam on the Belgian beaches. Like Vandercam’s photographs, they present memory as a collective phenomenon shaped by both personal experiences and cultural representations, from the samurai to the modern soldier. What the war means, in this art, depends on the viewer. The art of Cobra leads us to question our own relationship not only with the wars, violence, and inhumanity of the past, but also to ongoing struggles against the destructive pervasiveness of social inequality, patriarchal values, and white privilege. “The spectator does not and cannot exist in our days,” Jorn proclaimed in Helhesten in 1941.34 We are all accountable. To say these words, however, means much less, in the end, than to experience their message in unexpected, intensely material forms.

Vandercam’s Photographs: Life Among the Ruins In picturing new life among the ruins of a militarized landscape, Serge Vandercam’s North Sea, Nieuwpoort (See Figure 3.1) sets the stage for a discussion of Cobra’s relationship to the war that was its crucible. It is a particularly poetic example of a series of photographs Vandercam produced in 1949–1950 just as he became a part of Cobra. These photographic experiments exemplify Cobra’s foundational aesthetic principles of spontaneity and subjective engagement with the world in the form of objects and images presented simply, even bluntly, with a tactile materiality. Photography enabled Vandercam to reframe real objects as poetic images able to be interpreted in multiple ways. His photographs capturing the remnants of the war were included by German photo critic Otto Steinert in his “Subjective photography” movement, an emphatically humanist approach that rejected the commercial and journalistic uses of photography in the 1950s, but they are more materialist than subjective or expressionist.

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Vandercam described his own process as one of discovering the intentions carried by the objects themselves: I look at things as if they were sculptures. I am very sensitive to that and that is what I photograph. […] There are many trees in a forest. At a certain moment something attracts my attention and provokes a series of photographs. The tree is the medium, the pretext for sharing what I have to say. I become a tree. The tree itself, as a tree, has no interest anymore. It’s about what that tree wants to say. That is perhaps what experimental art means.35 Vandercam’s photographs invite subjective readings while at the same time presenting fragments of a larger reality shaped by both human and non-human concerns. The intersubjective dialog that they create between the viewing subject, the artist, and the objects depicted was characteristic of the materialist expression of Cobra. The aesthetic properties of materials are perhaps most directly translated in Vandercam’s photograms, works he made by placing objects directly on photographic paper. He described these works as “sensible experiences” that “restore the idea of [photography as a] trace.”36 Yet the photographs he made on the beaches engage directly with questions of memory and human agency after the Second World War. Vandercam’s photographs attest that Cobra was not just a movement of poetry or painting and sculpture, but a space for spontaneous experiments in multiple media. In 1949, Vandercam was working in a cigar store in Brussels owned by the father of Selim Sasson, a young art history student who also worked there to help pay his way through school and would become a close friend. Vandercam carried his Rolleicord camera everywhere at the time, and one day brought in a carton of photos that he showed to an enthusiastic Sasson.37 The next day, Sasson arranged for Vandercam to meet Dotremont, his neighbor in the Sablon area of Brussels who would also become a lifelong friend. Excited by the photos, Dotremont arranged to show them with the Surrealist experiments of Raoul Ubac and Roland d’Ursel in the exhibition “The Developments of the Eye” in 1950. Vandercam recalls that he immediately became part of the Cobra circle irrespective of the fact that he was a photographer. Cobra was not about specialization, he asserts: “Cobra was a state of mind.”38 In the photographs taken at the beaches at Nieuwpoort, Vandercam produces a fascinating play of tone, shape, and depth that turns the military ruin into a space of reverie. In Newport (Figure 3.3), a group of encrusted pieces of scrap metal stick up at odd angles from a rough concrete surface, a desolate scene isolated against a nearly blank sky. The camera focuses on several vertical metal protrusions in the middle distance, looking past a large pole that looms up over the entire scene in the immediate foreground, uncomfortably close. Its unfocused presence, awkwardly intersecting a second pole only slightly out of focus, seems to situate us right down in the scene and gives it an appearance of captured motion. Vandercam later describes this series of photographs as follows: Neither documentary nor witnessing […]. I recall, after the war, on the beaches they were clearing of mines lay an area still cluttered with disemboweled bunkers, bursting with scrap iron […]. They did not interest me as scraps of iron nor as documents of the bunkers […]. When the roof of a bunker was burst open, black steel bars stood up, an entanglement of steel bars, a strange world that […] I tried to make visible.39

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Figure 3.3 Serge Vandercam, Nieuwpoort, 1948. Gelatin silver print, 15-15/16 x 15-7/8 in. (40.5 × 40.3 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fund of the 1980s purchase. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels.

Rather than simply witnessing the violence of war, Vandercam sought visions of the material imagination, surreal scenes that suggested multiple interpretations. The scene could be read as a post-apocalyptic or dehumanized landscape, but its struts jutting up at odd angles could also be interpreted as human presences – those left standing, but barely. The photographs present fugitive moments of reconciliation with the war-scarred Belgian landscape shortly after the liberation, before its military detritus was cleaned up and confned to museums and memorials once again, its beaches beautifed anew

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for the annual rhythms of maritime industry and summer vacation. They relate directly to the flms of Henri Storck, the avant-garde flmmaker and friend of Dotremont and Luc de Heusch with whom Vandercam also collaborated. He was hired, for example, to photograph the flming of Storck’s Peasant Symphony (Symphonie Paysanne, 1942–1944), a documentary about a rural wedding and a meditation on the relationship between traditional communities and nature. In 1947, Storck produced for the Belgian Tourism Commission the flm Return to Life (La Joie de Revivre), a celebration of the liberation of the Flemish people and the places on which he built his career in prewar flms like the 1931 “city symphony” Ostend Queen of Beaches (Ostende, Reine des Plages). The documentary opens with Allied tanks rolling in and scenes of the military installations on the beach, and ends with upbeat imagery of children happily playing and bathing beauties sleeping on the beaches of Ostend. Storck’s early sequences of the beach include the lines of anti-tank installations set up across the dunes, rows of metal canisters and concrete lids, Belgian laborers attacking cement walls with mallets, and dramatic shots of the crumbling walls themselves with twisted metal skeletons poking every which way. The narrator intones, “In the warm light of the newly returned peace, the land reemerged, tragically scarred by the handiwork of death. And this Belgian seaport, once a place of pleasure and beauty, was found battered and almost unrecognizable.”40 Vandercam’s photos respond directly to such scenes, which he would have known well, but zoom in to a more intimate scale, or rather a scenario in which our scale in relation to the landscape becomes ambiguous. In Vandercam’s scenes, the materials themselves replace the human presence with their own animated qualities. Vandercam also resists the temptation played out in Storck’s offcially commissioned flm to celebrate the liberation as an unqualifed triumph of the “Belgian coast regain[ing] its liberty,” in which the happy children and young women stand for the innocence and progressive optimism of the entire Flemish people. Within the space of a few minutes, Storck’s flm replaces the images of war with those of happy crowds occupying the beach as they did in summers past, accompanied by the narrator’s observation that “optimism triumphs over the ruins.” The reality of the war in Flanders was of course much more complex, and the moral choices made by those who lived through it rarely black and white. The region is historically marked by a strong cultural and even, in the early 20th century, racial nationalism that made some of its citizens sympathetic to the German occupiers. The identity of Flanders related then as now to ongoing tensions with Wallonia and its much more powerful neighbor France, so that when the war began the French “Allies” occupying the Flemish streets were sometimes as violent toward the Belgians as the German occupiers later. Historical accounts like Hugo Claus’s autobiographical novel The Sorrow of Belgium make clear that ordinary Belgians were caught even more than the citizens of more powerful warring nations between a rock and a hard place. Like Claus’s story, Vandercam’s photos do not wash the unpleasant detritus away and replace it with a progressive optimism. Instead, they root the very seeds of such optimism in the hints of survival and regeneration visible emerging from the material ruins themselves. In this way, they refuse to separate social ideals of progress from the violence with which they are often enforced or imposed on others in modern society. Vandercam recalls the way the act of photographing the objects on the beach oddly resembled the violent actions of the war that brought them there in the frst place:

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Beyond this or that confguration, I discovered that there was a rhythm and that from this rhythm emerged the evocation of forms, sometimes birds, sometimes fgures. Then I photographed. There was something strange and ridiculous about “strafng” the barbed wire in this way. Solicited by this food of suggestions, I no longer saw the barbed wire, but men who emerged from this disturbing universe.41 Even as Vandercam saw the objects as living forms emerging from the ruins of war, the action of taking the image took on a violent aspect given the specifc history of the objects. Vandercam took the photographs of the military ruins just a few years after the photographs of Nazi concentration camps were widely publicized in the popular press. In an unprecedented food of public images of atrocity, photographs of piled-up bodies, emaciated victims, and atrocious camp conditions were reproduced throughout the Western media in 1945 as an injunction to, in the words of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “let the world see.”42 Editors chose to risk offending mass audiences with horrifc images in order to document and bear witness to what happened, to prevent it from ever happening again. This was a major shift in the public function of photography as a primary means to document the extreme inhumanity of the war and the Holocaust, the beginning of what Georges Didi-Huberman calls a new “period of visual evidence, or visual proof” as the Allies gathered evidence for the Nuremberg trials immediately after the war.43 In this context, Vandercam’s metal objects almost inevitably call to mind damaged bodies, suggesting “evidence” of some unnamed atrocity. What Michel Draguet calls the “choreographic” composition of Vandercam’s scene also suggests certain parallels to the emaciated bronze fgures of Alberto Giacometti.44 Giacometti’s sculptures became celebrated as the prototypical postwar Existentialist and humanist image of the traumatized body. Jean-Paul Sartre compared them directly to the concentration camp victims; in his account, the sculptor transfgures the “feshless martyrs of Buchenwald” into a glorious “group of Ascensions.”45 Vandercam does not reach for the pathos of memorializing the victims of war and the Holocaust directly in his photograph – much less attempt to visually redeem them – but he knows that people will naturally recognize human fgures in the abstract arrangement. Where Giacometti makes a dramatic spectacle of the traumatized body, Vandercam allows for a more subtle recognition that the instruments of violent confict have eerily come to signify its victims. He invites the observer’s memories or knowledge of the events of the war to circulate in and around its remnants. The brutal muteness of these weathered metal fragments does not demand an empathetic response, but grants us the agency to determine our own emotional landscape. The photograph asks that we situate ourselves actively in relation to the past, questioning our placement in relation to the physical landscape of the aftermath of violence. In Vandercam’s most well-known photograph, Hooks (Crochets) from 1952 (Figure 3.4), three hooks – large, medium, small – loom over a broken stone wall, producing a stark play of light and shadow. The rough upper edge of the stone crosses the page at a slight angle, with a second edge appearing in the shallow distance behind it. These edges seem to echo the materiality of the photographic page itself, visually suggesting layers of torn paper. The starkness of the metal forms and the ruined setting once again seem to refer to the violence of the war. Sharp metal points resting on the planar surface resemble meat hooks, suggesting the body reduced to animal fesh. They also recall the claws of a creature scrabbling over a wall. The photograph was not taken in the beachfront ruins, however, but at a quarry. The stone could be marble

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Figure 3.4 Serge Vandercam, Les crochets (Hooks), 1952. Photograph, 31.5 × 26.5 cm. Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels.

or limestone, the hooks part of the machinery used to move it. Vandercam had asked the Cobra artist Pol Bury to the quarry in 1952 to produce a commissioned portrait of the artist. It was a mischievous choice to photograph Bury, an avant-garde artist who made sculptures out of scrap metal and motors, in a site so deeply related to classical sculpture. While photographing the artist, Vandercam’s attention was diverted from Bury toward the striking view of the hooks. “There was something desperate and human that immediately struck my attention,” he recalls. “The photograph revealed this tone of feeling inscribed in my gaze and that the hooks […] took on.”46

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The stark contrast of the metal hooks against the sunlit stone and the rhythm of forms and shadows gives them a palpable presence and an almost rhythmic visual percussion. The shadows make them look like upside-down hearts, each hook completed by its shadow as if the objects were acting out a Platonic union of fesh with spirit. The progressive movement implied by their visual rhythm across the page calls to mind the “ladder of love,” representing the ascent of love from pure physical attraction to transcendence as described in Plato’s Symposium. The metal hooks lead with faltering steps, perhaps, from the large, clunky form at left to the one that overlaps it, and fnally to the isolated one at upper right, its greater purity suggested by spatial isolation and closeness to the sky. Yet all such readings remain projections on our part, belied by the adamant materiality of the image. The hearts have suggested a range of diverse readings over the years: Sasson calls them “these shiny and heavy hooks, erotic and slow as hearts of black blood.”47 For Julien Coulommier, they suggest “almost carnal bodily convulsions against a blind wall.”48 For many observers, they suggest a sinister or tragic aspect of bodily experience. Yet the hearts remain an evident illusion, obviously nothing but hooks and their shadows, captured as if by chance. The photographer creates a multifaceted puzzle. As Xavier Canonne observes of Vandercam’s photographs, “under his gaze, the object becomes sculpture as much as sign […] objects transform themselves.”49 Humor and hope take form, in the incongruous appearance of that most clichéd of symbols, the heart, appropriately upside-down. The hooks as objects speak a particularly human language that connects the most horrifc implications of violence to the highest aspirations of humanity. They could be read as signs of either violence or connection, death or renewal. Both Newport and Hooks were included by German photography critic Otto Steinert in the second of three “Subjective Photography” (Subjektive fotografe) exhibitions in 1954. Vandercam’s photographic approach parallels that of other European “Subjective” photographers like Steinert, Helmut Lederer or Hans Hammarskiöld, and Americans like Minor White, also included in the second “Subjective Photography” exhibition. The frst exhibition, in Saarbrücken and Cologne in 1951, included photograms and solarizations, as well as straight photography, setting Bauhaus precedents by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer next to new investigations by Steinert and other young European photographers. Otto Steinert was a doctor by training, and a self-taught photographer who became a key player animating postwar photography criticism. His exhibitions aimed to emphasize “the creative impulse of the individual photographer” in contrast to “‘applied’ utilitarian and documentary” photography.50 They foregrounded the “experimental and innovational” aspects of photography, focusing on black and white photography to signify artistic experiment at a time when color was increasingly used for commercial purposes. Art historian Franz Roh describes the exhibition’s focus as “compositions revealing by purely optical means a world of man’s imagination.”51 The catalog describes solarization, negative prints, relief printing, and manipulations of tonal range as experimental processes used to transform the photographic image into an artistic symbol.52 Vandercam made use of a range of such processes, including photograms that directly capture the object laid on the photographic paper, the layering or double printing of images, and darkroom manipulations of tone. In straight photographs such as Hooks, isolating such charged imagery opened up the symbolism of the image to new and subjective interpretations. In contrast to Vandercam’s materialist understanding, Steinert framed the “Subjective photography” project in explicitly humanist terms as a response to the war. He writes:

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War, Memory, and Renewal In the great crisis arising out of the confict between man and technical progress in all walks of life during the catastrophic decades of the 20th century, the demand became more and more insistent for a human direction of technics, for better controlled, that is to say, for creatively guided technics. […] “Subjective photography” means humanised, individualised photography and implies the handling of a camera in order to win from the single object the views expressive of its character.53

Steinert’s humanism responded to the German experience under Fascism, where personal expression was secondary to participation in the larger social organization, and avant-garde experimentation was shut down, its results sold off and destroyed by the Nazi authorities. It also responded to the destructive possibilities of technology made evident during the war on both sides, in the genocide of the death camps and the destruction of the atom bombs dropped by the U.S. in Japan. Steinert’s interest in turning the photographic technology toward personal expression presented a more experimental approach but in some ways paralleled the humanist goals of the more well-known photographic exhibition curated by Edward Steichen in 1955 for the Museum of Modern Art, “The Family of Man.” Both exhibitions focused on individual experience and celebrated human connection, one through creative invention and the other through the claim for universal human experiences. “The Family of Man” consisted of 503 works exhibited by 273 photographers depicting people from countries around the world, arranged in a dynamic display of enlarged photo panels on a grid of metal supports inspired by the exhibitions of the Bauhaus and the British Independent Group. It organized images from disparate cultures into broad themes such as maternity, father and son, childhood, education, spirituality, and labor. As Steichen writes in the catalog introduction, “it was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”54 The exhibition was a global sensation. Seen by over ten million viewers, it inspired both widespread praise and critical reactions from prominent intellectuals as it circulated around the world in the 1950s.55 The show’s prominent critics included Roland Barthes, who famously rejected its humanist approach. He writes: Birth, death? Yes, these are facts of nature, universal facts. But if one removes History from them, there is nothing more to be said about them […]. To reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing. […] I rather fear that the fnal justifcation of all this Adamism is to give to the immobility of the world the alibi of a “wisdom” and a “lyricism” which only make the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.56 The exhibition’s sentimentality, Barthes argues, obscures their subjects’ relationship to politics, and produces passive observers. Yet Barthes did not himself admit the degree to which the installation demanded the viewers’ active imagination to envision its universality. Photo critic Ariella Azoulay has recently critiqued Barthes’s reading, arguing that Steichen’s attempt to depict a universal experience was an active declaration of the existence of a global humanity equivalent to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Such a radical proposition, she argues, was dependent on the very

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plurality of experiences depicted. The organizers must have been cognizant of the multiple interpretations possible for each image.57 Yet while the show’s humanist intentions were productive in some ways and reductive in others, its limited range of pictorial choices reduced human cultural variation to a specifc set of themes that both minimizes political readings and foregrounds European and, especially, American perspectives. The majority of the photographers represented were Western (163 of the 273 photographers included were American). The photographs mostly frame their subjects through white, masculine, and heterosexual perspectives; for example, foregrounding images of women – especially white women and girls – as objects of the gaze, and boys and men as active subjects. Despite Steichen’s own pacifst intentions, the published catalog of The Family of Man – a coffee-table book found in many 1950s households, including my own family’s – omits an image of a hydrogen bomb test that was prominent in the MoMA exhibition. The book includes instead a generic optimistic statement by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that “Nuclear weapons and atomic electric power are symbolic of the atomic age: On one side, frustration and world destruction: on the other, creativity and a common ground for peace and cooperation.”58 It also omits a disturbing photograph of the aftermath of the lynching of Robert McDaniels in Mississippi in 1937, one that was removed from the MoMA exhibition after protests following the show’s opening.59 Such divisive and politically galvanizing images were actively suppressed. In this way, the humanist aesthetics of the show remained blandly pacifst and purportedly apolitical, as were to a lesser degree the more experimental images in Steinert’s “Subjective Photography” exhibitions. Both approaches contrast with the Cobra artists’ interest in a blunter aesthetics that recognizes the potentially political meanings of all images and playfully provokes the observer’s self-refection. The humanist approach of the Family of Man invites a response of empathy, but one that denies the continuing inequities among the different people depicted and easily reverts into a passive acceptance of social inequality, or, worse, a nostalgic sentimentality. “The Family of Man” glossed over all sorts of economic and colonial inequalities in its claims to apolitically represent a mythical foundation of unifed human experience. Its prominence made its approach exemplary of the emphasis on individualist humanism in the European and North American artistic establishment of the 1950s. Its humanism was echoed in France in André Malraux’s Voices of Silence and Museum Without Walls publications, which reproduced examples of art and religious sculpture from around the world in black and white photographs, using dramatically lit details in order to frame often anonymous or religious art works as expressions of individual artistic “talent.”60 Just as Barthes critiqued “The Family of Man” for its sentimentality, Asger Jorn critiqued Malraux’s project for its apolitical emphasis on spiritual transcendence.61 Malraux’s text celebrates the defnitive Western modernist values of originality, individual expression, and “art for its own sake.”62 Similarly, Steinert’s subjective-expressive approach emphasized techniques such as blurring, cropping, and solarization, to give the photographs a more expressive appearance. These aspects reinforced their aesthetic abstraction, divorcing them even further from social context and political perspectives than the journalistic portraits and collective scenes foregrounded in “The Family of Man.” While the wide range of approaches accepted by Steinert allowed the more experimental practices to resonate alongside straight photographs like Vandercam’s Hooks, his framework of personal expression functioned to limit rather than expand the potential meanings of the photographs included. Beyond

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the expression of Vandercam’s creative eye, the hooks convey other socially meaningful interpretations as a meditation on popular imagery or a political condemnation of human violence. The masculinist bias of both Steinert’s and Steichen’s exhibitions further limited their humanist understanding of art. “The Family of Man” included only 40 female photographers out of the total of 273, or nearly 14%, while its imagery reinscribed limiting stereotypes of tender white motherhood, rugged or intellectual father–son bonds, physical labor among black subjects, and pre-modern lifestyles among Asian and African people. The emphasis on photographic experimentation and abstraction in “Subjective Photography” meant that its images mostly did not reproduce stereotypes about people – other than certain reinscriptions of beauty related to images of the white female nude. Yet Steinert’s project included even fewer women photographers than Steichen’s: only 4 female names appear among the circa 64 photographers included in the 1951 Subjektive Fotographie catalog, a mere 6%. Its more experimental focus and resistance to documentary or journalistic approaches may be why its selection of photographers was even more exclusive: the almost total emphasis on male perspectives in “Subjective Photography” paralleled the similar exclusion of women artists from the Documenta I exhibition in Kassel in 1955 (which included only 4% women artists, as discussed in the next chapter). This fts a larger pattern of gender imbalance in the aggressive and highly competitive world of avant-garde art, as opposed to commercial photography where women artists like Margaret BourkeWhite or Germaine Krull were widely celebrated. Evidently men photographers were more suited to express the authentic subjective experience of “modern man.”63 It was no accident that those visions often corresponded to emotional states traditionally coded as masculine such as alienation, isolation, and fragmentation. These perspectives could also be found in Vandercam’s work, but alongside other possible readings that consider the social and political implications of the images. Their material subjects appear resistant to the colonizing “male gaze.” It would be hard to develop a gendered reading of a set of metal poles or the piece of a metal canister appearing to sprout new growth. Moreover, the emphasis on growth and collectivity rather than fragmentation or alienation takes up themes traditionally coded as feminine. Vandercam’s photographic objects suggest organic growth, popular symbols, common tools, or metaphors for collective experience with a clarity of focus that invites multiple interpretations, even as it foregrounds the ultimately unassimilable material reality of the objects in and for themselves. Instead of universality, they propose a multiplicity of interpretation. Vandercam’s photographs suggest less the humanism of Steinert or Steichen than an imaginative materialism particular to Cobra, while also indebted to Surrealism before it. Vandercam felt that his practice related more to Surrealism than Steinert’s “Subjective Photography” movement: “I departed from an understanding of Surrealism,” he states, “the sensibility was from that and [from] painting.”64 Vandercam’s photos draw on Surrealist precedents like the psychologically charged images of graffti-covered walls taken by Brassaï in the 1930s or the small objects he framed as “involuntary sculptures,” familiar to all the Cobra artists through their publication in Minotaure in 1933.65 Yet unlike the striking graffti faces carved into the walls and captured in Brassaï’s photos, Vandercam presents objects defned frst of all by their own impersonal materiality and relationship to a relatively forbidding military setting. While Brassaï’s photographs suggest the psychological impact of the uncanny in a neutral space, Vandercam’s photos are uncannily dehumanized in a post-industrial human

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one, a personal reverie forged out of the debris of the most violent political confict. While Brassaï’s photography turned the “documentary deadpan of the camera” into the “extravagant productions of the unconscious” as Rosalind Krauss describes in her classic essay on Surrealist photography, Vandercam turns the photographic document into a space for Bachelard’s “material imagination”; in other words, a material site for conscious reverie.66 Such a reverie just after the war, in light of the revelations about the concentration camps and the Bomb, would have been caught up, too, in the politics of witnessing those atrocities. The clarity and shallow depth of feld of Vandercam’s black and white compositions create the suggestion of reality captured at a specifc moment from a subjective viewpoint, a conscious vision rather than an unconscious expression. In fact, the aesthetics of these photos are closer to those of Vandercam’s friend Raoul Ubac, whose images of stone formations in Dalmatia also appeared in Minotaure in the 1930s and whose Surrealist photographs were also shown in the 1950 Cobra exhibition “The Developments of the Eye.”67 The stones in his 1932 Dalmatia series feature striation marks that suggest scarred bodies or holes created by erosion that turn them into masklike objects. Like Vandercam’s photographs at Nieuwpoort, Ubac’s images suggest a coming to life of the inorganic world, but while Vandercam’s are post-industrial relics, Ubac’s stones project a sense of primordial existence enduring in modern times. Even though Ubac had given up photography for slate sculpture and painting by the Cobra years, both artists demonstrate the close relationship between Surrealist and Cobra photography.68 Hal Foster describes the uncanny as a foundation of Surrealist aesthetics, manifesting in examples of the evil eye (the uncanny gaze) or the double in art that recalls repressed psychic states including the Freudian fear of castration or “animistic mental activity.”69 The uncanny relates to the Surrealist exploration of psychic and social trauma, in manifestations of the death drive that underlie the movement’s apparent celebration of love, liberation, and revolution. In Surrealist art, the trauma may relate to the death and mutilation caused by the First World War, to the threat of sexual difference at a time of rapidly changing gender roles, to the idealized body under Fascism, or to general social alienation in a capitalist society. “Traumas are as varied as individuals,” Foster notes, focusing his discussion on uncovering the aesthetic operations of the uncanny that point to it.70 Vandercam’s photographs of war remnants on the Belgian beach or hooks on a slab of broken stone may evoke many different reactions or trigger an observer’s personal traumas in a range of ways – but in 1948, they inevitably recall the traumas that characterized the Second World War: the fates of people who endured the occupations, fought on the beaches or were bombed in the cities, people rounded up for forced labor or death, forced to fee their homes, reduced to scavenging for food or selling their bodies to survive. Vandercam’s photographs do not suggest outmoded commodities or magical signs like Brassaï’s images, but they, too, evoke the uncanny in their transformation of metal remnants into suggestions of organic life or human presence. Certainly the beach, normally a location of modern leisure and now a site of war and death, recalls the Freudian descriptions of the uncanny. To claim that Vandercam’s images inspire feelings of “dread and horror” as Freud characterizes the uncanny may be too extreme, but his photographs surely recall the “sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-states” and the associations of an empty site with death and hauntings that Freud describes.71 At the same time, the literalness of these scenes makes clear that any symbolic readings belong to the viewer alone. “No, photography is not magic,”

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Christian Dotremont writes in “The Developments of the Eye”: “on the contrary it is terribly objective.”72 Vandercam’s photos appear to suggest not the uncanny presence of death within life but the reverse: life reemerging out of the ruins of death. The metal circle suggests the growth of new leaves in North Sea and the hooks suggest a musical rhythm of hearts in Hooks. While the composition of wires jutting out of the beach in Newport begs to be read as alienated people, it also suggests new plant life. The mute simplicity of these signs prevents us from reading them as illusions of magical animation in the classic Surrealist sense. Instead, they point to our own imaginative power to project animation onto inanimate material. Dotremont describes the photograph as an action that “intervenes” in reality in “The Developments of the Eye.” He was inspired by the writing of French Surrealist poet Régine Raufast, a member of La Main à Plume during the occupation and a lover of both Ubac and Dotremont at different moments. Raufast writes in the 1942 Main à Plume publication The Conquest of the World by the Image that a photograph must show a dual imagination: that of the artist and that of the material, the two in dialogue with each other. In the photography of Man Ray and Ubac, she writes, “we are in the presence of an interaction, a double imagination – the image-making imagination of the operator and the imagination peculiar to the medium itself.” Evidently inspired by the philosophy of Bachelard, she describes how the photographs foreground a process of “becoming”: This tangible realization of a material future initiates a reverie at the heart of matter and engenders a chain of transformations. […] We […] assist at […] a veritable image-making of matter: fertile, animated and drawn, despite itself, into the vortex of its own élan vital. At this point the operator decides the degree of the transformation and stops it the instant the visible image coincides with his own image-making mind. […] The image, produced from the encounter of the subjective preoccupation of the operator and the objective life of matter, is no more sign, but act.73 Raufast bases her description of the image as “act” on Surrealist processes like solarization that emphasize the transformation of the image into abstract poetry. Yet her description of a dialogue between the photographer’s subjectivity and the imagination of the material itsef equally describes the Cobra photography of Vandercam. While Raufast’s suicide in 1946 prevented her from ever encountering Vandercam’s photography, the impact of her ideas lives on in Dotremont’s text and Vandercam’s images. Her idea of a “double imagination” aptly summarizes the Cobra photographer’s ability to suggest personal meanings through the framing of objective scenes encountered in the demilitarized landscape. Vandercam considered the photograph an aesthetic dialogue, a response to the experience of his encounter with the object: I discover some thing, this thing opens the door of an imaginary world; it speaks to me; I explore it; we evolve together and what emerges is that the subject – tree, door, wall, piece of scrap metal or tool – and myself get merged together on the paper. […] In fact, I’ve never “taken” an object. I’ve always been conscious that it existed before me and that it would continue to exist after me. My connection develops therefore entirely in the instant.74

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Vandercam describes a spontaneous interaction with the world that unfolds at a specifc moment in time, rather than some preconceived inner subjectivity that is subsequently expressed. In transforming relics of the war into a personal dialogue – one open to reinterpretation by each observer – Vandercam’s images could assist people in sifting through the remains of the war physically, emotionally, and intellectually, but without demanding any one specifc response. In 1952, Roger Van Gindertael, director of the magazine Art d’Aujourd’hui, commissioned Vandercam to make the photographic portraits of contemporary artists that would lead to the encounter with Pol Bury in the quarry, the site of the photograph Hooks. Meeting painters such as Jean Arp and Hans Hartung would directly inspire Vandercam, in typical Cobra fashion, to try out a new medium: painting, for which he would gain signifcant renown in Belgium. In the late 1950s, he began making ceramics in the same studio in Albisola, Italy, where Jorn and the ex-Cobra artists organized their “International Ceramics Encounters” of 1955 to 1956. Vandercam collaborated on numerous projects with other artists including Cobra poet Joseph Noiret, artist Marcel Broodthaers, and poet and artist Hugo Claus. In 1958–1959, Dotremont and Vandercam made a series of word-paintings called “Mud-ologies” (Boulogismes), ceramic word-sculptures called “Boues” or “mud works,” and a book written by Dotremont and illustrated by Vandercam entitled “Bogs” (Fagnes), all directly inspired by the materialist theories of Gaston Bachelard.75 In 1962, Vandercam’s encounter in the Silkeborg Museum with Tollund Man, uncannily preserved in a Danish bog since the prehistoric Iron Age, inspired a new series of fgurative works that according to Claus mark the underlying chain of life, suffering and death that leads, fnally, to rebirth.76 Perhaps most signifcant was the anonymous nature of Tollund Man. Neither politician, nor hero, but likely a human sacrifce, he was preserved for the gods – who arguably turned out to be nothing more than his own people’s human descendants. These projects built on the Bachelardian “material imagination” so important during the Cobra years, reconciling the properties of matter with an intersubjective approach to expression.77 Matter itself was an “obsession” of Vandercam’s throughout his artistic career.78 Vandercam was never politically engaged, which kept him from participating actively in Cobra. He says that he was never really “disposed to integrate [him]self into a group” and he did not “see [him]self in this communist dream that made part of Cobra’s heart beat” – but he was in any case a “traveling companion.” His relationship with Dotremont would help make his photographs known, and his inspiration from Jorn and other painters would help him “discover the necessity of painting.”79 From the ruins of war in his photographs to his energetic paintings and sculptures, Vandercam foregrounded the specifc tactile properties of his subjects and materials. In a manner parallel to the art works of Jorn, Appel, and other Cobra artists, his photographs emphasize the way we shape ourselves in dialogue with our physical and social environment, and continually reimagine our place in the world.

Appel’s “Questioning Children”: Innocence Accuses After the war I wondered what art’s reply to all the violence would be to all these radical changes

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War, Memory, and Renewal in human relations famous artists barely responded I was on the point of giving up when I spied a group of youngsters who had something to say and who were saying it in a new voice violently maybe even primitively they were seeking a new language heatedly resolutely Appel was one of their leaders a world of monsters churning convulsively shouting beating rending and rent strong and benevolent sprang up under his hands no going back […] paintings sculptures relief object […] bearing the hot imprint and gesture of a man on the move […] to give this reply80

In his opening speech for a Karel Appel exhibition in Venlo, the Netherlands, in 1969, Willem Sandberg conveys the striking impact of the Cobra artists, particularly Appel, that led him to promote their careers so extensively over the years. Sandberg largely put Cobra on the map of the Dutch and international art world. According to historian E. H. Kossmann, the Dutch postwar culture was defned by a common belief that only principles of “law, order, and inspiration from above” would save Dutch society from the “capriciousness, chaos, and disorganized society” of the war.81 Dutch politicians in the 1940s and 1950s continually emphasized freedom, meaning specifcally “the people’s responsibility for their own actions and for standards of order and discipline and the readiness of the mature person to serve his community.” Community meant at the same time a unifed society able to rise above the stark self-interest that preoccupied people during the war. “The Liberation in 1945 should be used to help them join once again in a legally ordered social structure,” Kossmann writes. To the dismay of many young people, the Liberation restored the established order, failing to make the revolutionary changes to Dutch society that appeared as exciting possibilities immediately after the war. The Cobra artists, for many Dutch observers, captured this sense of disillusionment. Appel’s childlike and brutally direct aesthetic, in particular, conveyed the trauma not just of specifc war crimes, but also the general loss of hope apparent in the faces of the displaced children he observed in person after the war. He reinterpreted these faces as accusations against the postwar public, for burying people’s hopes for a better future in a bureaucratic language of discipline, specialization, and purity – a rhetoric that Kossmann relates directly to the violent “purifcation” of collaborators in the aftermath of war.82 Cobra defed the postwar emphasis on rationalism that led to a general

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“mathematization of society” after the war.83 As Appel wrote to Aldo van Eyck from Paris: “Here we’re drowning in abstractionism, sterile imitators of Kandinsky and Mondrian, all very scientifcally exact but lacking in the main thing: life.”84 Even if he only related to Cobra for a few years before declaring his independence of all movements, Appel’s art exemplifes Cobra’s reaction to its time in the name of uninhibited spontaneity, shameless delight, and profane outcry. Appel was living on public assistance as he began exhibiting his painting just after the war. He showed with Eugène Brands, Corneille, and Anton Rooskens in Willem Sandberg’s “Young Painters” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1946. At the time, he was preoccupied with the impact of Picasso and French painter Edouard Pignon, producing post-Cubist paintings and large abstract plaster sculptures.85 In 1947, he began making art works with newspaper and objects found in the streets. He showed these early painted assemblages, with titles like The Wild Fireman, Passion in the Attic, and Scream into Space, in the Madrid Bar in Amsterdam.86 Today, they stand as some of the most powerful Cobra responses to the situation in Europe just after the war. Dutch critics have periodically noted that Appel sold some works during the German occupation to collectors with ties to the Nazi administration, an issue that should be addressed rather than passed over in silence as it has been by the bulk of the Appel scholarship. At the same time, a young art student’s actions during the war are neither a reason to dismiss the artist’s mature work nor a coherent grounds to judge him as a person. The highly personal, contingent, and often circuitous choices necessary for the ordinary citizen to survive a foreign occupation, in a small country whose populace was vulnerable to the potential violence of Allied liberators and German occupiers alike, make any objective judgment of their wartime actions impossible. As a young art student, Appel had received subsidies from and sold up to six works to the Dutch National Socialist Government. Appel was not a National Socialist, however, but as Claartje Wesselink demonstrates, “a penniless art student with a pragmatic approach and an already well-developed instinct for the kind of art the institutions favored.”87 At that time, in 1942–1943, this meant relatively lifelike representations of Dutch landscapes and city scenes. Another young artist wrote to Sandberg urging him to exclude Appel from the “Young Painters” exhibition in 1946 because of his earlier relationship with German patrons, but Sandberg ignored the letter.88 Instead, Sandberg successfully branded Appel over the postwar decades as the ultimate exemplar of personal freedom, unbridled passion, and pacifst critique, themes taken up throughout the scholarship on the artist as well as the biography of Appel by Cathérine van Houts. It might be easy to criticize Sandberg’s project for its ideological underpinnings in the liberal era of postwar Dutch culture, but his active interest in challenging a conservative Dutch art establishment must also be taken into account. More important to this discussion, it was Appel’s Cobra-period and later work which Sandberg appreciated for its countercultural and anti-nationalist messages, not his early wartime commissions. Any examination of his work after 1946 – as this account, too, will make clear – reveals its overt social and aesthetic challenge to nationalist attitudes on the part of the Dutch postwar public. Appel was not an anti-Nazi resister during the war (like Jorn and some of the other Cobra artists were, in their own small ways), but his postwar work profoundly resisted all representations of national pride or self-congratulation afterward. It systematically negated heroic images and narratives of commemoration with provocative, brutal, and childlike representations of ordinary people, and specifcally refugee

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children who were some of the most visible victims of the war. Appel’s frst critical engagements broke with established methods of modernist painting and experimented with a new form of assemblage inspired by Dada and Surrealist precedents as well as non-Western, children’s, and outsider art, to provoke his audiences into a renewed confrontation not only with the plight of this generation of children, but with their own role in and response to the larger situation. According to Stokvis, Eugène Brands inspired both Appel and Corneille to make found objects at the time. Brands’s sculpture Heaven’s Arch was a sensation at the 1946 “Young Painters” exhibition.89 The assemblage features the deep blue enameled lid of a pan dotted with white spots found on New Year’s Eve on a street in Amsterdam. Appel and Corneille visited Brands’s studio regularly after the exhibition, and all three artists joined Refex in 1948, followed a few months later by Cobra. Appel must also have been struck by the junk sculptures and carved granite works of Henry Heerup in Denmark on his visit to exhibit with Høst in 1948. Around that time, he also visited the studio of Shinkichi Tajiri in Paris, where he had “no hesitation about picking up pieces of wood in order to compose and paint them.”90 The Dada assemblages of Kurt Schwitters and the collages of Max Ernst, known from reproductions and exhibitions at the Stedelijk, had a strong impact on Appel as well.91 Sandberg noted these connections in his correspondence around the 1949 Cobra exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, where he recognized the international character of the group and compared it to Dada as a response to the First World War.92 Appel synthesized these multiple inspirations into a new approach that conveys the artist’s reaction to the defning events of his time. After a visit to Paris with Corneille in 1947, Appel’s style changed radically, toward the brutal and childlike methods that would soon become evident in both his painting and his sculpture. He saw Dubuffet’s early, colorful paintings and his graffti-like “thick paste” portraits at Drouin Gallery in Paris, followed by a major exhibition of children’s drawings from around the world at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam the following year. Appel’s approach evolved beyond Cubist composition to something more brutal, creaturely, and spontaneous. He wrote to Corneille in December, 1947: I’m working day and night now I’ve really started painting, it suddenly came to me (in the night) now I’m working in a powerful primitive way more powerful than negro art and Picasso. […] My work includes everything. […] Don’t come over for the moment, no time to spare. Working hard, throwing everything overboard.93 In 1948, Appel lost his studio, and spent weeks living on the streets or sleeping at the houses of friends like Théo Wolvecamp. “The street was my studio,” he recalls of that time.94 This was when he began the series of “Questioning Children” (Vragende Kinderen), a subject that would occupy him throughout the three years of Cobra in both paintings and assemblage sculptures. Appel remembers in an interview that while traveling through Germany on his way to Copenhagen to meet the Høst group in 1948, “I’ve seen German children begging alongside the train. At the time, I didn’t think that it had got to me that much, but here is the result.”95 He made three versions of the subject as an assemblage of found wood pieces painted in bright colors with childlike faces and nailed to a wood support (Plate 16). The use of found wood in part refects Appel’s artistic relationship with the city of Amsterdam, specifcally his working-class neighborhood near

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the Eastern Docklands where he played growing up. “The wastelands belong to my youth,” he recalls. “When I was young, I played in the outskirts of the city, watched the cranes at the harbor. There was no law but garbage, grass, and wildfowers.”96 Pierre Restany observes that wood would have been a plentiful material on the streets of Amsterdam at the time: “There is water everywhere, and also wood. Hulls of ships and boats, driftwood eroded by seawater, brightly painted doors and windows and fences, smoothly polished foors and furniture.”97 By rearranging the found wood fragments and painting them, Appel transforms the banal associations with ships or buildings into an evocation of odd little beings. In the Stedelijk assemblage, they alternately suggest robots (the red creature with one nail sticking out of its “head” at lower right), early portable televisions with rabbit-ear antennae (the green one at upper right, with a smiley face missing the smile), or self-portraits made by kids (the red face at center with the black painted torso, its bars suggesting a crude rib cage and its hands sticking straight out from the sides). The overall appearance would have suggested tribal art to many observers at the time, for example the Native American totem poles that inspired a lost assemblage by Appel entitled Totem: the three Dutch Cobra artists posed with it in a famous photo taken in the attic studio that Appel rented in the fall of 1948 in Oudezijds Voorburgwal, Amsterdam.98 But the more immediate, and less exotic, reference is to children’s toys and crafts. The letters “C” and “O” appear on the sides of two of the smaller yellow, black, and white “heads” at the center of the composition, as if the sculpture were made of alphabet blocks. Donald Kuspit observes that the assemblages recall the handmade toys that were for many people “the frst toys that were truly one’s own, because one made them oneself from odds and ends found on the street.”99 Appel makes objects that not only represent children, but are made the way children make things, giving his work a particular power related not only to their material immediacy, but also to common childhood memories. Appel repeatedly emphasized the directness, simplicity, and materiality of his works and their links to both children’s art and outsider traditions. He said about his painting for example: We threw away all these things we had known and started afresh, like a child— fresh and new. Sometimes my works look very childish, or childlike, schizophrenic or stupid, you know. But that was the good thing for me. Because, for me, the material is the paint itself. The paint expresses itself. In the mass of paint, I fnd my imagination and go on to paint it.100 The perspective of the child, the outsider, and the “people” or the “folk” in the sense of folk art, which the Cobra artists considered collective and anonymous creativity, overlapped with their interest in the animalistic as a counter to humanist ideals of individual progress and civilization. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno describes this convergence of viewpoints in modern art: Human beings have not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to recapture it and be fooded with joy; the language of little children and animals seems to be the same. In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes fashes up; the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.101

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Adorno argues, among other things, that since art no longer reproduces the world mimetically, it is confned to the realm of entertainment and leisure. The philistine who laughs at modern art is therefore entirely justifed in this response; and any art that fails to refect this ridiculousness, the “barbaric residuum of something alien to form,” misfres. The truth of modern art, he implies, must take account of the ridiculous and the lighthearted, refecting on the relationship between child and adult, and human and animal. Appel’s Questioning Children assemblages resemble both a handmade toy and a carnival game. As Marshall McLuhan observes, “nobody […] has done more than Karel Appel to deepen and enrich the spirit of folk carnival in our time.”102 Accordingly, Appel states that “I’ve never been able to distinguish between the humorous and the terrifying aspect of things.”103 He would have liked Adorno’s clown analogy, since he declares, “my whole life I wanted to be a clown, because when I enter a place, I make people laugh.”104 His interest was never truly exoticism, even if the Questioning Children assemblages of 1948 feature faces on blocks with nails hammered into them that suggest his familiarity with Central African sculpture. He would have known of such objects as the Nkisi N’konde power fgures, wooden statues often ceremonially punctured with nails in healing ceremonies, through friends like Brands and Corneille who collected African art. Appel recalls that when he made this series, he “liberated [him]self from everything, from all of classical Europe.”105 He was more interested, however, in simplicity and directness than primitivist assumptions about African people. He writes: As I see it, life is built up of diverse skins which have to be removed, just as you peel a banana before eating it or, better still, as you eat an artichoke, leaf after leaf, in order to arrive fnally at the heart; it is only in this moment that my work is fnished, totally bare and devoid of inhibitions and, if we can say it like this, of the skins of the past. It is for this reason that some people say that my work is infantile or stupid, but for me it is like life itself.106 Cobra’s interest in the childlike, the mask, and the animal is often labeled a return to modernist “primitivism,” an easy argument to make since the 26-year-old Appel declared his work “more primitive than Picasso.”107 Contemporary discussions, however, like the critiques of the MoMA’s formalist 1984 exhibition “Primitivism in 20th Century Art” have reduced the term, which points to a fundamental human desire for simplicity and material plenitude, to the colonialist appropriation by Western artists of certain visual forms from West African and Oceanic sources. Worse, the term “primitivism” itself retains the colonialist assumptions about the “primitive” that the modern artists themselves were trying to overturn in the frst place. The reactions to pressing questions of ongoing racial injustices in the post-colonial world have obscured the deeper and broader cultural exploration of simplicity and directness that Cobra was after. The Cobra artists were not, for the most part, interested in exoticizing black or Pacifc peoples or reinscribing racial stereotypes (with certain exceptions such as the late painting of Corneille). Instead, their work explores humor, the grotesque, the ugly and the monstrous, the brutal and the childlike as attempts to break free of the judgments, biases, restrictive pieties, and not least, political injustices of European high culture. Appel states that while his painting in the 1950s was “all anguish, drama, and fear,” by the late 1950s his “atomic war” was over. Decades later, it was replaced by a new, almost ecological consciousness. “It’s rather a kind of warning that I’m trying

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to give,” he maintains. “What’s really at stake is the very future of our planet.” In 1948, the future of the planet was equally uncertain. Although many of our concerns are different today, such as global warning and mass extinction, other issues – like war, inequality, the legacy of colonialism, and the refugee crisis – remain the same pressing matters that faced Europe a half century ago. On March 14, 1949, Appel fnished a monumental mural on the theme of Questioning Children for the Amsterdam Town Hall (Figure 3.5 and Plate 17). He had proposed the commission in 1948 and the Town Hall accepted his idea to paint directly on the wall, provided that the mural could be covered over with paper if 108

Figure 3.5 Karel Appel, Vragende Kinderen (Questioning Children), 1949. Tempera wall mural, Hotel The Grand (former Amsterdam City Hall). Originally published in Aldo Van Ecyk, Een appèl aan de verbeelding (Amsterdam, 1950). Image courtesy of the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

162 War, Memory, and Renewal the committee did not approve of it.109 It did not take long for journalistic reports published before the mural was even fnished to stir up public disapproval of the project. Ironically, today the mural appears fairly restrained. Appel clearly adjusted his approach by favoring larger forms and calmer colors appropriate to a large-scale public mural. He painted four large, abstract fgures defned only by loose black outlines and an occasional clawlike arm, one horizontal and the other three looming vertically over our heads. Their only facial features are large black dots for eyes. They are barely legible as fgures and not differentiated as human or animal, much less child or adult. They emerge from a collection of white, pale yellow, muted blue, brick red, and soft grey organic and rectangular shapes, their fatness appropriate to a modern wall mural. One reason Appel proposed the project to the city was that he had no studio at the time, so he improvised the composition directly on the wall. The title, “Questioning Children,” was the only clue that the mural related in any way to the war or suggested any ideological challenge to its audience. The mural’s subject was not necessarily obvious from the painting – but it was discussed in an initial report for the socialist paper Het Vrije Volk written by a journalist called in by municipal employees who disapproved of the painting. The journalist interviewed Appel in the process of painting the mural and commented on the image which, he reports, depicts German children “begging for food, standing on the rails.”110 The site of the commission was the cafeteria wall, a provocative place to put an image of begging, hungry children – and children of the occupiers, no less. The reporter notes, nevertheless, that after fve minutes of talking to the artist he is “not a stitch further” in discerning the subject in the painting. He sees no children and no bread, just some black lines and spots. “How did you choose the style?” He asks the painter. “I don’t know myself,” Appel answers. “It is no longer just abstract. There is a message in it. A French woman called what I made magic realism.” “Ah, so,” replies the reporter. He wonders pointedly to the reader, “isn’t that dangerous? Won’t the city employees be choking on their sandwiches in the next few days?”111 This article, the frst of many, became a self-fulflling prophecy, and instigated a public outcry that caused Appel’s “infantile drawing” to be covered over with paper.112 The reaction against the Town Hall mural may have related less to the ostensible theme than to the childlike quality of the composition, which in its simplicity challenged common taste and ideas of good art at the time. Modern art in Amsterdam was defned by recognizable tendencies, namely the Expressionism of Van Gogh and his Dutch followers, or the geometric abstraction of Mondrian and De Stijl, the latter subtly negated by Appel’s modulation of red, yellow, and blue into muted tones and organic forms. The mural provides a gentle confrontation with childlike creatures that appear largely undefned, and barely human. It is much less Expressionist than the Cobra murals painted later that summer at the Bregnerød house in Denmark (Appel and the Dutch Cobra artists did not attend that Congress, angry at Jorn for running off with Constant’s wife) but it embodies in its own way Cobra’s radical proposal to transform public space through spontaneous personal expression. Even if the color was relatively restrained, the radical simplicity and inscrutability of the composition itself compounded the offensiveness of its purported subject, a strong provocation for an audience of city employees not necessarily accustomed to modern art in the frst place. Architect Aldo van Eyck, a member of the committee that commissioned the project, was the sole voice to defend Appel’s mural. He did so vehemently, both in person

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(so irate that he had to be removed from the room) and in a pamphlet posted on walls around Amsterdam in 1950 called An Appeal to the Imagination (En appel aan de verbeelding, a play on Appel’s name, which means “apple” in Dutch and “appeal” in French). He lambasted those who greeted your childlike rite by throwing their empty canteens so belligerently that the bottom three feet of your work looks as though it had been shot away. […] They reproach children for their naiveté and men for their feelings. […] Terrifed of freedom, they isolate the people by sapping their powers of renewal, because they are only too well aware that novelty inevitably leads to freedom. […] They call us subversives. Well, they’re right! A subversive is someone who prefers […] healthy vitality to tottering impotence, a passionate embrace to the repressed twitch […] he is someone who places his imagination at the service of his own rejuvenation and that of the community – in short, someone who has the courage and the power to be free, yes, that is the true subversive, for he places the state in jeopardy.113 The City remained impervious to van Eyck’s pleas despite the others who spoke out on his behalf, including Sandberg from the Stedelijk Museum, the curator of the Rijksmuseum, the architect J. J. P. Oud, and Professor Heinrich Campendonk, the Fauve artist from the Academy of Fine Arts whose animal paintings were an early inspiration for Appel. The mural was only revealed again – and the artist’s overdue fee paid – ten years later in April, 1959. By that point, Appel had achieved international fame and a certain amount of time distanced the Dutch public from the events of the war. Appel’s “Questioning Children” begins with a specifc memory but spirals outward toward larger questions of understanding through making, innocence and experience, and trauma and accountability in modern life. It reveals the way the supposedly personal experience of memory is shaped by the culture in which it develops and later cultures in which it is recalled. This process was described in the 1950s by Maurice Halbwachs, whose studies of “collective memory” challenged the interpretation of memory as a purely individual phenomenon. Halbwachs discusses the way memory forms itself discursively, by defnition after the experience in question, in collective contexts defned by membership in specifc social groups. Halbwachs’s theory takes on renewed relevance today given widespread interest in the ways subjective interpretations of the past develop in specifc social and national contexts, and relate to broader investigations of history versus memory.114 Halbwachs argues that a collective memory, or “lived history,” only lasts a brief period of time, related to the lifespan of the group that defnes it, before it becomes the written, impersonal, retrospective form he variously calls “learned history,” “historical memory,” or “general history.”115 Appel attributes the meaning of his work to a specifc memory, but its wider impact – and the controversy related to its manifestation as a public mural – demonstrates how memory is actually an intersubjective phenomenon often contested in its public manifestations. Just as Jorn and Constant’s animalistic Cobra history paintings attempt to activate their observers and help them rethink their own relationship to current events, Appel’s series, too, participates in this critical territory where memory and history overlap in a way that points to the subjective biases inherent in offcial history. The plight of children in the larger refugee crisis of postwar Europe was the subject of extensive commentary and refection in the 1950s, and of historical accounts

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later. Women and children, often viewed as the quintessential victims of war, were the privileged subjects of humanitarian aid as it developed through the course of the 20th century. Save the Children was founded in the U.K. in 1919 to aid orphans of the First World War; UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, was founded in 1946 in New York.116 Children’s experiences functioned as metonyms for the larger tragedies of the war as well as the Holocaust in fction flms like Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero and Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (both from 1948). Children who survived in hiding or lived through the camps were malnourished and often plagued by digestive problems, rickets, baldness, and lice.117 Observers just after the war expressed particular concerns that groups of children “with eyes that looked ten times ten” might become marauders, “undisciplined, untrained, ready for any political disorder and without any sense of communal responsibility.”118 It is likely, however, that rather than share such fears, Appel empathized with the children he saw from the train, having survived homelessness and hunger himself at various times. Appel’s Questioning Children, then, appeared as both a raw, expressionist outcry and a call to witness for the postwar public regarding victims they were attempting to disavow or were not yet ready to acknowledge. They were particularly “material witnesses,” symbolically confronting observers to examine their personal relationship to wartime and postwar injustices through the vivid intensity of the artistic materials themselves. One of the assemblages Appel exhibited in Paris in 1949 was called, more pointedly, Innocence Accuses (L’innocence accuse – though the French term “accuse” means both “point to” and “indict”). Ragon describes this work as a “violently colored relief with the heads of three men,” but given the trajectory of Appel’s work at the time they were more likely children.119 Because the Dutch press reported immediately that Appel’s mural depicted German children begging for food, the public outcry must have related partly to the content of the mural. It may have also responded to the perceived gap between subject and content – the tendency to dismiss a modern artwork that uses simple and childlike means to convey a serious message. As Rasaad Jamie writes about Appel’s work: His art is still frmly rooted within a format of a childlike spontaneity and innocence; qualities which are rarely able to accommodate the tragic without coming dangerously close to melodrama. One is often too quickly seduced by the colour, the lush textures, the childlike buoyancy of the drawing to appreciate the sense of tragedy that Appel is trying to convey […]. Paradoxically, the very best of the work derives its authority from his valiant attempts to go into the face of this unsuitability […], when he strains and contorts an aesthetic based on innocence and affrmation to convey a note of despair.120 The combination of innocence, accusation, and despair was too much for the Amsterdam audience in 1949. Donald Kuspit, an art historian also trained as a psychoanalyst, attempts to explain the particular emotional challenge that confronted them. He writes: Questioning Children could not help but remind viewers of their own childhood, and of the frightened child they were inwardly reduced to by the war. […] Indeed, Appel’s deeply troubled children, by appealing for help, questioned every adult’s conscience. […] Appel’s relief sculpture established a dense, complex matrix of

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anxiety-arousing associations, a virtual psychic terra incognita, inevitably unnerving to the diners in the cafeteria. What was meant to be a relaxing, carefree social space, an oasis in the daily routine, became a highly personal, emotionally charged, dangerous territory.121 The public’s resistance to a radically new and childlike expression about the trauma of German children just a few years after the German occupation was overdetermined, with multiple and overlapping causes, but it would also contribute to Appel’s notoriety. The reaction and censorship that plagued the project as soon as Appel painted it in March was followed a few months later by the scandalized responses of the local press to the Stedelijk Cobra exhibition in November. The ongoing resistance and even ridicule of their work in the Dutch press led Appel, Constant, and Corneille to leave Amsterdam and move to Paris for good (only Constant would eventually return). It also secured their reputation as challenging artists – later to become heroes of modern Dutch art, given art history’s tendency to lionize masculine outsiders and provocateurs above all. In Paris, Appel would become the frst Cobra success story. Willem Sandberg told both MoMA curator James Johnson Sweeney and New York gallerist Martha Jackson to visit Appel in 1950 at his Rue Santeuil studio, a former tannery and abject squat he shared with Corneille. Jackson would show his work in her gallery in New York starting in 1954, establishing his success as the most well-known Cobra artist in the United States. Thanks to the connections of French Cobra painter Jacques Doucet, Appel exhibited with Constant and Corneille at the gallery of Colette Allendy, widow of a prominent psychoanalyst in the swank 16th arrondissement, in May, 1949. The catalog includes Dotremont’s essay “Through the main gate,” where he describes the artists’ goals “to express the organic joy of the universe, the historic joy of the world of 1949.”122 Appel’s apotheosis was secured by the prominent critic Michel Tapié, who included Appel in his Informel canon of “other art” (art autre) and thus established his importance for the art world of the 1950s. Tapié writes in typically famboyant prose in 1953: Where the range of means and inventions is infnitely vast and complex, […] of the work of Appel and a few rare others, […] it will now be possible to develop an aesthetic on the scale of this Now that is ours.123 Tapié’s hyper-individualist attitude helped Appel draw a wedge between his trajectory and the story of Cobra, albeit one as infra-thin as the paper walls separating his studio in the old tannery from Corneille’s, through which Corneille could hear the parade of critics and collectors gushing over the work of his friend. Appel’s early success disrupted their friendship by fall, 1950. By the following decade, though, both Appel and Corneille were recognized in both Paris and Amsterdam as individual painters admitted into selective accounts of the postwar School of Paris. Ragon would later acknowledge that “Cobra was founded and developed against the School of Paris, but in the end the School of Paris, which leads a tough life, digested Cobra.”124 Appel’s direct engagement with artistic materials in relatively raw states and his utter rejection of all theory or referentiality beyond mundane everyday experiences were perhaps the most important factors in his early success. As Franz-W. Kaiser observes, Appel ft the bill of what art critics were looking for at the time:

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Although Appel would eventually outshine Cobra as a movement, he did not forget his friends. He participated in Jorn’s “International Ceramics Encounters” in Italy in 1954–1955 and made “four-handed” art works with Alechinsky, Hugo Claus, Dotremont, and others over the years. The flm Jan Vrijman made of him in 1961, The Reality of Karel Appel featuring an original jazz score by Appel’s friend Dizzy Gillespie, would cement his international fame and lives on to inspire new generations of artists online.126 It is the immediate impact of Appel’s paintings above all that continues to generate interest among critics and the public. Their combination of social content, popular address, and ebullient optimism remains unique, refecting Appel’s own attitude. Rather than turn away from art or push art to echo the tragic and immobilizing mindset that, as Adorno famously wrote, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Appel continually moved forward: For me the important thing is always to go on in our Western civilization, to go on with the real evolution of art, so that we do not say, “Today is the end of our culture of art.” No, we can always fnd a new truth there, so that we can then move ahead, each in his own way.127 Adorno, too, later qualifed that the brutality that threatens to make art irrelevant after Auschwitz makes art all the more necessary: “The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting […]. Yet this suffering […] also demands the continuing existence of art while it prohibits it.”128 Appel’s art manages uniquely to convey not only the suffering but also the joy of modern experience, in forms that are easy – and therefore sometimes dismissed as too easy – to understand. Appel was excellent at self-promotion, and believed strongly in the power of his own work. But it is the art works themselves, from the Questioning Children sculptures to his vibrant later paintings, that capture the complexity of Cobra’s response to contemporary politics and social life. The works convey the joy of human experience but also the violent injustices of Western culture that threaten it. Their refections on the past and the present recognize the importance of preventing a repetition of the atrocities of the war, but they also call out to the fundamental human potential to survive and even triumph over adversity.

Tajiri’s “Warriors”: Sentinels for Peace Remembering the brutality of the Second World War, from concentration camps to the Bomb, from the everyday abuses of the German occupations to the forced migration of millions of people, from the exploitation of colonial regiments during the war to the suppression of colonial independence movements afterward, also demands a broader recognition of historical injustices. The U.S., for example, leaders of the Allied victory who commonly presented themselves after the war as the “saviors” of Europe and the liberators of the concentration camps, has its own history of enslaving and

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incarcerating its own people, beginning with black and Native Americans and continuing during the Second World War with Japanese-Americans. All the more important, then, to remember the story of Japanese-American artist Shinkichi Tajiri, the only Cobra artist from the U.S. Tajiri escaped internment in his own country only to be discouraged from studying there afterward by ongoing discrimination against Japanese-Americans. He ultimately relocated to the Netherlands to make a successful career, primarily in Europe as an expatriate sculptor. Tajiri developed a unique approach to postwar sculpture starting with the material experimentation of the “One-Day Sculptures” he produced on the banks of the Seine in the early 1950s, at the moment of his encounter with Cobra, and developing in the incisive social critique of his “Warrior” series. Ultimately, Tajiri left the “Warriors” behind for a series of abstract “Knots” made of diverse materials, which promote a more positive message of human connection not unlike the minoritarian humanism of the Danish Cobra artists and Mancoba – a more appropriate one, perhaps, for an increasingly fragmented global contemporary society. After his experience during the war, however, he wanted to confront the meaning of violence head on. Tajiri’s “Warrior” sculptures appeared prominently in the most important Cobra exhibitions in Amsterdam in 1949 and Liège in 1951, but his work has not been examined for the way it exemplifes the explicit social critique and radical aesthetics of Cobra. As the sole Asian and American artist in the movement, with a long career that evolved in many directions after Cobra, Tajiri is often discussed in isolation. Yet he produced his totemic sculptures through the same approach to material improvisations referencing historical images that animate the other Cobra works. His sculptures convey a pacifsm both critical and tragic, in part the result of his own experiences of political brutality. Tajiri was born in Watts, Los Angeles, near the renowned Watts Towers, an outsider art work improvised from ordinary materials and built over several decades by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia – an important precedent, perhaps, for Tajiri’s later improvisatory sculpture. Tajiri was the Nisei (second generation) son of immigrants from Japan. He survived a gang-ridden childhood in a rough neighborhood where he already felt like an outsider, “an American by accident,” even though he grew up speaking English and never learned Japanese.129 His family was among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned in a camp by the U.S. government after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, Tajiri’s 18th birthday. Their house and most of their possessions were permanently lost. They arrived at the camp in Poston, Arizona in early 1942. Tajiri had already begun studying sculpture in Los Angeles with Donal Hord, and produced a few drawings in Poston. He volunteered for the U.S. army in 1943 in order to escape the camp. After basic training in Mississippi, he served in Italy under a white offcer in a segregated Japanese-American unit later renowned for its bravery during the war. Wounded by sniper fre in northern Italy in 1944, he recovered in Paris (his night nurse would become his frst wife when he returned to France after the war). In 1945 he was granted Special Services status as an artist in order to sketch displaced persons from the German concentration camps, an experience that vividly reminded him of his days at Poston. He returned home after the war, intending to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and worked briefy in the studio of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The continuing racism he endured in Chicago, however, led him to return to Paris in 1948 to study in Ossip Zadkine’s sculpture atelier and, briefy, in Léger’s painting studio (where the Cubist artist was not interested in his fantastic

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Klee-inspired paintings). In 1949, he met Cobra poet Simon Vinkenoog, who worked as a model in Zadkine’s studio and soon introduced him to the Dutch Cobra artists Appel, Corneille, and Constant. He began to exhibit his work both at Colette Allendy with the Cobra artists and at the expat-run Galerie 8, established by black American artist Haywood Bill Rivers. Tajiri was living on less than a dollar a day and working on junk sculptures in the scrapyards along the Seine. In 1952, he met his second wife, Dutch sculptor Ferdi Jansen, when she came to him for welding lessons. The couple would relocate to Amsterdam in 1956, and then moved with their two young children Giotta and Ryu into a large 18th-century villa in Baarlo in 1962. The same year, Tajiri would represent the Netherlands in the country’s prestigious national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Cobra was only a brief phase of a long career, for an artist who cared less for movements than in wide-ranging experimentation with new materials and artistic connections. Yet his story is central to a post-colonial account of a movement that attempted to break open the conventions of European modernism and “materially witness” the inhumanities of nationalist politics, racism, and war. Tajiri’s improvisational sculptures in plaster and metal of the 1950s appear typically Cobra in their experimental approach to spontaneity and their symbolic political critique of war and violence. The junk sculptures epitomize the notion of art as play, making use of any means immediately at hand (Figure 3.6). The artist produced creatures made of scrap metal, old mattresses and bed frames, bits of tubing, nails, mesh, wire, and other found post-industrial materials, ranging in size from knee-high birds to larger-than-life animalistic or humanoid fgures. The photographer Sabine Weiss documented Tajiri working on them while amused bystanders and ship captains looked on. Tajiri called these “One-Day Sculptures,” works made and then taken apart in a day, to be left behind in the junk pile the same evening. The process was more important than the product – although he surely took some of the portable materials back to his studio to weld them into the mid-sized abstract metal sculptures exhibited in the 1951 Cobra exhibition in Liège. Tajiri learned welding from Robert Jacobsen, the Danish Cobra and later Linien II sculptor who lived in the Cobra years with Asger Jorn in a Danish artists’ house in Suresnes, outside Paris.130 “My relation to Cobra was always through the word experimental,” Tajiri recalls.131 The childlike fgures he produced, using provisional methods of assemblage rather than carving as in traditional sculpture or Zadkine’s Cubist works, embody Cobra’s interest in the spontaneous transformation of raw materials into symbolic forms related to popular imagery and everyday life. In Zadkine’s studio, Tajiri studied Cubist methods of carving and assembling abstract plaster forms intended to be cast in bronze. Zadkine’s work emphasized the expressive human fgure in sculpture, most famously in The Destroyed City (1951– 1953), his memorial to the destruction of Rotterdam by German bombs in 1940 that represents a man without a heart. Such examples, along with other modern precedents in experimental abstract sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Julio González, Henry Moore, Noguchi, Picasso, and others, led Tajiri to a range of sculptural experiments including the “Warriors” series. These works are often represented in histories of Cobra by the reworked and smoothly polished bronze version of a 1949 Warrior that Tajiri cast in 1974, after the original plaster that was once owned by the writer Henry Miller in Paris.132 A closely related plaster Warrior, also from 1949, was shown in Cobra’s “International Exhibition of Experimental Art” at the Stedelijk Museum (Figure 3.7).

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Figure 3.6 Sabine Weiss, Shinkichi Tajiri with a “One-day sculpture” on the banks of the Seine, Paris, 1950. Photograph © Sabine Weiss. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

After being damaged in transit, Tajiri repaired the sculpture in the galleries during installation. Its rough fnish and experimental form make it much more evocative than the later bronze. Where the bronze sculpture has the conical form of an Asian sun hat seemingly balanced on the top of one arm, in the rough plaster sculpture the bent arm extends through a shieldlike form and is topped with a fat mask that resembles the imposing iron masks worn in the trenches of the First World War (such as the fea market fnd that Giacometti famously referenced in his Surrealist sculptures of the early 1930s).133 This mask is topped by a long fat tempered form that suggests the abstract Surrealist metal sculptures of Calder, the front crest of a Samurai helmet, and the shape of a Samurai sword.134 Tajiri’s father was from a Samurai lineage that traces back to 270 CE; he left Japan and came to the U.S. in 1906, during a period when the Samurai family estates and social privileges were disappearing under the Meiji emperor.135 In the bronze Warrior, this more menacing mask is replaced with a helmet mask based on Western armor, reminiscent of a playful chess fgure. Tajiri distorts human anatomy in the plaster Warrior by connecting arm and neck forms to objects suggesting weapons, shields, and a tall staff evoking a rudimentary

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Figure 3.7 Shinkichi Tajiri, Warrior, 1949. Plaster, 135 in. high, exhibited in the “International Exhibition of Experimental Art,” Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1949. No longer extant. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

spear. Its tip rises up where the fgure’s head would be, signifying the soldier’s anonymity and utter lack of agency. A round form inside a cone of narrow wires could suggest a bullet’s trajectory through a gun. In Tajiri’s later “Warriors” from the 1960s, the projecting form of an overtly phallic abstract rife would make the symbolism of masculine aggression clear. The spherical shape inside the wire cone also indirectly recalls atomic models, common images in the popular press at the time. The U.S. media framed any reference to atomic physics as a symbol of progress rather than a recollection of the military aggression and tragic violence of the atomic bombs dropped in Japan.136 The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, however, was personal to Tajiri – it killed most of his father’s relatives there.137 Tajiri’s sculpture makes clear that the energy suggested by the structure of the atom is intimately related to its military application, literally fused to the body of the soldier. It also, however, relates the atomic form, with its constantly moving electrons circulating around a nuclear core, to the cellular building blocks of life, as part of the complex of what one critic of the series calls “aggressionlife generation-destruction.”138 In the later bronze version, the atomic form becomes the warrior’s heart and rib cage itself, the wires turned vertically so that they also evoke the strings of a harp, perhaps a reference to peace rather than war.

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In both versions, the “Warrior” fgure appears more enigmatic and defensive than aggressive. Spiky forms along its “ribs” evoke protection in the plaster fgure, but they are mirrored by three projecting forms with round knobs at the end that turn the shield-arm into a suggestion of a musical instrument (these three knobs were reworked into riblike bent forms when Tajiri repaired the sculpture at the Stedelijk Museum).139 The least abstract features are the sculpture’s two legs, despite their unnatural smoothness, asymmetry, and thinness. Forms attached to the fgure’s knees recall the way Tajiri was injured by sniper fre in his left thigh in Italy in 1944. A small shield form is attached to the right knee. From the left knee projects a small weapon like a threepronged trident. The rough surface of the plaster evokes stone, giving the fgure a strange presence, like the guardian of a ruin or the relic of an ancient war. Inspired by popular images of African warriors as well as Medieval and Samurai armor and modern weaponry, the “Warriors” were Tajiri’s attempt to exorcise the experience of war and excoriate a society that continued to believe in heroes. Asked what he took away from his military service, he responded: “Sense of survival and desire for peace.”140 “All my warriors and Ronin are three dimensional icons,” he explains, “remainders of certain war experiences which have left me with psychological scars. By giving form to these nightmares and demons I have hope to rid myself of their constant presence.”141 The “Warriors” suggest both Freudian masculine aggression and wounded, post-apocalyptic fgures. Like Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s sculpture, they express an emotional reserve and anonymity related to their abstract or insectoid forms and their lack of faces and heads. They stand like sentinels, as if to protect the ordinary citizens of the world. Christian Dotremont observes that, “Tajiri’s aggression is at once the expression of our age – […] that era of which Hiroshima was one of the major events – and, at the same time, a response to that age.”142 Tajiri’s art uses abstract forms to symbolize for a broad audience the trauma of war, through a combination of aggressive and playful elements. His work also pointedly critiques rational ideas of progress, technology, heroism, and nationalism by animating scrap materials in forms resembling wounded creatures or toy soldiers. Tajiri’s works from the 1950s continue to explore new sculptural methods while critiquing the nationalism and militarism of the Cold War. The constructed iron sculpture Wounded Knee from 1953 (Plate 18) perhaps best exemplifes the way his works draw historic parallels among diverse histories of political violence through both symbolic references and direct material operations. The title must have been a personal reference for the artist, as a soldier who survived the war due to his own wounded leg, but also a conscious allusion to the history of Native Americans in the United States, and specifcally the violence of their treatment by the U.S. Army and the U.S. Government. Tajiri saw direct parallels between the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in internment camps and the confnement of Native Americans to reservations after repeated attacks and betrayals in the late 19th century. These resulted in the notorious massacre of several hundred Lakota people, mostly women and children, by U.S. Army soldiers on December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. This famous battle is understood as the last, tragic defeat of the Plains people by the Army that ended the centuries-long Indian Wars between colonial and U.S. forces and Native Americans. It appeared to the artist to anticipate the atrocious treatment of Japanese-Americans during the war – a history hardly absolved by the government apology and check for $20,000 received by the Tajiris and other survivors of the wartime internment camps as a result of the Civil Liberties Act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988. Tajiri recalls his own feelings when his family was interned in 1942: “We had been placed under

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the administration of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and seemed headed for the same slow annihilation that the ‘braves’ had been duped into accepting.”143 It is of course a myth that Native life has been eradicated in the United States, any more than Japanese American culture has; the popularity of the Romantic myth of the end of Native culture actually became a justifcation for the atrocious treatment of Native people in U.S. history. Nevertheless, the threat of destruction was immanently real in an emotional sense to the citizens forced into camps in 1942 – or at any other time and place in history. The parallels among diverse political incarcerations, from the Native Reservations to the Japanese internment camps to the German concentration and extermination camps, are not made in order to explain away the profound singularity and injustice of each event, but rather to recognize the deeper patterns of human politics and behavior that led to them – and, equally important, to recognize the fundamental value of every human victim. Each person’s story is both incommensurable and part of a larger pattern discernible in global human history. As Alon Confno writes of the relationship in Israeli collective memory between the historic traumas of the Holocaust and the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel in 1948): The mention of the two events in the same breath has always aroused ferce opposition and profound resentment. And yet this opposition is part of the cultural tradition that by connecting the events confront their memory and give them meaning.144 Confno describes the way the active “erasure of memory” of the Nakba from Jewish memory after 1948 was instrumental to its construction of the sacredness of the history of the Holocaust. Similarly, the internment of Japanese-Americans could only have been possible in an American culture that continued to deny the actual inhumanity of its earlier treatment of other racial minorities including Asian and Mexican immigrants, black people, and Native Americans. While the sequences of events may have been unique and historians continue to argue over the defnitions of “genocide,” the subjective experience of those who experienced such events, and the way they were later constructed as foundational cultural traumas for diverse minority groups, are inextricably linked. Confno’s description of the plunder of Palestinian possessions and homes by Jewish settlers in Israel in 1948–1949 could easily be reread as a description of the confscation of Japanese possessions by white Americans in 1942: The Jewish act of plunder and its justifcations belong within a general, comparative history of plunder in cases of mass violence, be they forced migrations, such as in India/Pakistan in 1947, or the plunder of Jewish Holocaust victims. Particularities exist in specifc cases, of course, but in all these cases the perpetrators used specifc historical “reasons” that allegedly justifed the expropriation of the enemy as well as the opportunities offered by war and the basic view of the other as humanely debased. Plunder is often initiated from below, but it is sanctioned from above as state authorities conduct the plunder themselves.145 In his discussion of “bare life” in Homo Sacer, philosopher Giogio Agamben describes the action of taking away people’s possessions and personal freedom by putting them into camps as basic to modern political states, whether democratic or totalitarian. He

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calls the near-universal idea of the camp, whether a prison, a concentration camp, an internment camp, or a refugee camp, a “biopolitical paradigm of the modern,” in which the state exerts the ultimate control over the biological life of its subjects.146 The reduction of subjects to “bare life” means the exertion by the nation-state of complete and entirely public control over human experiences that most democracies consider private, from eating and the occupation of space to death itself. It is the horror of this atrocity and the troubling continuation of it in contemporary politics that Tajiri’s sculpture conveys so vividly. Wounded Knee 1890 is an abstract sculpture made from aggregated pieces of scrap iron, with several sharp points splashed with an evocative scarlet red. It inevitably symbolizes a creature, perhaps a human reduced to “bare life,” balanced precariously on three legs, rather than two or four – suggesting that one leg is wounded or lost. Or, perhaps the fgure is ready for action, bristling with swords drawn and extended among several other forms reminiscent of shields. The improvisatory web of iron that forms an open work skeleton suggests both protective armor and a cage. At the same time, it evokes a structure or a burnt-out landscape, littered like Vandercam’s beaches with fragments of weapons, tools, and defensive structures. On a smaller, helmet-like cage at its top two fgures seem to stand, perhaps a human and a horse, signaling the symbolic importance of horses in Plains Native culture, but also, perhaps, a nod to Picasso’s drawings of toreador and bull. At the pinnacle, possibly the head of the small human fgure or else the larger creaturely one, a clawlike form suggests either a raised paw or a warrior’s feathered headdress. Modern and pre-modern references multiply in the abstract forms Tajiri coaxes out of a prehistoric material, iron, one he appreciated because it was so diffcult to work with.147 The narrow, double-pointed, fn-like form projecting from the front, accompanied by several sharper red-painted points, suggests at once a sword and shield, a machine gun (the fns are already riddled with “bullet holes”), a set of monstrous jaws, or the tail fns of an airplane. In the 1960s, when Tajiri returned to his “Warriors” in a series of increasingly stylized representations, he would take direct inspiration from the latest car and jet plane designs. Here, the naturally uneven surface of the iron gives the whole sculpture the appearance of an ancient relic – but its modern title refuses to allow us to forget a battle that still has not received a proper memorial. The sculpture suggests, in its own humble way, a counter-monument that connects the genocide of the Native Americans with the violence inficted upon all American minorities, not just Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. As historian James Young explains, counter-monuments do not reduce the complexity of past events to a single monumental celebration like the old bronze heroes of the European Renaissance. Instead of pacifying viewers as the traditional statues do, the counter-monument provokes them. It de-naturalizes their relationship to history and demands that they question the meaning of the past. Like the countermonuments designed by artists like Horst Hoheisel and Jochen and Esther Gerz in the 1980s to problematize the memory of Fascism in Germany, Wounded Knee 1890 functions to “disperse – not gather – memory.”148 The counter-monument inspires concern rather than celebration. While Wounded Knee 1890 is not a public monument but an art work, one owned by a museum and encountered in a space that is only semi-public, it inspires a similar response. Its abstract elements and intense materiality provoke symbolic associations and refection on the connections among diverse historical instances of political persecution and violence. At the same time, its archaic quality also comments on what

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historian Louis Mumford described as the strange and irrelevant appearance of the traditional monuments in bronze or stone, which invariably appear anachronistic in the space of the modern city.149 As Young summarizes: The counter-monument seeks its fulfllment in – not at cross-purposes with – historical time. It recognizes and affrms that the life of memory exists primarily in historical time: in the activity that brings monuments into being, in the ongoing exchange between people and their historical markers, and fnally, in the concrete actions we take in light of a memorialized past.150 Tajiri’s insertion of “1890” right into the title of the sculpture insists not only on its location in historical time, but also the disconnect between the historical times of its making and our encounters with it. The art of Cobra explores the imaginary spaces of this disconnect. In the mid-1960s, Tajiri’s reprise of the “Warrior” series directly critiqued the U.S. military aggression in Vietnam. He became dissatisfed, however, when the public misread his “Warriors” as glorifcations of violence, so he turned to a new series, the “Knot” sculptures he produced from the 1970s until his death in 2009. The abstract knots produced in diverse materials from paper and wood to fberglass and bronze present an open-ended, poetic metaphor able to be successfully translated into sleek monuments symbolizing public ideals of universal humanism. His fberglass Friendship Knot of 1972, for example, was installed in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, in 1981, in belated recognition of the importance of Japanese-Americans to the local community.151 Its smooth, uncannily white fberglass surfaces do not encourage a static contemplation, but rather mimic the intense and constant movement of the city. Nevertheless, it is a monument, not a counter-monument, inviting observers to interpret the knot as a symbol of connection with a multitude of more specifc references and meanings in various world cultures. It is an appropriately abstract totem for a cosmopolitan community. Like many other Cobra artists, including Appel, Jorn, and the Mancobas, Tajiri moved from early, more aggressive abstractions responding to the inhumanity of war, occupation, racism, and internment to a broader, multifaceted but still personal expression in the 1960s–1970s. Tajiri produced versatile work in many different media, including his groundbreaking flm The Vipers in 1955 and later extending to photography, computer drawings, and other new media. He taught at the Berlin University of the Arts for two decades, after students who saw his “Knot” sculptures at the international Documenta exhibition in 1968 requested that he apply for a professorship. He collaborated with a wide network of colleagues including and beyond the Cobra artists and poets and his wife Ferdi (who died in a tragic studio accident in 1968). In 1996, the Dutch Ministry of Defense commissioned a large bronze Sentinel sculpture from Tajiri to commemorate the end of the draft. It still faces the Ministry of Defense in The Hague. Together with four large cast-iron Sentinels installed on a bridge in Venlo in 2007, these are his most prominent statements, modern monuments for a public that fnally understands his pacifst message.152 Their abstract and playful metal forms seem to defy Mumford’s critique of the static quality of the monument. The Hague in particular remains a prominent site of global pacifsm, the city where Andrew Carnegie built the Peace Palace to promote international cultural understanding and to house the Permanent Court of International Justice, which ultimately became

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the UN International Court of Justice, after the First World War. It is now the site of the International Criminal Court that began operations in 2002, fully fve decades after the institution was stipulated in the United Nations General Assembly as part of the negotiations for the Genocide Convention, ratifed in 1948. These institutions symbolize the global potential to resist the discourses of nationalism and patriotism that have led to so much historical destruction, acutely felt by the small nation-states which have been occupied so many times by foreign armies. The Sentinels also signify in a broader sense the institutional recognition of the important role played not only by Tajiri but by Cobra art in general, in proclaiming a public value for the personal transformation of symbolic cultural imagery in art. Their whimsical and eccentric forms stand publicly for the social values of playfulness and creativity that are fundamental to a pacifst world view.

The Value of Experimental Art Reconsidering Vandercam’s photographs and Appel’s Questioning Children alongside Tajiri’s “Warriors” in relation to the Cobra movement foregrounds its inherent openness to diverse artistic methods and perspectives. What unites these different projects is an underlying interest in the spontaneous manipulation of materials into abstract and symbolic forms that convey multiple, sometimes conficting, meanings at once. Celebrating the raw directness of materials and the spontaneity of childlike methods, they comment on recent political events while also calling attention to their relationship with older historical cultures. All three artists, as well as Alechinsky with his early print of the Assassinated Poet, began with imagery of war and the human violence that follows in its wake, and evolved in their later work toward more general statements about human experience, statements that also made use of symbolic or fgurative imagery while resisting heroic images of public commemoration. These artists celebrate instead the ordinary people left out of the grand narratives of history. As Constant wrote to Jorn in 1951, “The world is tired of misery and war. All of that must change to create the atmosphere in which a universal style can come into being.” Constant was willing to work with all artists who shared “a positive position towards humanity.”153 Humanity, however, was not a given entity defned by any one culture in the experience of Cobra, but rather something continually evolving, created in specifc communities and reshaped by the imaginations and material interventions not only of artists, but of everyone who participates in them. Only Cobra’s experimental attitude, accompanied by Jorn’s aesthetic “theory of wonder,” could approach such a huge topic with the humility it requires. Jorn’s phrase appropriately describes the way these art works allow us to refect on our values and reevaluate the world we share, creatively and spontaneously, letting go of the destructive certainty that we know what is right.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Vandercam, Interview with Marc Vausort, 9. Sasson, “A la Galerie Aujourd’hui: Photographies de Serge Vandercam.” Vandercam, interview with Marc Vausort, 5. Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 28.

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5 Christian Dotremont, Les Développements de L’Oeil, n.p. 6 Recent accounts of the Europe in the immediate postwar period include Judt, Postwar; Lowe, Savage Continent; and Gatrell, “Europe Uprooted.” 7 See Mayers, “Humanity in 1948.” 8 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 21. 9 Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” 116. 10 Adorno, “Coming to Terms,” 128. 11 Jorn, “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” 59–69. 12 Jan Vrijman mentions the “abominable stench” in “Karel Appel’s Reality,” Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 427. 13 Constant recalls the experience of moving to Paris in 1950 in Schmidt and Doebele, Constant, avant le départ. 14 Stokvis, Cobra, 162. 15 Karel Appel, interview with Frédéric de Towarnicki, 1977, quoted in Frankenstein, Karel Appel, 161–2. 16 Appel, in Camps, “Karel Appel,” 42–4. 17 Constant, “C’est notre désire qui crée la révolution.” 18 See “The Postwar Years,” in Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age, 57–95. 19 Mathieu, De la révolte à la renaissance, 360. 20 On the Parisian attempts to reconstruct the School of Paris after the war, see Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris. 21 Jorn, “Peinture détournée.” 22 Dotremont, Cobraland, 164. 23 Dotremont, Constant, n.p. 24 Asger Jorn, “Tegn og Underlige Gerninger,” n.p. Jorn refers in the text to Langer, Philosophy in a New Key; Langer, Feeling and Form; Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning; and Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts. 25 Alechinsky, interview with Jacques Putnam, in Alechinsky, n.p. 26 Alechinsky, “Cobra dans le rétroviseur,” 11. 27 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. 28 Glotz, “Les Gilles de Binche,” 11. 29 Cobra 6 (April, 1950), frontispiece. 30 Alechinsky, Lettre suit, 110. See also Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness, 191. 31 Luc Zangrie [Luc de Heusch], untitled text in Alechinsky, Fêtes et trouble-fête, n.p. 32 See Alechinsky and Pirotte, Catalogue inopiné du musée imaginaire de la ville de Binche. 33 Jean Raine recalling his frst meeting with Alechinsky in 1946, quoted in Abadie, Alechinsky, 154. 34 Jorn, “Intime Banaliteter,” 38. 35 Vandercam, quoted in Vausort, Serge Vandercam, Photographe Cobra, 5–6. 36 Vandercam, interview with Michel Draguet, quoted in Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 20. 37 Sasson would later write an enthusiastic review of Vandercam’s frst solo exhibition, “A la Galerie ’Aujourd’hui’: Photographies de Serge Vandercam.” 38 Vandercam, interview with Marc Vausort, 17. 39 Vandercam, Conversation avec Joseph Noiret, 5. 40 Henri Storck, La joie de revivre, 1947, with commentary by Arthur Haulot, narrated by Bryson Gerrard, and music by Jean Norin (André Souris). My gratitude to the Henri Storck Foundation for providing access to this flm. 41 Vandercam, quoted in Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 24–5. 42 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 86. 43 Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 68. 44 Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 21. 45 Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute,” 16. 46 Vandercam, quoted in Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 26. 47 Selim Sasson, untitled statement, invitation card for the exhibition Foto’s van Serge Vandercam, Kunsthandel Martinet, Amsterdam, 1953.

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48 Julien Coulommier, “Serge Vandercam,” Contretype 26 (January–February 1991), 6, quoted in Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 26. 49 Canonne, La Chair de l’image, 29. 50 Steinert, Subjektive Fotografe, 26. 51 Franz Roh, “The Imaginative Range of Photography,” in Steinert, Subjektive Fotografe, 35. 52 J.A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, “Objective and Subjective Photography,” in Steinert, Subjektive Fotografe, 30. 53 Steinert, Subjektive Fotografe, 26. 54 Steichen, The Family of Man, 4. 55 See Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition; and Hurm, Reitz, and Zamir, The Family of Man Revisited. 56 Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” 100–2. 57 Azoulay, “The Family of Man.” 58 Steichen, The Family of Man, 82. 59 See Shamoon Zamir, “Structures of Rhyme, Forms of Participation: The Family of Man as Exhibition,” in Hurm, Reitz, and Zamir, eds., The Family of Man Revisited, 133–56. 60 Malraux, The Voices of Silence. 61 Jorn, Concerning Form, 207. 62 André Malraux, Museum Without Walls, 27. 63 On the discourse of modern man, see Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism. 64 Vandercam, interview with Marc Vausort, 10. 65 Brassaï, “Du Mur du caverne au mur d’usine” and “Sculptures involuntaires.” 66 Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in Krauss, Livingston, and Ades, L’Amour Fou, 9; cited in Van der Jeugt, Cobra en Fotografe, 15. 67 No list exists of what photographs were shown in the 1950 exhibition, but Ubac did not make photographs during or after the war, so the photographs featured in the show were likely from 1930–1940. Debrocq, “Les Développements de L’Oeil,” 10. 68 The Belgian Surrealist photographer Marcel Lefranq, co-founder of the Hainaut Surrealist group in 1939 and the Haute Nuit group in 1947, provides another link between Surrealist and Cobra photography. Dotremont wrote him inviting the Haute Nuit group to join Cobra in 1949, and reproduced his abstract photograph Pastorale in Cobra 2 (March, 1949). 69 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 8. 70 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 48. 71 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 219 and 237. 72 Dotremont, “Les Developpements de L’Oeil,” n.p. 73 Régine Raufast, “Photography and Image,” 155. 74 Vandercam, quoted in Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 24. 75 Noiret, “Gaston Bachelard et Henri Lefebvre dans Cobra,” 43. 76 Claus, “De Man van Tollund,” n.p. 77 See also Kurczynski, “Materialism and Intersubjectivity in Cobra.” 78 Spiegeler, “Biographie.” 79 Vandercam, quoted in Draguet, Serge Vandercam: L’invitation au voyage, 35. 80 Willem Sandberg, “Art’s Reply,” trans. in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 56–7. 81 All quotations in this paragraph are from E. H. Kossmann, “Holland Re-Emerges,” 8. 82 Kossmann, “Holland Re-Emerges,” 10. 83 Ibid., 16. 84 Appel, letter to van Eyck, c. 1950, quoted in Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 21. 85 Stokvis reproduces photographs of his studio in 1947 in Cobra, 77. 86 See Kuspit, Karel Appel Sculpture, 15–19. 87 Wesselink, “The memory of World War Two,” 6–7. 88 Wesselink, “The memory of World War Two,” 7. 89 Stokvis, Cobra, 105. 90 Pierre Restany, “Street Art,” 1982, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 270. While Restany claims this occurred in 1947, Tajiri did not arrive in Paris from Chicago until September, 1948, so it must have been between late 1948 and 1952.

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91 Van Houts, Karel Appel, 95. Rasaad Jamie reports that Appel “sees Schwitters as his most enduring infuence.” Jamie, “Appel Now,” 1984, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 166. However, he likely could not have seen Schwitters’s assemblages in person until 1958–1959 when they were included in a Dada exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum. 92 Willem Sandberg, letter to the mayor of Amsterdam, December 12, 1949, SMA. 93 Karel Appel, letter to Corneille, December 2, 1947, Archives Corneille, Brussels, translated in Stokvis, Cobra, 79. 94 Karel Appel, 1968, quoted in Stokvis, Cobra, 79. 95 Karel Appel, quoted in Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 301. 96 Karel Appel, quoted in Visser and Hagenberg, eds., Karel Appel: The Complete Sculptures 1936–1990, 75. 97 Restany, “Street Art,” 1982, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 269. 98 See Stokvis, Cobra, 98. 99 Kuspit, Karel Appel Sculpture, 37. 100 Karel Appel, Interview with Alan Hanlon, 1972, in Appel’s Appels, quoted in Klaus Ottmann, “The Appel Effect,” in Kaiser, ed., Karel Appel: Retrospective, 41. 101 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 119. 102 Marshall McLuhan, “Appel,” 1980, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 319. 103 Appel, quoted in Frankenstein, Karel Appel, 167. 104 Karel Appel, “Appel on Appel, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 590. 105 “Karel Appel in Conversation with Rudi Fuchs,” 36. 106 Appel, “Appel on Appel,” in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 599. 107 The best overview of Cobra from a standpoint of traditional primitivism is Graham Birtwistle, “Primitivism of the Left.” 108 Karel Appel, interview with Frédéric de Towarnicki, 1977, quoted in Frankenstein, Karel Appel, 161–2. 109 Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 301. Ragon describes the Town Hall Mural as if it were one of Appel’s wood assemblage works, but it is a fat, painted composition on the wall of the building, currently the Softel Legend Hotel The Grand in Amsterdam, where the mural remains on view behind glass. 110 “Stedenschoon (magisch abstract),” Het Vrije Volk, 1949, quoted in Van Houts, Karel Appel: de biografe, 129–30. 111 Ibid. 112 Critique of the mural in Algemeen Handelsblad, April, 1949, quoted in van Houts, Karel Appel: de biografe, 132. 113 Aldo van Eyck, En appel aan de verbeelding, 1950, translated in Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 302–7. 114 See Assmann and Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”; and Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader. 115 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 50–87. 116 Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 20. 117 Michlic, “Jewish Children in Poland,” 485. 118 Edward A. Shils, “Social and Psychological Aspects of Displacement and Repatriation,” Journal of Social Issues 2, no. 3 (1946), 9–10, quoted in Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 104. See also Zahra, The Lost Children. 119 Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 237. 120 Rasaad Jamie, “Appel Now,” in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 179. 121 Kuspit, Karel Appel Sculpture, 40. 122 Christian Dotremont, “Par la grande porte,” n.p. 123 Tapié, “L’aventure totale d’Appel,” n.p. 124 Ragon, Vingt-cinq ans d’art vivant, 119. In L’aventure de l’art abstrait, Ragon describes Cobra as an appendage of Dubuffet’s revolution of Art Brut and treats Corneille, Atlan, and Appel as individual painters, in line with his political leanings toward anarchist philosophy. In Naissance d’un art nouveau, he offers: “Even if their pictorial qualities often remain doubtful, they nevertheless contributed to humanize contemporary art which had a tendency to calcify into decorative abstraction” (91). He respects Cobra’s experimental

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125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

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spirit without taking seriously its challenge to the very possibility of objective judgments of aesthetic quality. Franz-W. Kaiser, “Between the Lines” in Kaiser, ed., Karel Appel: Retrospective, 10. On the making of the flm, see Jan Vrijman, “Karel Appel’s Reality,” in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 419–48. Karel Appel, quoted in Sam Hunter, “Karel Appel in the Spirit of Our Time,” 1986, in Hagenberg, ed., Karel Appel: Dupe of Being, 102–3. Theodor Adorno’s statement appears in Prisms, 34. Adorno, “Commitment,” 188. Tajiri, “A Brief Account of Events,” booklet cover. Corneille writes that he sees Tajiri daily in Paris as the sculptor was learning welding from Jacobsen, in a letter sent to Henny Riemens in Amsterdam, March 8, 1950. Wouter Schopman archive, Amsterdam. Tajiri, quoted in Grotenhuis and Forger, Tajiri’s labyrinth. Stufkens, et al., Tajiri: Snelheid, erotiek en geweld, vol. 2, 128. See Breton, Mad Love, 29. Calder’s infuence is noted in Romare, “Shinkichi Tajiri,” 114. Tajiri, The Genealogy of the Family Tajiri; and Tajiri, Autobiographical Notations, 22–3. On the U.S. policy of censorship regarding images of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Dower, “The Bombed.” Tajiri, Autobiographical Notations, 44. Romare, “Shinkichi Tajiri,” 5. See the photographs in Stokvis, Cobra, 159. Tajiri, “Shinkichi G. Tajiri,” 2007, in Japanese American Military Experience Database, www.discovernikkei.org/en/resources/military/521, cited in Robinson, “Shinkichi Tajiri and the Paradoxes of Japanese American Identity,” 75. Tajiri, quoted in Vercauteren, De Wachters van Shinkichi Tajiri, 23. Christian Dotremont, L’arbre et l’arme, 1953, translated in Lambert, Cobra, 143–6. Tajiri, “A Brief Account of Events,” n.p. Confno, “Jaffa, 1949,” 138. Confno, “Jaffa, 1949,” 143. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 69–105. “I like materials that resist, iron, bronze, stone.” Shinkichi Tajiri, “Tajiri, een documentaire van Johan van der Keuken,” in Stufkens, et al., Tajiri: Snelheid, erotiek en geweld, vol. 1, 55. Young, “The German Counter-Monument,” 294. Mumford, The Culture of Cities. Young, “The German Counter-Monument,” 296. Shinkichi Tajiri, Friendship Knot, 1980, glass fber-reinforced polyester, 6 m tall, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, USA. See Vercauteren, De Wachters van Shinkichi Tajiri. Constant, letter to Jorn, June 1951, quoted in Hummelink, Après nous la liberté, 114.

Plate 1 Jean-Michel Atlan, Untitled, 1951. Oil on hardboard, 81 × 65 cm (32 × 26 in.). Private Collection, Paris. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Plate 2 Ejler Bille, Komposition, 1934. Oil on canvas, 67 × 74 cm. Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Denmark. Photograph by Ole Bjørn Petersen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Plate 3 Egill Jacobsen, Ophobning (Accumulation), 1938. Oil on canvas, 80 × 65.5 cm. SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen. SMK Photo/Jacob Schou-Hansen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Plate 4 Asger Jorn, Legetøjsbillede (Toy Picture), 1945. Oil on canvas, 74 cm × 99 cm. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Plate 5 Asger Jorn and Christian Dotremont, Je Lève, Tu Lèves, Nous Rêvons (I Rise, You Rise, We Dream), 1948. Collection Pierre and Micky Alechinsky, Bougival, France. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA / SABAM, Brussels.

Plate 6 Carl-Henning Pedersen, Fugle i Landskab (Birds in a Landscape), 1944. Oil on canvas. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, the Netherlands, on long-term loan from Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Plate 7 Pierre Alechinsky, Central Park, 1965. Acrylic with marginal drawings in India ink on paper mounted on canvas, 63.8 × 76" (162 × 193 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Plate 8 Asger Jorn, Ørnens ret (The Eagle’s Right) II, 1951. Oil on masonite. 74.5 × 60 cm. Museum Jorn. Photograph by Lars Bay. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Plate 9 Constant, Animaux (Animals), 1949. Oil on linen, 85.2 × 70.5 cm. Collection ABN AMRO Bank, on loan to Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

Plate 10 Asger Jorn and Christian Dotremont, Il y a Plus de Choses Dans la Terre d’un Tableau Que dans le Ciel de la Théorie Esthétique (There Are More Things in the Earth of a Painting Than in the Heaven of Aesthetic Theory), “Peinture-mot” (Word-painting), 1948. Oil and pencil on canvas, 99 × 129 cm. Former Ernest van Zuylen Collection, Liege. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA / SABAM, Brussels.

Plate 11 Eugène Brands, Untitled mask, 1948. Mixed media: papier mâché and colored eggshell with snake skin, height 25 in. Golda and Meyer Marks Cobra Collection, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.

Plate 12 Eugène Brands, Neergeschreven Drift (Passion Written Down) II, 1949. Oil on canvas, 485 × 112 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Plate 13 Eugène Brands, Neergeschreven Drift (Passion Written Down) I, 1949. Oil on canvas, 112 × 112 cm. Private collection.

Plate 14 Anders Österlin, Imaginary Red, 1950. Oil on canvas, 60.7 × 68.2 cm. Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden.

Plate 15 Max Walter Svanberg, Porslinskvinnorna ur den Spröda Butiken Som Ar Mitt Hjärta (Porcelain Women out of the Brittle Shop That Is My Heart), 1961. Gouache and watercolor, 69 × 83 cm. Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden.

Plate 16 Karel Appel, Vragende Kinderen (Questioning Children), 1949. Assemblage, found and painted wood and nails. 105 × 67 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

Plate 17 Karel Appel, Vragende Kinderen (Questioning Children), 1949. Tempera wall mural, Hotel The Grand (former Amsterdam City Hall). Image courtesy of the Karel Appel Foundation. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

Plate 18 Shinkichi Tajiri, Wounded Knee 1890, 1953. Iron and paint, 103 cm high. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven (NL)/Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht (NL). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

Plate 19 Asger Jorn, Såret vilddyr II (Wounded Wild Animal II), 1951. Oil on masonite, 100 × 82 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Lars Bay. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Plate 20 Constant (artist) and Gerrit Kouwenaar (writer), Goede Morgen Haan (Good Morning Rooster), 1949. Ink and oil crayon on paper (printed with hand-colored illustrations), 25 × 17.5 cm. Amsterdam: Experimentele Groep in Holland. Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. Photo: Henni van Beek. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

Plate 21 Else Alfelt, Blaanende Fjell-Verden (Blue Mountain World), 1948. 126 × 126 cm. Oil on plywood. Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

Plate 22 Corneille, Black Girl in Room, 1951. Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 54 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Plate 23 Ernest Mancoba, Composition, 1940. Oil on canvas. 59 × 50 cm (23.2 × 19.7 in). Collection Wendy Fisher, A4 Foundation, Cape Town.

Plate 24 Ernest Mancoba, Untitled, 1958. Oil on canvas, Fundaçao Sindika Dokolo in Luanda, Angola.

Plate 25 Herbert Gentry, Among Others and With Friends, 2000. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 in. Estate of Herbert Gentry.

4

Expression for All

What is expression in art, exactly? The idea of expression suggests that the art work externalizes thoughts and emotions internal or unique to the artist. This is often viewed as a simple process, but there is nothing direct or simple about the notion that a physical confguration of matter can encode or transmit ideas and affective states. In Western aesthetics, the association of painterly gesture and color with the expression of the passions was codifed in the 17th century in the debates about colore (color) versus disegno (line) in the European Academies. Rational contemplation became frmly associated with line. However, 20th-century modernist movements from Cubism to Expressionism destabilized and often deliberately cut across that dichotomy; the Cubist Picasso, for example, stated unequivocally that he wanted “nothing but emotion to be given off by” his art.1 Emotional expression is only part of what any art work expresses, only one way the work connects. Cobra’s interpretation of expression relates to both emotional and rational (including social and political) content. Cobra art works foreground the process of expression as an intersubjective link between artist and observer as much as the specifcs of what is expressed, which the artists well knew was open to interpretation. A signifcant problem in interpreting modern art is that artistic attempts to express emotional affect in Expressionism, Cobra, Abstract Expressionism, and NeoExpressionism – not to mention children’s art, outsider art, popular or folk art, and other forms closely associated with “direct” or “authentic” expression – often appear repetitive, if not outright poor, easy, cheap, crazy, unresolved, or otherwise unacceptable. The attempt to express emotions directly leads artists to make work quickly, and therefore to continually risk sloppiness and failure. Yet the very emphasis on authenticity of intent over fnished product radically destabilizes aesthetic value judgments, leading to repeated crises about how to differentiate “good” from “bad” painting. The problem of how to judge personal expression raises the question of how artistic professionals decide what to include – what to deem worthy of our attention – in the category of art. Anyone familiar with Cobra recognizes immediately the wide range of accomplishments among the art produced by the movement. What emerges only through closer study is the fascinating way that our own values shift the more we study the aesthetics and history of Cobra. We come to recognize new value in art works that we may have initially dismissed as poorly conceived or executed. The challenge of this work pushes our criteria of value from preconceived ideas of development and fnish toward a recognition of the values of complexity and a diversity of ideas, practices, and interpretations proposed by a given work. 20th-century Expressionists like Wassily Kandinsky proclaimed that their movements were not based on style, but rather the authenticity of having something to

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express, an “inner need” for expression, as he famously described it. Similarly in Cobra, no one style unifes the wide range of work produced by the different artists. Instead, what links them together is the understanding that art is something made by people attempting to connect with other people as well as the non-human world. The desire for connection was termed “empathy” in early 20th-century Germany. For Cobra it became a search for something more fundamental, which Asger Jorn called a “common human expression,” a phrase with deliberately populist connotations.3 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba used the phrase alment gældende udtryk, literally a “generally applicable expression” or just, “expression for all.”4 Expressionism and Cobra responded to the social alienation of living in a modern society that was more complex and specialized than ever before. The desire for expression is a desire for human connection, a particularly modern response to alienation no matter what the cause – technological mediation, war, migration, the nuclear threat, mental or social instability, capitalist exploitation, racism, sexism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia are just some of the major ones. The Cobra artists attempted to create a populist understanding of expression that was ordinary, but also unique in its material manifestations. Their idea of authenticity was about engaging with a culture in a specifc moment, rather than channeling some exclusive inner talent. The problem of defning expression leads back to the fundamental issue of art’s role in society. In the 20th century, emotional expression became one of the most important social functions of art as European society became more complex, technologically mediated, and rationally organized. Expressionism emerged as a movement over the course of the 19th century, in part as a response to the increasing homogenization of culture due to the explosion of print media, including photography and color lithography. It also responded to new psychological investigations of the irrational thoughts and feelings that made each human subject unique. As Van Gogh said, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, to express myself forcibly.”5 An artistic emphasis on the direct and unmediated remains compelling to many observers in our increasingly networked global society. Artists like Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Gogh are still celebrated for their ability to express themselves vividly through abstractions of form and color. Expressionism was a term made popular in the German art press in the 1910s and associated most strongly in art with the Bridge (Brücke) and Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) groups in Dresden and Munich. French critics chose to dissociate modern art from “German” Expressionism between the wars.6 The Cobra movement was founded as a break with the French and Belgian Surrealist movement, but Expressionism provided an equally important aesthetic framework for the Dutch and Danish artists in particular, in part because both countries were broadly considered part of a “Nordic” Expressionist tradition in modern art. When French critic Michel Tapié frst saw Appel’s art in Paris in 1950, he said it was “authentic, bounds-breaking, Nordic.”7 This chapter explores the complex and contradictory relationship between Cobra art works and Expressionist precedents, and analyzes why certain artists were deemed more “expressive” than others. It examines the ways the artists broke from historic Expressionism in their search for something more material and spontaneous, childlike, and interpersonal. The way they channeled emotion into a culturally informed connection with new audiences had its proper equivalent in jazz, the music that directly inspired the artists discussed here, especially Corneille. Cobra artists from Asger Jorn to Ernest Mancoba believed that art was a way to connect with a fundamental human experience. Aesthetic theories of Expressionism 2

182 Expression for All have emphasized the connection with the receiver through the expression of emotion from the beginning, and the idea pervades the later aesthetic approach of Linien and Høst in Denmark. Leo Tolstoy explained in the 1890s, in one of the foundational texts on Expressionism in literature, that the purpose of art is not simply to express the artist’s emotion, but rather to cause the viewer to experience emotion themselves. Jorn underlines Tolstoy’s lines, quoted by art critic Herbert Read, that the activity of art is “to evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movement, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling.”8 Tolstoy considers art “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”9 In his copy of Read’s The Meaning of Art, Jorn also underlined a passage stating that the reaction of the viewer to art is an emotional one, involving empathy.10 The concept of empathy (Einfühlung) was frst defned by philosopher Robert Vischer in Germany in 1873. Vischer describes the aesthetic experience as one of reciprocal exchange and transformation: “I entrust my individual life to the lifeless form [and] I am mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this other.”11 The aesthetic theory of empathy, as Juliet Koss describes, destabilizes the identity of the viewer and animates the object. Empathy was foundational in the German Expressionist theory of Wilhelm Worringer, who writes in Abstraction and Empathy (1908) that empathy is a pre-cognitive state associated with pre-modern peoples, which is missing in contemporary rational life. For this reason, he writes, empathy has become the basis of modern aesthetics, a search for reconnection with organic life. Empathy for Worringer was a way to “enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from myself, to empathize myself into it.” It was also a vitalist theory: “What I empathize into it is quite generally life. And life is energy, inner working, striving and accomplishing.” Cobra would agree with the vitalist emphasis on energetic labor, but not with Worringer’s individualism. Worringer also considered empathy a fundamentally individual and self-refective activity: “Aesthetic enjoyment is objectifed self-enjoyment.”12 Cobra instead explored the ways art connects artists, observers, and the physical environment in momentary encounters. The focus on self-expression in the writing of Worringer, Kandinsky, and other German Expressionists is one of the reasons Jorn and Cobra would diverge from historical Expressionist theory.13 The Cobra artists were less interested in empathy alone than in reconfguring our sympathetic responses in dialogue with rational ideas about social experience. In a society increasingly defned by mass culture, their work addressed the way emotional experiences became pre-defned in discourses of advertising and popular entertainment. Politics, too, became emotionally reductive and dangerous under Fascism. Jorn responds directly to Worringer’s opposition of abstraction and empathy by presenting his own aesthetics as a synthesis of both tendencies. While abstraction explores more rational formal concerns in art and the process of perception, Expressionism emphasizes human expression and emotional identifcation or empathy. Kandinsky and Klee, Jorn writes, brought these competing aspects together in their work at the Bauhaus, the foundation for Linien’s fusion of Surrealism with Bauhaus-style abstraction.14 The Danish artists did not use the term “empathy,” perhaps because they avoided making reference to German art theories during the war. Instead, the language of Scandinavian vitalism and the interpretation of expression as a way of connecting

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people pervade their writings. Ferlov recalls her time in Linien as a search for humane expression in the midst of an inhumane society: 15

It was natural for people to work together in a group that was based on a common understanding of life, a common content. I mean people who could meet in their quest to reach a human expression that can have a common human meaning and help in the struggle for a society where the individual can preserve his or her personality as a human being and each individual human being can live in humane conditions.16 Danish spontaneous abstraction emphasized an organic and holistic approach that viewed the artist as integrally connected to science, to society, and to a humanism they conceived as inclusive rather than exclusive. Ejler Bille described the group’s goal in his book Picasso, Surrealism, Abstract Art, as a “living human expression” (levende menneskelige udtryk).17 He praises Miró’s work for contesting the values of both Fascism and bourgeois culture in the name of more fundamental human values, and asserts that art’s form is less important than what art communicates about “human experience” and “human truth.”18 He admires the art of Léger for expressing a dream of collective forms of life, Giacometti for connecting instinct and intellect, and Arp for sculptures that he describes as “symbolic forms, forms of love which, like ripe fruit, are bursting with plasticity and power.”19 Jorn echoes Bille’s views around the same time, writing that abstract art is not an isolated formal investigation, but rather an art about human experience. It explores living growth, inspired by modern science. Abstract art, Jorn argues, is not an oppositional art like Dada, but rather a positive “lifegiving art.”20 By the Cobra period, the artists emphasized the raw physicality of the work as the material means to convey emotional connection. Cobra expression produces a physical or sensory as well as social effect. As Jorn describes in the 1955 essay “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” a key statement of his aesthetics written just after the end of Cobra: The human content expressed in art is only of value if it is a collective, common human expression. How on earth do the more or less ridiculous complexes and complications of some neat little bourgeois concern us? What was previously considered the most outstanding quality of subjective expression, the individual and the original, is herewith struck from the program. […] In addition to emotion and the production of knowledge, we are looking for a third factor in art, the immediate experience of something singular, new and original, something that is neither form nor content but simply effect, sensation, or immediate impact.21 Jorn writes that the sensational effects of art are often dismissed as mere entertainment or vanity, but in fact provide an important counter to the dominant ideas of technical and social development. Art is a combination of “experience, emotion, and realization” uniquely able to counter the apathetic and routine existence toward which modern society and mechanical production pushes us.22 In response to the rational demands of modern Functionalism (the dominant tendency in modern Scandinavian architecture), Jorn proposes a sensational art as a unique form of “useful object.” He explains: “By ‘useful objects’ is understood those things that enhance and deepen the

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inner harmony of humans, our contact to nature and the elements that surround us, and further social harmony between men.”23 Jorn takes up the Scandinavian vitalist idea that art can reconnect us to nature and to each other, not through the expression of inner emotion, but through its engagement with the physical world of sensation. The question of communicating directly through a spontaneous expression that connected rational and emotional experience came to defne the art of Cobra. Because they emphasized materiality and sensation, the artists considered their work “realist” and “experimental” rather than “expressionist.” Expressionism frst codifed the idea of direct and authentic emotional expression as a primary purpose of art, but Surrealism’s attempts to allow the unconscious to express itself through automatism made obvious the artist’s limited control over what gets expressed. Cobra moved further away from the idea of authentic expression through its emphasis on spontaneity: because it depended on the unexpected, spontaneous expression could not be “authentic” to any pre-given meaning, not even an unconscious one. To create an art work spontaneously meant improvising and acting semiconsciously, as opposed to the conscious symbolization of emotion in Expressionism or the unconscious channeling of the psyche in Surrealist automatism. It meant acting in a particular material and location in space and time, in a specifc social context defned culturally and intersubjectively – these contextual links were often what the Cobra work was actually expressing. Where historical Expressionism depended on the assumption that the artist’s intention directly determined what the work meant, the Cobra artists were more interested in the observer’s interpretation. As philosopher John Hospers argued in the late 1940s, expression means the effect a work has on us as viewers. It is defned subjectively by us, not the artist, since neither the artist nor the observer has a clear way of knowing entirely what the artist was attempting to express.24 The role of the observer in interpreting an artistic expression was basic to the spontaneous aesthetics of Cobra at the time Hospers was writing. The Cobra artists used symbolic images both to connect their work to a larger historical context and to connect with viewers from diverse social backgrounds. Artistic symbols such as animals were not presented as having set meanings, but altered through material distortions that emphasized the process of transformation over the identity of the symbol, opening the image up to new interpretations. Asger Jorn’s 1951 painting Wounded Wild Animal (Plate 19) provides an exemplary case study of Cobra’s complex relationship to Expressionism. The painting suggests a vivid, monstrous image that we are forced to read through the tactile application of paint that seems almost to interfere with our interpretation of the fgure (actually multiple fgures). The picture’s opaque, saturated color, and thick paint surface recalls fnger painting, a painterly materialism that seems to contradict the representation of fgures at all. The wounded animal is a clichéd Expressionist image, an obvious reference to the modernist trope of the anxious artist (as well as a tribute to André Masson’s Surrealist paintings of wounded animals). The heavy-handed, claustrophobic, and oppressive effects of the brushwork are reinforced by the opaque earthly colors of the central monster, the black sun, and the compressed images of a female fgure and a fower (or fame) at the margins of the picture. The vivid materiality of the painting presents fguration and symbolism as active processes of interpretation. The image reads as an animation of the materials themselves. The “wildness” of the animal is suggested in part by the animated paint itself. The materialization of a monster only

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half-formed in heavy paint breaks down the distinction between the cognitive and the sensual, an effect more disturbing than if the picture were either totally abstract or naturalistic in style. The fgure signifes, frst of all, the ability of paint to represent, in other words, the process of giving material form to the human imagination – what Gaston Bachelard called the “material imagination,” a key concept for the early years of Cobra. Jorn’s crude development of a symbolic form rejects the idea of the purity of painting so common in postwar abstraction through its combination of raw materiality and kitschiness. Personal anxiety may have been his point of departure as Guy Atkins observed, since Jorn painted the work during his recovery from a near-fatal bout of tuberculosis in a Danish sanatorium; he surely saw himself as “wounded” at the time.25 Yet, as part of a series of pictures Jorn made investigating the public meanings of symbolic images (his series of “War Visions” and “History Pictures” of 1949 to 1950 and the “Silent Myth” murals of 1952 to 1953), it suggests multiple interpretations. Expressionist angst is only one possibility. The picture’s intense, almost overwhelming physicality, and raucous depiction of an almost comically anxious subject contradict each other. The cartoon-like feet, the ladybug-like wing, the marginal image of the small “pregnant” female form at the left edge, and the fower or fame – or paint brush? – held in the monster’s semi-human hand are all interpretable elements that signify much more than a personal trauma. The pregnant fgure for one, a common representation in Jorn’s painting at the time, refects his own family life and signifes hope as much as anxiety.26 Even the compositional structure of the image evokes meaning expanding out in all directions. The composition is defned roughly by a centralized black “X” that seems to initiate a dynamic outward spiral, with smaller symbolic elements relegated to the exterior edges on all sides, pushing our attention beyond the central wounded monster. The beast is labeled not only wild but wounded, and thus doubly dangerous, but its frightening aspect comes as much from the almost obsessive brushwork as from its grimacing face and unnatural combination of body parts. Like a Van Gogh painting, the work implies obsession, trauma, or madness through the emphatic, repeated brushstrokes that make the surface seem to come alive. Yet the idea of trauma appears theatrical in its very obviousness. The banal clichés of wild animal, black sun, and obsessive brushwork suggest an overproduction of meaning that threatens to destabilize the painting. Is the wild animal a single creature or multiple? Is it emerging from a shell or a wing? Is another animal attacking it, or the woman trying to save it? Is the color or the image more signifcant? Interpretive possibilities seem to proliferate. Wounded Wild Animal represents an intermediary point in Jorn’s lifelong dialogue with historical Expressionism, directly channeling the emotional obsessions of Munch and Van Gogh. Jorn’s 1951 statement, “I paint exclusively to satisfy an inner need,” paraphrases Kandinsky’s idea of “inner necessity.”27 Kandinsky’s Expressionist theory was a major infuence for Jorn and his Linien and Høst colleagues. Kandinsky emphasized the qualities of abstraction, harmony, and rhythm to allow the elements of the work to speak for themselves. He promoted children’s, folk, and non-Western art, and the use of “unskilled” methods to allow more direct and spontaneous expression.28 On the other hand, the playful humor and thick materiality of Jorn’s painting, not to mention its bestial subject, depart signifcantly from historical Expressionism. Rather than the heroic Expressionist artist, Jorn celebrates the human animal. His 1952 aesthetic treatise Luck and Chance proposes the idea of art as anti-heroic, the “humanization

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of the heroic character.”29 Jorn adamantly divorced his work from Expressionism until the late 1950s; he and his Høst colleagues explicitly called their work a “new realism” based on art’s material properties instead.30 In contrast to the Expressionist belief that the artist externalizes his inner emotion, Jorn used symbolic images that he knew would speak differently to different viewers, based partly on his 1946 experiment on “multiplicity of meanings” (fertydighed) where he asked his friends to provide their own interpretations to a single drawing.31 The speed and rhythm of Jorn’s brushwork in Wounded Wild Animal indicates the spontaneous creation of the picture as much as any claim to an authentic inner message. Such works are expressive, meaning subjective, hand-made, and inventive, but not Expressionist. Rather than a pure Expressionist emblem of individual pathos, the animal-in-formation opens a dialogue with the observer. It manifests what Bachelard would later call a “variational image,” a specifc material manifestation of an image that strikes a chord with a perceiving subject in the moment of encounter. Bachelard refers to this intersubjective exchange as the “transsubjectivity of the image,” meaning a “transmission from one soul to another.” However, he also speaks of “inter-subjectivity” in that this transmission ultimately exceeds simple one-to-one causality. The perception of the image is a transaction that breaks down the subject–object divide: “At the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions.”32 The excessive, often brutal materiality of Cobra images suggests both a breakdown of meaning and the appearance of new meaning. The artists were attempting to express an unprecedented historical situation in a symbolic language of painting that no longer seemed adequate to it. The strange combination of symbolic imagery and visceral materiality in Wounded Wild Animal suggests a new tension in the process of signifcation itself that has everything to do with the problem of representing the traumatic recent events of the war for an entire generation. Jorn’s multifaceted work moves toward a deconstructive approach involving an ambivalence toward symbolism, rather than its complete negation.33 The conficting meanings of popular symbols overlaid on each other break down the very notion of a globally shared symbolic language. The ideal of a universal language of expression, so beloved to abstract artists like Kandinsky or Mondrian, gives way to a celebration of interpretive variability. The centrifugal aspect of Jorn’s composition, its proliferation of symbolic elements pushed to the margins of the picture and thus pointing beyond its borders, suggests the endless dissemination and continual evolution of symbolic motifs. In Bachelardian terms, the art work’s material imagination brings images into being, while the excessive application of paint suggests their ongoing transformation. Any interpretation of these symbols must take into account their partiality and their shifting historical and cultural signifcation. The black monster signals a threatening excess of physical material, while the mythological and kitsch references recall Jorn’s study of collective popular culture. The fower or fame that Jorn’s beast appears to hold in a pawlike hand may reference Bachelard’s musings on the cultural and psychological meanings of fre in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, and anticipate those in his later book The Flame of a Candle. There, Bachelard notes that “fowers, all fowers, are fames – fames that want to be light.”34 Jorn writes that Bachelard gave materialist emphasis to the understanding of art, meaning that, while linked to fantasy, artistic creation always arises out of inspiration from matter: the four elements.35 To understand his thoughts on fre, Jorn

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continues, one must consider the sun, moon, and stars not as independent objects, but as materializations of fre’s being. In this Cobra painting, the blackness of the sun emphasizes its materiality rather than its potential for illumination. Meanwhile, the fre itself is transferred not only to the glowing red eye of the beast that animates matter, but also to the vivid pinkish “ground” itself that seems to come bodily to life under the creature’s “snout.” Bachelard writes eloquently of the sexual interpretations throughout human culture of fowers and fames, recalling Jorn’s other symbolic fgure of the “pregnant” fgure pushed to the edges by the wild animal. This fgure could be read as a reference to the life cycle and an emblem of creation itself, but appears only partially formed. The overt – almost desperate – masculinity of the wild beast emerges by means of this marginal female image. It might suggest redemption through the vague gesture of one arm extended toward the beast’s mouth, except that it appears like an almost comical afterthought or an incomplete cipher.36 The activation of viewing, a classic avant-garde tactic, took new forms in the ongoing Cobra play of material and intersubjective interpretation. Bachelard writes about reading poetry that, “it would seem that the reader is called upon to continue the writer’s images, he is aware of being in a state of open imagination.”37 The intensely physical experience of Cobra artworks like Wounded Wild Animal similarly demands that viewers take an active imaginative role. Jorn quotes Bachelard’s statement that, “one always wants imagination to be the capacity to form images.” For Jorn, imagination “is rather the capacity to deform images, furnished by perception, […] to liberate us from initial images, to change images.”38 The Cobra propensity to deform and transform images through their materialization has a deconstructive aspect, in that it subjects pre-existing images to a process that simultaneously transmits, evolves, and negates their previous signifcations. The Cobra image continually defers the establishment of any original or fnal meaning by suggesting multiple pathways of signifcation, making visible and palpable the process of meaning construction. Cobra art demands an interactive play of reference and interpretation. In Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire, fre is a fgure where material reality meets reverie. The book chronicles numerous world myths and poetic references that describe the mastery of fre as the origin of human cultural development. While Jorn’s painting seems to suggest the impossibility to master “wild” nature, it can also be read as a coded image of mastery over the complexity of human experience through the creation of new symbolic forms. The imagery invites a cognitive as well as an emotional response, depending on our interests as we read the painting. The brutal materiality of the work calls for an emotional response, while the symbols paradoxically demand a cognitive interpretation. “The artists of Cobra entirely devote themselves to the entire expression of reality in its entirety,” writes Dotremont in “Le grand rendezvous naturel.”39 And reality, needless to say, consists of both rational and emotional, objective and subjective elements. In a 1948 interview, Jorn affrms that art is fundamentally related to everything humans produce, based on the etymology of the Danish words “kunsten” (“art”) and “kunnen” (“to do or make”). The so-called fne arts cannot be “isolated from the technical, as people are doing today,” he says. “There is a tendency to isolate all things, and in art there is also a tendency to create overspecialists [literally “specialized idiots,” fagidioter]. One suppresses all things’ mutual dependency.”40 Jorn views the tendencies of art toward the subjective and science toward the objective to be complementary. The Dutch artists echoed this sentiment in a newspaper interview in

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Copenhagen in 1948, declaring that “There won’t be just cerebral or just emotional work, art will stand as an expression for everyday life and become accessible to all.”41 The joint interest in cognitive and emotional connections would continue to shape the art of Cobra and its legacy. Ejler Bille and Jorn would emphasize the links between art and science throughout their careers, and Corneille would explore the opposition of compositional structure and expression in several phases of his work. Constant would turn away from expressive abstraction after Cobra and make extensive use of De Stijl design principles in his New Babylon project, before returning to fgurative painting traditions in the 1970s. Ernest and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba would develop art works that personally reinterpret the impersonal abstractions of traditional African and pre-Columbian sculptures and masks. Cobra has often been described simplistically as a postwar Expressionism, but its artistic experiments were more multifaceted and socially engaged than a simple outpouring of feeling. While Dotremont and many of the Belgian artists framed their work almost exclusively in relation to Surrealism, Expressionism and Surrealism were two major points of departure for the Danish and Dutch Cobra artists. Some artists discussed below, including the Dutch painters Théo Wolvecamp and Anton Rooskens, were infuenced more by Expressionist than Surrealist or Cubist art, while others like Constant and Corneille draw on a wide range of earlier modernist practices including Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. All of the Dutch artists (except perhaps Eugène Brands, who deeply admired Mondrian) reacted directly against the predominance of De Stijl in modern art in the Netherlands in the Cobra years. Expressionism directly inspired Danish artists Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelt, but only Pedersen’s approach to expression has been investigated in depth. Alfelt has been marginal to discussions of Cobra, in fact, because Expressionist theory itself has been shaped by the privileged categories of gender, race, and class. Women artists Alfelt and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and the black Cobra artist Ernest Mancoba developed particular expressive strategies that have been overlooked due to the critical biases inherent in modern art criticism. Once those biases are made apparent, their work and their relation to Cobra can be reevaluated.

The Identity Politics of Expression The political persecution of Expressionism in favor of heroic naturalism by both Fascist and Communist regimes in the 1930s and 1940s led directly to the revival of expressive abstraction in Western Europe and the United States after the war. Danish artist Carl-Henning Pedersen developed an active interest in German Expressionism after witnessing the Degenerate Art exhibition in Frankfurt in 1939, where he saw works by Emil Nolde, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Kandinsky, Klee, and others covered with vehement denouncements against modern art. In the 1950s, Jorn began to describe Cobra’s contributions as part of the “Nordic Expressionist” lineage in art.42 By that time, Expressionism was promoted internationally in exhibitions like the 1955 Documenta I, curated by Arnold Bode in Kassel, West Germany. The frst Documenta was a way to connect postwar art with the prewar avant-garde legacy that Nazism had either suppressed, exported, or in many cases literally destroyed. The landmark exhibition included both Expressionists like Kandinsky and younger expressive abstract painters like Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Rather than focus on Expressionism as a set of avant-garde collective experiments, however, it presented a series of individual modern

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masters as a way to link young artists to the great European culture of the 1930s. Individualist notions of artistic genius were revived through the Cold War rhetoric of personal freedom, thereby reinscribing the social privileges that helped create the reputations of the male Expressionist artists in the frst place. While women artists were part of all the historical Expressionist networks, they were no longer seen as leaders or stars. The Documenta I exhibition included 146 artists: 140 men and only 6 women (a striking total of 4% women artists). Even more than other modernist movements, Expressionism was a patriarchal lineage. The most celebrated Expressionists were all male and European in part because the very notion of artistic genius was a European idea linked to masculine subjectivity. Feminist scholarship defnitively exposed this bias in the 1970s, but its implications for Cobra have yet to be taken into account.43 Gaining control over emotion itself continues to defne adult masculinity; the male Expressionist artist’s mastery over the appearance of affect, a culturally feminized domain, allows him to convey a universal humanity beyond the limitations of gender identifcation. The signs of race, class, and sexuality also relate to the mastering of affect, because whiteness, upper-class status, and heterosexual masculinity are all strongly associated with emotional restraint. Expressionism meant artistic mastery over the signs of affect, traditionally associated with color, texture, and organic forms in art. Expressionist artists attempted to convey universal human emotional experiences beyond the specifcity of modern life and social identity, but biases about gender and sexuality (not to mention race, class, and other categories of identity) proved impossible to set aside. Kandinsky opens his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art with the idea of appropriating domains of creation and affect traditionally associated with the female body: “Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions.”44 In a wide range of Expressionist art, as Carol Duncan demonstrates, the hyper-sexualization of women in the paintings represented the virile attitudes adopted by male artists to counter the affective associations that were otherwise viewed as feminine weakness and slavery to “natural” instincts.45 Given the social limitations that made it diffcult enough for women in the early 20th century to even conceive of an artistic career, this was an extra hurdle for women artists: as soon as art became about personal expression it became an aggressive and masculinist language. Similarly, Expressionism did not typically afford black artists the recognition of mastery over artistic expression given the common Expressionist identifcation with primitivist notions about non-Western subjectivity: the white male artist could embody femininity or blackness, but not the other way around. For the generation of Abstract Expressionism, Informel, and Cobra, artists based their expression primarily on the material dynamics of color and brushwork. Their work related to the mastery not of a single emotional signifcation (for example, sexual mastery in the German Expressionist painting) but of a generalized, abstract affect unattached to a particular subject. This was more diffcult for women to achieve credibly without taking on masculine attributes themselves. Audiences still tend to assume an abstract work is an expression of the artist’s emotions or persona, based on inherited social attitudes about emotion reinforced by the way historical Expressionist artists framed their work. In the postwar period, affect was once again socially reinterpreted as a feminine area. Men struggled to reassert control over their emotions in cultural archetypes of the 1950s like the traumatized war veteran of Film Noir or the James Dean–style outsider fgure on which Jackson Pollock modeled his own artistic persona. “Being

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emotional,” Sara Ahmed writes, “comes to be seen as a characteristic of some bodies and not others” through specifc cultural processes.46 Assumptions about gender, sexual, and racial identity enter into the artist’s own decisions about how to develop a personal language of expression and they shape the critical reception of such works, in terms of both professional judgments of how successful the works are at accomplishing the ideal of expressing something universal, and personal observations of how different communities experience and respond to them. Cobra approached expression in relation to artistic and political materialism in art works produced both singularly and collectively, attempting to resist the way artistic institutions codifed expression as a personal discourse of talent and virtuosic skill in the Cold War era of liberalism. Radical spontaneity and experimentalism were central to this project, but they were not the artists’ only tactics. The quiet evocation of multivalent artistic forms, often characterized by emotional restraint rather than strident aggression, were tactics used by Else Alfelt, Sonja Ferlov, and Ernest Mancoba to refute the spectacular aspects of the more internationally successful expressive artists of the day. Like Jorn, Appel, and the other founders of Cobra, they valued folk and non-Western art along with ancient art from Europe as outsider creations that stood for a spontaneous, anonymous expression. They sought in their own work such a socially engaged “expression for all,” as Ferlov Mancoba called it. She notes that such expression is always precarious: “there will always be critics who make it into a special individual and fantastic expression instead of an expression for all.”47 Her observation echoes Constant’s 1948 declaration in Refex that “every limitation that reduces art to the reserve of a small group of specialists, connoisseurs, and virtuosi must be removed.”48 The Cobra artists wanted art to be inclusive rather than exclusive, common rather than elite. They produced what could be called a “personable” or “interpersonal expression” rather than a personal expression, meaning one potentially open to anyone and addressed to everyone, based on a simple transformation of materials into symbolic images. The meaning of these images relates to peoples’ experience as part of a community rather than the expression of individuals set apart. The fact that Alfelt and the Mancobas framed their expression less aggressively has, however, kept it from the recognition it deserves as part of a larger Cobra project. In Scandinavia, art criticism was culturally more egalitarian than in art-world centers like New York or Berlin, and Danish women artists like Alfelt and Ferlov Mancoba were taken more seriously as a result. Yet fundamental assumptions about femininity and affect still predetermined the reactions to their work within Cobra and by later international scholars writing about the movement, making the male founders of the movement much more prominent. On the gender parity score, the Cobra movement appears only slightly better than Documenta I: of the 45-odd artists involved in the movement, Alfelt and Ferlov Mancoba are the only two consistently cited women artists (histories also occasionally reference Danish painter Agnete Therkildsen, the wife of Ejler Bille; Hungarian painter Madeleine Kemény, who was in the 1949 Cobra exhibition; German photographer Anneliese Hager, partner of Karl-Otto Götz; and Dutch sculptor Lotti van der Gaag). The racial identity of Cobra’s one black artist, Ernest Mancoba, further complicates the story for both Mancobas. The reactions they received as an interracial couple, combined with their personal refusal to play the aggressive game of artistic self-promotion and their artistically nuanced critique of primitivism in solidarity with colonized peoples, have all shaped their historical marginalization in the story of Cobra. Meanwhile, the male Cobra artists have been praised

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for their aggression, for their mastery of the artistic signs of affect, and ultimately for their ability to synthesize these “masculine” and “feminine” attributes. André Breton, for example, praised Alechinsky’s ability to assert power through “womanly abandon”: “what I appreciate most in art is what you possess, this power of curves intertwining, this rhythm quite evidently organic, this joyous sense of womanly abandon that you obtain from colors, from light.”49 Completely overlooked, by contrast, are the tactics used by the female and black Cobra artists in appropriating the dominant forms of emotional restraint associated with masculinity and whiteness to make their own work into an equally balanced and multifaceted, “common human” expression. This chapter reframes Cobra’s interpersonal expression as a minoritarian claim for broader human connections. It describes the way “men artists” like Jorn, Constant, and Corneille reinterpreted expression through a vigorous spontaneity and collectivism, while Alfelt and the Mancobas produced quieter work that has led to a misunderstanding of their art as “less” Cobra according to the dominant perception of the movement as an aggressive and primitivist provocation. As Susan Buck-Morss observes, “when collective actors proclaim themselves as the standard-bearers for universal history – indeed, especially when they make this avant-gardist claim – they establish their identity in contrast to others, to outsiders.”50 Paradoxically, Cobra eventually achieved art-world insider status for those of its members who most vocally represented as well as promoted outsiders as cultural producers. To recognize the radicality of Cobra’s defense of outsider perspectives also means recognizing the conceptual limitations and oversights that allowed its male and northern European spokesmen greater visibility. The artists themselves, on the other hand, were often more egalitarian. Ferlov Mancoba summarizes the predominant Cobra attitude in her statement that “what really matters is not the sculptures, but the spirit of fellowship which one tries to express.”51 For Ferlov and her fellow artists, “interpersonal expression” meant creating new connections among a diverse international network of artists – including those on the margins of Cobra itself – to reach new and broader audiences.

Expression and Intersubjectivity While the Cobra artists agreed with the basic premise that art involves emotional expression and an attempt to draw connections among different points of view, they largely rejected the individualist framework of Expressionism, especially as it was publicly celebrated in the 1950s. Their artistic approach suggests a particularly contemporary model of subjectivity. Rather than depicting an outer world distorted by the flter of inner emotion, their works both refect and create an intersubjective dialogue among artists, subjects, and viewers, across different times and places. They re-envision older artistic signs and symbols and reanimate physical materials in ways that help viewers to reposition themselves in relation to the worlds they inhabit. For a movement often characterized as Expressionist, it is striking how rarely the Cobra artists discussed expression. Instead, their discussions of art focused on material reality and experimentation. Jorn later avowed that until 1949 he believed that an artwork was a form at the service of expression, but Dotremont convinced him to replace “expression” with “experimentalism,” the constant search for new ways to unify form and content.52 He embraces the term “experimental,” also used by Constant, for the concept of art as a process of seeking the unknown consciously modeled on scientifc investigation.53 Cobra broke with the individualist framework

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of Expressionism in insisting on the collective experience of both creating and appreciating art. The group’s emphasis on experiment related to their understanding of creativity as something that develops consciously in a social context – in other words, intersubjectively. The transmitting of thought or emotion could come from one creator or multiple, as in the case of collective artistic production or the anonymous collective expression of Medieval and folk art that the Cobra artists celebrated. Cobra’s material investigations of intersubjectivity – the social emergence of subjectivity – can be seen in their reliance on common symbols open to dialogic interpretation as well as their collective art works such as artist’s books. It can be further understood through the descriptions of intersubjectivity by philosophers Maurice Merleau Ponty and JeanLuc Nancy. While the Cobra manifesto put theory second to the idea of “working together” in a material artistic investigation, the Cobra artists produced a profound body of theoretical writing on aesthetics and politics that in some ways echoes the ideas described by Merleau-Ponty around the same time and Nancy more recently. Dotremont described the Cobra “word-paintings” and collaborative artist’s books as the most typical products of Cobra, praising their “collectivization of personal spontaneities, the collectivization of poetry and of painting from the moment of creation, in the immediate reality of their specifc resources.”54 The many interdisciplinary artist’s books produced by the artists in the Cobra years and later rely on both visual and poetic images to connect with audiences. In the collaborative artist’s book made by Constant and the poet Gerrit Kouwenaar, Good Morning Rooster, Constant draws a rooster with a “wound” running like a scar down its body next to a tall shape suggesting a radio tower or construction scaffold (Plate 20).55 As always, the artists’ deliberately unskilled and childlike methods, such as the rough abstraction of Constant’s images, present symbols in process rather than fully resolved. The rooster is a common image, meaning both ordinary and linked to a particular community, often a rural agricultural one. Constant’s drawing makes it a prominent icon of sustenance in an era marked by material deprivation. The rooster is also a traditional symbol of Gallic France, which Constant depicts symbolically torn apart (as it was by the war) and sewn back together again. The prominent scar on the rooster’s cheek suggests its zombie-like survival beyond death, implying, perhaps, the morbidity of modern (French) culture at the moment when its offcial art institutions were attempting to revive it. Yet at the same time, its contours seem to generate other images – a songbird, a gesturing arm, and a pig or rock on which it seems to stand. Rather than express an emotion or idea defned by the artist, the actively transforming images invite observers to interpret and redefne them in an open-ended process. In the Cobra artists’ books, intersubjective dialogue was an inherent part of the creative process. Written by Gerrit Kouwenaar and drawn by Constant, Good Morning Rooster was published by the Dutch Experimental Group in 1949. Constant describes its genesis as spontaneous and fully collaborative: “The text in Gerrit Kouwenaar’s handwriting is in part derived directly from my drawings and at the same time becomes itself a part of them.”56 The rooster calls the reader to “pay attention/wake up!” The rooster is made to prophesy as the projected “speaker” of Kouwenaar’s text, which uses the imperative tense to situate the reader vividly in the performative present. The spontaneity of the book’s aesthetics – the fact that the text is scrawled messily, the images done quickly and hand-colored by Constant – makes palpable the intersubjective encounter of the two friends as a momentary event, and makes readers more aware of the act of reading as an event. Constant presents the rooster in a scratchy but

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fuid abstraction indebted to Picasso and Miró, hand-colored with an oil crayon mimicking children’s drawing, to emphasize the action and the pleasure of mark-making. Images and text fow into and around each other playfully. The precarious tower, a sort of children’s toy-meets-post-apocalyptic space-frame architecture, anticipates the structures in Constant’s later “New Babylon” project (1957–1974), an attempt to envision a new urbanism for a postindustrial society based entirely on desire and play.57 It parodies another French symbol, the Eiffel tower, as signaled in Kouwenaar’s text: Good morning rooster! You have crowed thrice We heard you. You have crowed thrice loud and on high before the singing and clawing harpy-green-evil-now forced us to put up our honest bedstead. Leave the Eiffel tower aside, Steel skeleton-shadowbullet-forgotten—on the Scrapheap that’s how we hang, And that’s how we hang, hanging in the ears of the UPRISING. Our uprising shall be a testimonial.58 Both images and text emphasize qualities of material directness or rawness. Materiality develops here through the partial reduction of symbolic fgures into rhythms, marks, and gestures – the material of sound, the material of color, the material of meandering lines. Also suggested is the material bluntness of violent images such as the bullet, as well as the political materialism of a revolution. In the 1948 Refex manifesto, Constant writes that the group’s new “creative concept is not one of theories or forms, which could be described as solidifed matter, but arises from the confrontation between the human spirit and raw materials that suggest forms and ideas.”59 In other words, it is not so much the foregrounding of matter that makes Cobra works materialist, but rather their recognition that meaning emerges intersubjectively through physical encounters. Through these, the spectator becomes a participant in creating meaning. Constant writes: The creative act is more important than that which it creates, while the latter will gain in signifcance the more it reveals the work which brought it into being and

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Constant’s conceptual framework was based strongly in the tradition of Marxist historical materialism thanks to the extensive philosophical reading he did while working in relative isolation during the war.61 He insisted on the connection between art and social transformation, breaking with the perceived individualism of French Surrealism. Constant critiques the limitations of Surrealist “pure psychic automatism,” writing: We fnd the true source of art only in matter. We are painters, and materialism is frst of all, for us, sensation: sensation of the world and sensation of color. There is no other way to arrive at a common art, an art that responds to the transformation of society.62 The sensation of color and the physicality of the mark or the word, linked to the Marxist desire for social transformation, are evident in Good Morning Rooster. Constant’s statements on sensation also related to his dialogue with Jorn, Dotremont, Alechinsky, and the theories of Gaston Bachelard. The aesthetic of Good Morning Rooster is not about materialism per se as much as a process of materializing images. A “pure” materialism might look more like the total abstraction of Jean Dubuffet’s “Texturologies” where the composition appears to dissolve into a dirt ground.63 Cobra art focuses instead on materialization as a process of making ideas and images palpable. Constant and Kouwenaar’s materialist expression foregrounds a reanimation of historical motifs in order to produce a more egalitarian collective expression. Cobra did not believe in a “pure” material presence outside of the shifting social context of symbolic interpretation, just as it did not believe in an isolated subjectivity existing outside a particular community. The artistic transformation of material remakes marks and images into intersubjective utterances. Rather than suggest clearly defned meanings for a given image, Cobra artworks present the memory of their prior meanings embodied in transformation. Cobra explored the idea of imagination itself as an intersubjective and material process, and creativity as a dialogue among multiple subjects and materials. Cobra’s intersubjective art manifests what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls “being-singular-plural,” a post-structuralist approach to describing human subjectivity.64 Nancy’s terminology replaces the idea of the “individual” as something whole and indivisible (an idea closely associated with the Expressionists who wanted to externalize individual subjectivity) with the idea of the “singular voice.” This more momentary and provisional idea of subjectivity encompasses within its very defnition the listener who hears and in so doing helps defne the voice. The “singular voice” only appears in a collective, or plural, social context. It can only emerge by means of other voices, as they “co-appear” (from the French comparaît, meaning to appear in a court of law).65 This framework is crucial for understanding the particular combination of collectivism and subjective expression in Cobra, for it describes their mutual inseparability. In collaborations like Good Morning Rooster, the artist and the poet each propose an expressive and spontaneous communication that can only be received

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by us as we consider what the marks, sounds, and symbols mean both to the artists in their own time and to us in ours. Intersubjectivity is a slippery concept at best, but it helps to frame the art of Cobra as a set of material practices that do not so much form a cohesive theory as attempt to activate and engage diverse viewers. The concept relates directly to the collaborative practices at the heart of the movement, including Jorn and Dotremont’s “word-paintings” as well as the collective artist’s books and painting collaborations. While individual Cobra artworks dialogue with older traditions through their imagery, collective works are at the heart of the movement, because the artists considered both creation and reception to be social processes. The Cobra artists would repeatedly attempt to break down art’s traditional division of self and other in favor of a dialogic practice involving multiple perspectives working – that is, playing – momentarily together. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty helped defne the idea of intersubjectivity in the 1940s, and his theory of phenomenology was a major infuence on contemporary philosopher Nancy. Merleau-Ponty writes in The Phenomenology of Perception about recognizing the material, concrete situatedness of the other subject, without collapsing the distinction between self and other. He opens with the recognition that: In order for the word “other” not to be meaningless, my existence must never reduce itself to the consciousness that I have of existing; it must in fact encompass the consciousness that one might have of it, and so also encompass my embodiment in a nature and at least the possibility of an historical situation. The Cogito must fnd me in a situation, and it is on this condition alone that transcendental subjectivity will, as Husserl says, be an intersubjectivity.66 “Transcendental” in this case refers to ideas that are beyond the subject’s immediate experiences, because they preexist the subject’s own existence. “Transcendental subjectivity” for Merleau-Ponty means, then, that subjectivity is defned not only in relation to immanent phenomena with which the subject interacts, but also to transcendent phenomena that exist before or beyond it.67 He observes that “transcendental subjectivity is a revealed subjectivity, meaning that it is revealed to itself and to others, and as such transcendental subjectivity is an intersubjectivity.”68 Cobra art works suggest a parallel to this idea in the way they use traditional or preexisting imagery to connect different subjects and materials. At the same time, “transcendental” subjectivity implies something removed from everyday life. Cobra’s materialist approach proposes instead that experience always involves multiple perspectives developing in real time. Merleau-Ponty recognizes a deeper level of social-perceptual interchange that he calls “reversibility” in his later text The Visible and the Invisible. The condition of reversibility defnes the “fesh,” another new concept that describes the subject as both subjective and objective at once, in the form of a body. The subject is both seeing and also visible to others; it touches and thus also is touched, as in his key example of one hand touching the other.69 Reversibility describes the way everyday distinctions of self and other, internal and external, are inherently connected. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion, while too complex to be fully elaborated here, articulates certain fundamental elements that the Cobra approach to materialism explored in spontaneous art and poetry. Cobra shared Merleau-Ponty’s insights that material reality or “fesh” produces sense and can never be completely experienced through a single subjectivity; and that the

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sensory experience of the body is only fully available as experienced in the larger social world, in part through the perspectives of others. Self and other are permanently intertwined by their reversibility; in other words, by the recognition that one’s own perspective is only part of the picture, which means that no interpretation is fnal. Merleau-Ponty inspired Nancy’s theory in that he frst uses the term “compresence” to refer to both the subject’s unity with the body (the two hands that touch each other as a metaphor of coexistence), and the extension toward a unity with the other through the other’s body.70 The unity of “compresence” is never fully achieved, but always exists as a movement toward the other accompanied by an experience and consciousness of alterity that returns to the subject – a passing into the other and back, through vision, through language, and through touch. Merleau-Ponty describes “a refexivity of the touch, of sight, and of the touch-vision system, [and] a refexivity of the movements of phonation and of hearing”; the latter are ultimately linked to language and to thought, indicating that not only language but also thought itself are intersubjective phenomena.71 This intersubjectivity is both visible and tangible in the collaborative works of Cobra. Its interdisciplinary expressions demonstrate the interactions of language, image, and visual mark, all of which are given meaning by us. Reframing Cobra expression in relation to intersubjectivity raises the question of how the artists’ work connects to the idea of the social other discussed by MerleauPonty. While his philosophy refers to the “other” in a general sense, Cobra’s neoMarxist politics calls for a discussion of specifc social others, people overlooked by the traditional histories of art. Those included not only the anonymous Medieval and folk artists discussed in the Cobra journal – rarely given a voice of their own – but also the women and black artists in the movement itself, whose voices and art works were present, but heard and seen less than those of the male northern European artists. Their perspectives are important to reclaim, as a way to push the egalitarian implications of Cobra’s intersubjective approach even further than the artists were able to go. This work is crucial to establishing Cobra’s continuing relevance today.

Else Alfelt: Gender, Affect, and Expression On Asger Jorn’s initiative, the Danish Høst artists Else Alfelt, Ejler Bille, Egill Jacobsen, Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Agnete Therkildsen, and Erik Thommesen created wall decorations in the Hjortøgade Kindergarten in Copenhagen in 1944. Jorn’s son Klaus, aged three, was enrolled in the school at the time.72 Jorn’s room is the largest, featuring a frieze of scenes from folk stories and children’s tales in vivid colors and abstract forms. Pedersen’s frieze of fantastic fgures and Viking ships welcomes visitors into the entrance hall. His pastel-and-earth-toned horses, riders, fshes, ships, and birds recall the pagan “chalk paintings” (kalkmalerier) in the Danish churches that Pedersen praised the same year in Helhesten, as well as Expressionist paintings by Marc Chagall, a major infuence on Pedersen. Two tall pink waves with black outlines are strongly reminiscent of the lyrical paintings of mountain landscapes by Pedersen’s wife Alfelt, whose own frieze appears in the smaller “pillow room” (a room used for naps and time-outs) not far away (Figure 4.1). The art of Cobra is usually defned by the aggressive and extroverted use of color, texture, and above all, gesture in expressive transformations of imagery, as seen in the painting of Jorn, Appel, and Pedersen. Alfelt’s painting, by contrast, is emotionally reticent. From a feminist viewpoint, her work appears as an artistic response to the way the male Cobra artists proclaimed

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Figure 4.1 Else Alfelt, detail of wall mural, 1944, Pudserum (Pillow Room), Hjortøgade Kindergarden, Copenhagen. Photograph by the author. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

their own innovation by appropriating the feminine discourses of affect, intuition, and kitsch in the tradition of modern Expressionism. Alfelt’s otherworldly mural encircles the pillow room’s four walls with an abstract mountain landscape in pale colors, punctuated by multiple suns. Her painting displays the values of abstraction characteristic of the Høst group: the spontaneous development of colors and simple forms in rhythmic compositions to suggest the fundamental commonality of aesthetic experience. It immerses us in a foating, dreamlike space, far from human civilization, painted lightly and quickly like a memory. Alfelt’s painting anticipated her travels in northern Scandinavia and southern Europe after the war, when she won several travel awards to study in person the mountain landscapes so different from the fat rolling hills of her native Denmark. Rather than a naturalistic depiction of landscape, however, the mural suggests a rhythmic unfolding of color, line, and shape through patterned brushwork. Alfelt once stated: “I am tired of people reacting to my pictures with: look at the sunset over the mountain tops – the glaciers […]! Color and rhythm are what I paint.”73 Alfelt described mountains as a “border between real and unreal, where heaven and earth meet.”74 She claimed that her paintings create in viewers their own experience of the mountains, their own encounter with space.75 She describes her aims as: “A nearness – a deep emotional connection with – other peoples – a connectedness

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with humanity subject to the laws of the universe (wherever it is found on the planet) subject to the same law – live – die.”76 Such idealized views of art as expressing a deepseated human connection, beneath and beyond individual experiences, were shared by the other Høst artists (male and female) in the 1940s. In contrast to the betterunderstood work of the “men artists,” however, Alfelt’s attempts to develop an art open to diverse and multifaceted readings beyond personal experience or identity were hindered by the gendered attitudes toward painterly expression that would defne her work in limited ways for decades to come. Alfelt makes clear in numerous interviews that she saw herself as an Expressionist artist. She states that while the world wants to call the Høst artists abstract, she and Pedersen are closer to Expressionism: “Yes, you take your feelings with you, the senses, in contrast to the fgurative art that wants to shut feelings out, building the picture up in a mathematical way.”77 Pedersen praised Alfelt’s work throughout his life, during which he became a much more well-known artist. He consistently describes her not only as an artistic partner, but the one who inspired him to start painting in the 1930s. In an interview after her early death (of a stroke in 1974), he states that “girls can be fully as good as men, and in reality they paint better, because they are far more sensitive than men and far more stringent in their criteria for existence.”78 Attempting to overturn the stereotypes that usually sideline women artists for their emotionalism, Pedersen ended up reinscribing them. Such deep-seated attitudes from both supporters and detractors repeatedly position her work, like that of other women artists, in relation to her feminine persona. The identity of women artists was often reduced in modernist art criticism to specious ideas of a preexisting female bodily existence, but femininity is in fact socially constructed through education and experience. For a personal expression to become meaningful for audiences beyond the artist herself, the woman artist must demonstrate enough traditionally masculine qualities – such as aggression, power, strength, fortitude, and resilience – to be seen as transcending her own femininity enough to achieve the possibility of universality. When observers recognize the role of their own expectations about femininity and affect in relation to judgments about her painting, their understanding of it inevitably changes. The men artists and writers of Cobra, with the notable exception of Édouard Jaguer, expressed conficted attitudes toward her work. They did not acknowledge the artistic strategies she used to broaden its impact beyond the almost inevitable dismissal of it as secondary work by a woman artist – a dismissal predetermined by the gendered assumptions of Expressionism. We can only understand the complexity of her artistic choices by reading through the limited way her work has been discussed. When Belgian poet Christian Dotremont and the Dutch artists Karel Appel, Constant, and Corneille frst visited Copenhagen for the international exhibition with the Høst artists, including Alfelt, Pedersen, and Jorn, in 1948, they were galvanized by the vividness of Danish artistic developments. Corneille writes in the frst issue of Cobra, “we return to the Netherlands […] with a sense of strength.”79 While they spoke highly of the male Danish artists, however, they ignored Alfelt’s work. Corneille’s “Høst Report” is telling in its description of the impact of the art of his male comrades – and the hospitality of Alfelt: The shocks were innumerable. Should we talk about Elsa Alfelt’s moving welcome, the discovery of paintings by our Danish comrades [camarades danois, masc.], the interviews, the sales, the dinners, the speeches, the parties, the discussions, the

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smørrebrød, the Danish women, the neon lights […]? But I risk forgetting the most important: the Høst exhibition society, this manifestation of a free, happy, active life. I had never seen anything like it in other countries. The Danish comrades have shown us […] what remains to be done by all who regard art as a weapon of the spirit, as a tool for the construction, the transformation of the world.80 Corneille’s words about Alfelt expressed gratitude for a warm welcome; she, in turn, must have known well how to play her feminine role. His gendered impressions were typical of his generation, but they prevent us from seeing her, too, as a comrade. The failure of both prominent Cobra artists and later historians to recognize the gender bias of their conception of personal expression was typical of the 1950s avantgarde internationally and has limited our understanding of the movement. Why, for example, did the “men artists” dominate the wall and ceiling murals at the two-week Cobra Congress at Bregnerød in 1949, one of the defning events of the movement, after both Alfelt and Agnete Therkildsen painted walls at the Kindergarten in 1944?81 Pedersen, Jorn, and British artist Stephen Gilbert painted large murals on the 3 largest walls of the Bregnerød cottage, while Vibeke Alfelt, Alfelt and Pedersen’s daughter, painted a single ceiling panel among the 17 painted by the male Cobra artists. Alfelt may have chosen to step back, or work on her own paintings, or clear the dinner tables (as Jorn was famous for cooking at such events and leaving a large mess behind); it’s not clear what sort of choice she was offered.82 It is striking that Danish art critics at the time treated Alfelt as an artistic equal to her male colleagues, and regularly praised her work in gender-neutral terms. An unsigned 1947 review in the communist newspaper Land og Folk reads: Behind her newer work must lie a confrontation with a more magnifcent nature than the one that the predominantly idyllic Danish landscape can offer. It is the experience of the monumental, of mountains, garden and sky, which lies behind these watercolors […]. In both watercolor and oil crayon, both cold and hot meet, the powerful and dramatic hang side by side with the more gentle and receding, soon the images are built up of sensitive, small facets, soon by copious, more thorough strokes, but expressions of shifting, common human (almen menneskelige) states of mind.83 The recognition that Alfelt’s works were able to convey diverse attitudes and ultimately achieve “common human” meanings, in ways comparable to descriptions of Pedersen and the other Høst artists at the time, exemplifes the unusually egalitarian reception of the work of women artists in Denmark – even if Pedersen would admit that as a male artist he was unfairly given more attention later on.84 Alfelt produces spontaneous and expressive painting as a form of symbolic abstraction, just like the “men artists” of Høst, but certain aspects of her painting challenge the brutality and aggression that characterize the work of Jorn, Constant, and Appel. NonDanish observers found her work aesthetically restrained. French critic Claude Serbanne singles her work out in his letters to Jorn from 1946. He compares her work to the French Symbolist poet Mallarmé, in terms that read both as praise and as the worst sort of masculine condemnation of a woman: the accusation of frigidity. He writes: Her works have a striking character. Whenever I see one, I think of Mallarmé, of this excessive creative and physical impotence he has, like in his fragment of

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The unfinching sexism of Serbanne’s observations suggests a visceral reaction toward someone whose work surprises him, so he seeks an explanation in her personality, which also does not conform to his expectations. The fact that he reads her as cold, even “cruel,” is signifcant: it suggests that Alfelt kept personal imagery out of her work deliberately, replacing the anticipated warmth of feminine emotional expression with the cool colors of dark violet, blue, and green, the sharp icicle-like forms and the impersonal spaces that characterize her work. Her own statements convey an attempt to distance herself from the perception of direct emotional expression, for example in Helhesten where she writes, “The colors are tools, they feel me, I follow them.”86 To say the colors “feel her” rather than the other way around is a classic description of artistic inspiration, but it also makes her statement less personal, more about a dialogue she has with her materials and the natural world than her own intentions. Alfelt’s resistance to personal imagery and her manipulation of landscape forms toward open-ended symbolism literally allowed her the space she needed to develop her own form of expression beyond a gendered identity. She says in a 1955 interview that “The moon, the sun, the mountains and space are concepts of eternity for me.”87 A few years later, she clarifes: “I try to hold onto the eternal, and at the same time I do not want to bring my person into it.”88 Like other mid-century artists, she became interested in East Asian art and culture in the 1950s as a means of transcending the self. Many painters, including Cobra artists Dotremont and Alechinsky, were more inspired by calligraphy, the epitome of gestural expression in the 1950s so often taken to new heights of masculine aggression in that era. Alfelt was interested instead in the Chinese tradition of landscape painting, a more subtle form involving subjective expression that was simultaneously an escape from the personal.89 Alfelt developed her own expressive abstraction through landscape imagery and cool tones – even if she proclaimed that “there is nothing as warm as an ultramarine blue.”90 Ultramarine blue has a particularly intense physiological impact on the observer. Despite her claims for its warmth, it suggests water or sky rather than a living body, a feeling of outdoor space rather than an interior, emotional world. The complexities of Alfelt’s compositional choices were valued highly by her Høst colleague Egill Jacobsen and by French Cobra critic Édouard Jaguer. Jacobsen praises Alfelt’s “sensitive and extremely subtle world of color.”91 He writes that her paintings contain both calm and disturbing elements: “Light gray, heavy gray, soft as fog and hard as stone, city life universally perceived. Lines sling themselves nerve-wrackingly back and across, and can take the form of something ghostly.”92 Such dynamic descriptions, which aptly describe paintings like the 1948 Blue Mountain World (Plate 21), drop out of the discussion when it comes to her later, more meditative work. The compositional energy and dynamic use of color link Alfelt’s earlier work in particular to Cobra. Jacobsen closes with a line that unfortunately tempers his praise of her art: “In her imagination she expresses herself without chains, freely, lightly, and with femininity.”93 The fnal word, kvindeligt, as with Corneille’s comments in Cobra, was likely intended as a kind of praise for Alfelt as a person, but artistically positions her

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work as secondary to the expression of male artists like her husband, who were considered pioneering experimental artists when they painted with childlike methods or fantasy subjects. It is notable that neither Alfelt nor Ferlov Mancoba produced childlike or fantastic imagery, perhaps because as women artists they knew they would risk being dismissed as childish and naïve by observers. In fact, this is exactly what happened to Dutch artist Lotti van der Gaag (Figure 4.2), whose drawing and sculpture approaches that of Appel in its spontaneity and playfulness.94 Although van der Gaag lived at the same studio as Appel and Corneille in Paris in 1950 and her work was in artistic dialogue with theirs, Constant and Corneille objected publicly to her inclusion as a Cobra artist in exhibitions at the Cobra Museum for Moderne Kunst in Amstelveen (which does exhibit her work today). They wrote an open letter proclaiming that van der Gaag’s inclusion was a “serious historical misrepresentation,” and made clear that, “we do not wish to see the pioneering strength of Cobra diluted, and defnitely not its historical signifcance distorted.”95 Like judgments of “quality” by more conservative critics, the idea of “strength” is a typical avant-garde response that tends to be applied as a pre-judgment toward women artists’ work; the truth of the judgment cannot be assessed without frst addressing its relationship to the larger assumptions about gender within the discourse of modern art criticism. The fact that Jaguer in fact took those assumptions into account in his text on Alfelt is remarkable. Jaguer wrote the volume on Alfelt for the Cobra “Free Artists” (Artistes Libres) book series, likely after frst seeing her work at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris in 1950. Jaguer’s text does not discuss any contemplative or harmonious

Figure 4.2 Lotti van der Gaag, Untitled, 1952. Charcoal on paper, 23 × 37 cm. Ambassade Hotel Collection, Amsterdam.

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experience of landscape. Instead, it deploys a high-keyed military rhetoric typical of Cobra polemics, describing Alfelt as “committing herself to a high wire act of experimental plasticity.” The Danish avant-garde, he writes, is in battle against a “multiheaded monster” ready to “devour” every painter’s achievement: To avoid every attack from this ‘picturesque’ multiform always ready to assimilate with a growing bulimia every conquest of the painter, […] the instigators of the Danish avant-garde refuse to accept any formulas, actively defying all of them, and mount an all-round attack, adopting a concerted and varied strategy aimed at all fronts.96 Jaguer then consciously pries Alfelt away from the critical platitudes about women artists. He writes: Even though her work at frst glance presents a less turbulent façade than that of Bille or Jorn we should not presume that the artist has surrendered to her natural femininity, content to regard her art as a kind of superior vision of embroidery – that she, in fact, has chosen to play Penelope at her easel while her husband Henning Pedersen spends his entire life risking his all, hunting the vampires of the Zealand forests and the sirens on the shores of Elsinore. She is no gentle lamb in the cave of the werewolf.97 While the comparably bland painting of French painter Jean Bazaine, Jaguer continues, “comments pleasantly on reality,” Alfelt “loves taking risks.” He compares her forms to “open scissors and raised arms.” Where lyric-abstract artist Alfred Manessier “always ends up in the marvellous and religious universe of the ‘crumbling cathedrals,’” Alfelt dreams of “exploring the vast natural spaces and unlimited landscapes that she has discovered for herself.” The trope of explorer conquering the unknown wilderness, it bears pointing out, is another paradigmatically masculine (as well as colonialist) one not commonly applied to women artists. Jaguer compares Alfelt’s forms to nautical and natural shapes as well as a metronome, pendulum, or gyroscope, all images that capture its intense visual rhythms. His text captures the way abstract art is able to liberate us from the rigid categories of identity and seem to connect us to something larger. He praises in her works the “level of pulsating life which only André Masson has achieved in certain of his recent works.”98 Jaguer’s favorable comparison of Alfelt to Masson is signifcant since he was one of the most aggressive Surrealist artists, a traumatized war veteran known for his violent and hypersexualized visions of female bodies. Jaguer pointedly uses Masson’s reputation to shift our understanding of Alfelt. He closes the essay with the words, “who could argue that the brightness of the fre diminishes its power to destroy?”99 Instead of the life-giving woman artist – which is exactly the way Dotremont describes Ferlov Mancoba in his Cobra book on Ferlov’s work, highlighting her identity as a mother – we are left by Jaguer with an image of fery destruction.100 An exaggeration, yes, but clearly a deliberate one to accede her the respect he seems to know she would normally not be granted as a woman artist. There is some evidence that the Dutch Cobra painters and Dotremont, on the other hand, were skeptical of Alfelt’s work. While Dotremont praised her ability to paint “what she has dreamed” in his account of the Bregnerød Congress, he privately

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expressed reservations about Alfelt’s painting. He writes to Jorn that he cannot exhibit Alfelt in the Brussels exhibition “The End and the Means” because it is a “question of taste and quality.”102 This unusual recourse to the conservative language of taste stands out as reactionary for an artist known for his colorful attacks on the artistic establishment. He seems to fall back on an outmoded aesthetic discourse in order to insult her work without concrete justifcation. Claims for personal taste and artistic quality are the marks of social privilege, what Pierre Bourdieu describes as “distinction,” terms that make it diffcult to identify specifc social discrimination while implicitly endorsing it.103 Later Cobra scholars like Jean-Clarence Lambert also tend to side with the Cobra painters who discounted her work. Lambert describes Pedersen’s life in detail, writing that “his own story had […] something of the legend about it,” but he mentions Alfelt only in passing.104 He compares her work to that of Svavar Guðnason, the Icelandic Cobra artist whose painting also evokes musical abstract rhythms and abstract Nordic landscapes (Figure 4.3). Yet, while he dismisses Alfelt in a brief discussion of her as an “abstract landscape painter,” he calls Guðnason “one of the masters of Abstract Expressionism.”105 During the planning of the Stedelijk exhibition in 1949, Jorn suggested to Dutch curator Willem Sandberg that he contact Guðnason in Iceland for inclusion in the show (he was not in the end included). In the same letter, Jorn writes 101

Figure 4.3 Svavar Guðnason, Sankt Hans drøm (Midsummer Night’s Dream), 1945. Oil on canvas, 97.6 × 130.1 cm. Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Photo: Niels Fabaek.

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that Sandberg should have been “more selective” on his list of Danish artists, a list that features Alfelt’s name mysteriously crossed out among the other male artists’ names in the copy of Sandberg’s typed invitation letter in the Stedelijk archive.106 This mark added after he drafted the letter suggests that Sandberg may have been reconsidering Alfelt’s work, perhaps after some conversation with the Dutch Cobra artists in Amsterdam. Three of her works were included in the end, despite Dotremont’s reservations and, it appears, Sandberg’s and Jorn’s – likely due to the insistence of Pedersen, who traveled to Amsterdam with Alfelt to attend the opening. Alfelt’s often subtle and understated works are easy to overlook next to the more strident, in many cases more aggressive, art of Jacobsen, Jorn, and even Pedersen. Pedersen notes that her work had very different concerns from the rest of the Cobra artists, in what he describes as a “poetic vision caught in the atmosphere of mountains and sky.”107 Yet as Per Hovdenakk observes, she frst made reference to “Mountains” in her picture titles in 1943, after working with her characteristic shard-like forms for several years.108 In the 1940s, her work often uses color to mitigate the drama of the intersecting compositional lines. In the 1943 Composition, Mountain Peaks (Figure 4.4), a limited spectrum of mauve and blue tones lends a paradoxically cool appearance to the otherwise vividly animated shards pointing across the canvas in all directions, set against a contrasting gold background in a jagged and dynamic composition.

Figure 4.4 Else Alfelt, Komposition, bjergtinder (Composition, Mountain Peaks), 1943. Oil on canvas, 60 × 74.5 cm. Vejle Kunstmuseum, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

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Alfelt’s mountain imagery functioned as symbolic abstraction in the same way masks did for Egill Jacobsen and monsters did for Jorn. As described in Chapter 1, Egill Jacobsen created the geometric or dancing “mask” forms that would become his own artistic contribution and inspire many of the other Høst artists, including Jorn, in the early 1940s (See Figure 1.3).109 He states that he developed his mask forms to “express inner and outer experiences, and to free these experiences and pass them on.”110 The mask exemplifed what artist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen called “symbolic abstraction” in the 1930s, a way of producing an abstract art with a social content that invites wide-ranging interpretation.111 The symbolic form inspires a certain recognition in the observer that remains suspended in the vividness and singular presence of the materials. A similar alternation between material interactions of composition and symbolic readings of forms appears in the poetic landscapes of both Alfelt and Guðnason. Guðnason and Alfelt’s landscapes suggest both real experiences of Nordic nature and mountain fantasies familiar from childhood stories and literature, even as their forms remain emphatically abstract. As in the mask paintings of Jacobsen and Jorn, the forms suggest emotional landscapes rather than real ones. Although Alfelt is known for her quiet and meditative imagery, her paintings made during the occupation present compositions of clashing forms and colors (Figure 4.4). Around 1943, she places a new emphasis on the antagonistic dimension of the jagged, crossed shapes. The abstract imagery creates different associations. On the one hand, the compositions evoke nautical imagery, as Jaguer observes. They could suggest sailboats passing each other on a windy day, two sets of sails crossing in opposite directions. On the other hand, they also suggest scenes of confict. 1943 was a particularly intense year for the fghting in Europe, the year of the horrifc winter-long Battle of Stalingrad that turned the tide of the war; it was the year the German government cracked down on the Danish resistance and declared Denmark “enemy territory” for the frst time.112 In this light, the “X”-forms also recall the structures used for draping barbed wire on the front lines, armatures of wood or metal called “Frisian horses” that were a highly visible intervention in the occupied city of Copenhagen (Figure 4.5). The “X” also recalls the metal antitank installations placed along beaches and front lines throughout the country. Their presence marring the landscape of Jutland would have certainly troubled Alfelt, given that natural scenery was her primary place of refuge and contemplation.113 These must have been painful reminders that the “space” she sought throughout her life was violently hemmed in during the war. Alfelt’s compositions do not literally transcribe these things, but they do present abstract imagery of opposition and struggle, suggesting a world out of balance. They make clear why Jaguer describes her imagery as aggressive and violent. She occasionally responded directly to the imagery of war, as in the 1946 painting Exploded Bridge.114 While the painting was part of a series inspired by the sight of rainbows over the mountains in the Swedish Lapland, some of them titled “broken rainbows” in other paintings, the title Exploded Bridge seems much more specifc. It recalls the many bridges bombed throughout Europe, including in Copenhagen and German cities like Cologne, during the Liberation fghting the previous year. Such references have been completely ignored in the scholarship on the artist. Recognizing the traces of violent confict in her work pries Alfelt’s work loose from the associations of gentle mountains and moonlit skies inspired by her later paintings. A particular combination of aggressiveness and meditativeness defnes the work she made during the war and the lead-up to Cobra. The violence of her work has been

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Figure 4.5 Freedom fghter behind a barricade at Holmens Bro, Copenhagen, May 4, 1945. 5 Aar: Besættelsen i billeder, ed. Ernst Mentze (Copenhagen: Berlingske Forlag, 1945), fgure 410.

overlooked in part because of the way she herself framed it. Alfelt had vivid early memories of reading and walking in the moonlit landscape, often quoted in writing about her work, but the paintings’ abstract forms also suggest other readings. Equally important, to imagine these painterly shapes as abstract weapons goes against the grain of the way women artists’ works are normally read. It is not enough to point out, as Per Hovdenakk does, that the mountain is a masculine force representing power, and the moon a feminine archetype, so the artist harmonizes both by including these images together.115 Nor do Alfelt’s childhood memories of the moon necessarily have anything to do with feminine bodily cycles, but Hovdenakk’s description also links it directly to those. Even if Alfelt herself spoke rhapsodically about the moon, the tropes of gender and landscape can become traps for women artists. They prevent us from seeing the way Alfelt’s abstraction works more dialogically. Her paintings liberate forms from their referents in the world in order to recode them. The gender associations of mountains and moons are not negated, but pushed toward more multifaceted readings. Feminist aesthetic theory focuses on ideas of affnity that counteract the overemphasis in avant-garde discussions on masculine provocation and aggression. Recent feminist accounts of Alfelt’s painting have emphasized her interest in harmony, or what Eva Pohl calls her “radiant, pictorial connectedness.”116 Pohl draws on Alfelt’s own statement that “we conquer nothing – we ourselves are a part – in a space of planets, suns and moons.”117 Such readings are important for situating Alfelt in a

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lineage of women artists and feminist aesthetics. At the same time, however, ideas of harmony, community, balance, and connection were also important for the male Høst artists, part of their unique Danish contribution to modern art. Egill Jacobsen writes in Helhesten, for example, that, “creative abstract painting is […] a bridge over prejudice and anxiety, stupidity and dark forces.”118 The idealistic searching for connection to a lost or threatened community was a key theme in abstract art internationally: American abstract artist Barnett Newman famously stated that, “if my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism.”119 These are feminist ideals inasmuch as they express a minoritarian humanist perspective, and they are often shared by male avant-garde artists. Alfelt’s paintings do not simply replace modern alienation with harmony and connection. Rather, they suggest the very diffculty of striving to reach a lost community or revisit a childhood fantasy. Alfelt’s work is more like that of her male Cobra colleagues than has been recognized, sharing the Høst group’s interest in a symbolic abstraction that reaches out toward a new and more open conception of community. Its jagged and extroverted forms embody a process, a struggle to emerge out of adversity and into an experience of harmony or balance. While certainly idealistic, Alfelt’s work developed alongside that of her male colleagues who also tried to reach beyond the limitations of personal or national identity, toward more fundamental and creative connections with different types of viewers. To fully comprehend the attitudes that framed both Alfelt in Denmark and the Mancobas in Paris as social others within Cobra’s redefnition of expression involves a necessary detour through Amsterdam. Dutch Cobra painters Theo Wolvecamp and Anton Rooskens took an active interest in historical Expressionism, reinterpreting it as spontaneous and mostly abstract expression. Rooskens and Corneille both moved from abstract expression to semi-fgurative work that engaged African subjects based on their extensive travels to the continent. Yet as these two male European artists’ work makes clear, the colonial attitudes inherited from the history of modernist primitivism allowed them the privilege of basing their own personal expressions on the image of the sexual and racial other, mostly in ways that perpetuate the silencing of the depicted subject’s singular voice. The limitations of their attempt to produce a universal expression may not have been clear to the artists in their day, but are more evident in ours, when the voices of the women and people of color symbolized in their Cobra paintings must come back to haunt them.

Wolvecamp, Rooskens, and Corneille: Expression and Primitivism The self-taught Dutch painters Appel, Corneille, Rooskens, and Wolvecamp responded to the broad history of modern painting from Van Gogh and the Amsterdam Impressionists to the Dutch and German Expressionists as well as Picasso, whose work produced a major impact in the “Picasso and Matisse” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 1946. Brands, Rooskens, and Wolvecamp were older than Appel, Constant, and Corneille, and were initially more prominent painters. While Brands took direct inspiration from Surrealism, Wolvecamp and Rooskens showed a strong interest in Expressionism. Wolvecamp’s 1948 painting Explosion (Figure 4.6) relates to the early “Improvisations” of Kandinsky and Dutch Expressionists like Jacoba van Heemskerck in addition to the Surrealist abstraction of Miró. Explosion features an allover composition marked by the artist’s characteristic use of black to anchor the

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Figure 4.6 Theo Wolvecamp, Explosie (Explosion), 1948. Oil on canvas, 70 × 80 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

composition and carry out its energetic drama. The title makes reference to the war and the Bomb in a manner typical of the time, but given the allover nature of the composition it also refers to a more generalized material interaction. Given Wolvecamp’s avowed interest in spontaneous expression, it was not necessarily a reference to the war. He states in a 1955 interview, Departing from the material I try to arrive at an expression of life in the shape of a painting, which is not only a construction of color and lines, but where a spontaneous human sentiment is a victory over matter and any aesthetic concept.120 A combination of drawn and painted forms foat amidst the blue, gold, white, and red background colors to animate the composition. Wolvecamp’s Cobra-period works set red, yellow, and blue marks in dialogue with black splotches and stains, as if liberating the primary colors from the geometric order imposed on them by Mondrian. Small curlicues and even faces and bodies seem to emerge from the fracas, giving the image a childlike simplicity that moves it beyond Miró’s sexualized forms and into Cobra.

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Rooskens was a self-taught artist and the oldest member of the Dutch Experimental Group, 14 years older than Constant. His early paintings were inspired directly by the painterly expressionism of Van Gogh and Flemish modernist Constant Permeke. After fve years of isolation during the war, he met Appel, Corneille, and Brands at the “Young Painters” exhibition in 1946. The following year, he frst visited Paris with Brands and other painters from the Dutch exhibition society “Free Imaging” (Vrij Beelden). Dubuffet’s paintings and the Foyer de l’Art Brut at Galerie Drouin made strong impressions on him. Also striking were the Surrealist wall paintings at the St. Anne psychiatric hospital and the children’s drawings on the walls he observed in Rue de la Santé at the time.121 These infuences dovetailed with the profound impact of the art of New Guinea at the “Art in Freedom” (Kunst in Vrijheid) exhibition of world art at the Stedelijk Museum in September 1945, and subsequently the traditional African and pre-Columbian sculpture he saw at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1947. The encounter with non-Western, children’s, and outsider art, he says, was the beginning of the Cobra story as well as his own “jungle adventure.”122 Rooskens writes, “We were aware that we had cut ourselves off from the past and enjoyed an unfettered freedom. Only primitive people, children, and psychopaths could reckon on our sympathy.”123 He embraced classic primitivism in his breakthrough painting The People of the Sun (1945), depicting two large black Cubist-style male and female nudes in a colorful abstract setting.124 The title problematically implies that the particular qualities of simplicity and naturalness he valued were somehow inherent to the black people he depicts. The schematic and sexualized nude couple in People of the Sun reinforces the colonialist views of the black body that characterize Cubist primitivism. The painting confates black people with the forms of traditional West African sculpture in a simplistic reduction. More effective are Rooskens’s later works that utilize decorative patterns and colors inspired by non-Western art but do not characterize people of color one way or another. Rooskens gained a better understanding of African art when he traveled to the Congo in 1954, but the trip led to his disillusionment and recognition that his primitivist assumptions did not correspond to African realities. Rooskens laments after this voyage, “I had hoped to fnd sorcerers, but it was no more! I set down Africa’s color, the colors of the Congo and the earth colored red by the sun onto canvas.”125 Around 1947, Rooskens made use of Surrealist techniques to produce monstrous fgures more open-ended in their symbolic associations, in some of his most experimental and spontaneous works. He studied the works of Ernst, Magritte, and Dalí in German catalogs available in Amsterdam, and avidly read the works of the poet Lautréamont, a favorite of the Surrealists. His drawing Homage to Lautréamont (Figure 4.7) captures the tone of mystery and evil in Lautréamont’s “Songs of Maldoror,” depicting a spontaneous amorphous fgure reminiscent of an ink blot overlaid with a white skeleton at once eerie and playful. The fgure features breasts (which could also be eyes), ribs, and feminine sexual openings reminiscent of Miró, but morphs from human to animal. Its fshlike limbs and head are replaced by multiple dissolving and intersecting forms dotted with white in a way that suggests a constellation. The strong energy of its composition, surging up diagonally from the bottom of the page like a black fame, epitomizes the work of the Dutch Cobra artists at the time, replacing Surrealism with Cobra’s more materially intense transformation of animalistic imagery. Rooskens’s painting Danse Macabre features similarly dynamic and grotesque undersea imagery indebted to Lautréamont, and was appropriately displayed next to the foor of the

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Figure 4.7 Anton Rooskens, Hommage à Lautréamont (Homage to Lautréamont), 1947, Ink on paper, 53.5 × 40.5 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam.

Stedelijk Museum by Aldo Van Eyck in the 1949 Cobra exhibition (see Figure 0.6). Ed Wingen compares its foating monsters to Lautréamont’s description of “two muscular thighs pressed tightly against the slimy skin of the monster like two bloodsuckers and arms and fns entwined about the beloved creature […] soon nothing more than a sea green mass, smelling of seaweed.”126 Figures begin to dissolve into open-ended expressive marks, pointing toward the abstract compositions for which Rooskens became known, in dialogue with Corneille. Corneille, born in Liège, Belgium, to Dutch parents, later moved to Amsterdam. He taught himself to paint while studying drawing and printmaking with his new friend Karel Appel at the Royal Academy from 1943 to 1945. During the “hunger winter” of 1944 to 1945, he produced a series of gray paintings of prisons, people being shot, and other wartime horrors, but he later destroyed them. After the war, he and Appel

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discovered the work of the “Young French Painting” artists Maurice Estève, Léon Gischia, and Édouard Pignon in a 1943 publication called Five Painters of Today.127 The book inspired them to visit Pignon in Paris in late 1947. Corneille later said that their art was revelatory because nothing so uplifting could possibly be done in the Netherlands during the war.128 Corneille more than any other Cobra artist is associated with themes of the childlike, the joyous, and even the hedonistic. Like Eugène Brands, known for more abstract and spiritually motivated paintings, Corneille made a deliberate choice to shape his art as a radical counterpoint to the violence, injustice, and inhumanity of Western society. As a young artist in Cobra, his art began to evolve toward the fgurative paintings that established his later popularity, but the primitivism of those works was for a time tempered with an experimental spirit of open-ended investigation. Corneille’s painting The Joyous Rhythms of the City from 1949 (Figure 4.8) depicts an exuberant scene that nevertheless conveys dark intimations of the traumatic experience of the war. Next to this painting in Cobra 4, Corneille reproduced children’s drawings from the exhibition of children’s art curated by Willem Sandberg at the Stedelijk Museum in 1948. As Jonathan Fineberg observes, the children’s drawing of a fgure whose torso transforms into a large face is echoed in the large central fgure in Corneille’s painting.129 The child’s use of rhythmic hatched lines to delineate teeth on the fgure’s large smile is echoed as well in the ladderlike forms in Corneille’s composition, also part of his artistic dialogue with Miró and Constant at the time. The painting’s color, composition, and use of line all recall Pignon’s work during the war. But where Pignon depicts hearty fgures and interior scenes related to the Cubist portraits of Picasso, Corneille simplifes the fgures into round faces and stick torsos inspired by children’s art and Klee’s use of the grid as an armature for childlike fgures. Corneille’s 1949 paintings show a strong debt to Klee. The German Expressionist’s work was celebrated in a major exhibition organized by Sandberg at the Stedelijk Museum in 1948. Corneille had traveled to Tunisia early that same year in the footsteps of Klee, who famously painted there in 1914. (Corneille arrived in Spring, 1948, just after Asger Jorn left the Tunisian island of Djerba.) One such painting, featuring fat shapes of people, animals, and balls reminiscent of Miró, is called In the Heart of the Desert, There Is Still Room to Play.130 Corneille’s paintings push Surrealist techniques of abstraction, often developed through networks of automatic drawing, away from unconscious themes and sexuality, toward conscious references to celebration and play, popular culture, and everyday life. Corneille’s return to Paris signifed in Joyous Rhythms of the City transports Klee’s poetic scenes of North African architecture to a metropolitan context. The suns and domed towers of Klee’s Tunisia become black and white half-moon forms that evoke both lightness and darkness or trauma. Corneille frst encountered Surrealist art and literature during a four-month residency in Budapest in 1947–1948, when he became close friends with the French artist Jacques Doucet and read Surrealist writings in a local bookshop owned by avant-garde writer Imre Pan. Corneille’s impressions of the gardens and ruins he encountered in Budapest inspired his lively compositions of people, animals, insects, and vegetation interacting together. Doucet introduced Corneille to Miró, Dubuffet, and Atlan, as well as the Revolutionary Surrealist group upon their return to Paris. Corneille’s painting recalls the cosmopolitan experiences he had with Doucet in both Budapest and Paris just after the war, when international travel became possible and lights could once again shine out through the city streets at night.

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Figure 4.8 Corneille, Les Rhythmes Joyeux de la Ville (The Joyous Rhythms of the City), 1949. Oil on canvas, 62.5 × 52.5 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

The childlike attitude of Cobra painting was a polemical challenge to the dominance of reason and practicality in adult life. It responded critically to the systematic brutality of the Fascist repression of modern art with its links to the childlike, the disruptive, the marginal, and the spontaneous. It also rejected the technocratic aspects of postwar society with its emphasis on rational reconstruction and economic expansion.

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Both Corneille and Constant would later highlight the importance of play for Cobra, related to the theories not only of renowned cultural historian Johan Huizinga, but also psychologist Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendyk and Henri Zondervan.131 Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens discussed the role of spontaneous play in the development of human culture, which the author felt was threatened by mechanistic and technocratic concerns during the rise of Fascism. Constant cited Huizinga’s theories in the 1960s while promoting his “New Babylon” project. Constant observes that while Huizinga describes play as limited to childhood and a way of practicing for adult social roles, his theory implies that “the liberation of man’s ludic potential is directly linked to his liberation as a social being.”132 In the spatial environments he envisioned for New Babylon, mobile structures and ambiances would be continually changed according to the needs and desires of each participant. The playful side of spontaneous creativity would take over. “Homo ludens dispenses with education,” Constant writes in his description of the project. “He learns by playing.”133 Constant envisioned New Babylon as the culmination of the collectivist and egalitarian ideals of Cobra, a movement that failed in his view because it relied on outmoded artistic methods.134 New Babylon would make the creative act into a direct intervention in the social world – or at least Constant believed for a time.135 His views in fact evolved directly out of the experiments of Cobra. Cobra’s emphasis on play in painting, poetry, and other media related directly to the artists’ interest in spontaneity as pioneered in Danish “spontaneous abstraction.” Spontaneous expression meant that the act of artistic creation would not be linked to the authentic communication of inner states but rather the unpredictability of living in the moment. While living was drastically reduced to daily survival during the war, the necessity of openness to changing conditions became a virtue after the liberation – an event linked to moments of renewed festivity and play throughout Europe. The childlike attitude related broadly to the desire for a fresh start. As Corneille recalls, the artists responded to the conditions of life under the occupation by creating the visual joy that was missing in their lives: The war did not inspire Karel Appel and me, at least not the violence and misery. Only with Constant do you get anything in return, dark, gloomy paintings. Karel and I were more happy, we painted birds and cats. We wanted to tackle life again. Where were the cats and the dogs in the war? They were all eaten, just like the birds. If you saw a dog walking in the street, you thought: a few pounds of meat on legs. That’s probably why we started painting those animals, because you no longer saw them on the street.136 In Joyous Rhythms of the City, a diminutive red form with three tiny legs suggests a dog on the city street at lower right, his roundness a visual rhyme for the large heads of the more human fgures. All appear to be wearing their joy like masks, and confronting us like strangers approaching a parade. The artist cannot seem to decide if we are welcome or not, insiders or outsiders to this party. The “joyous rhythms” of Corneille’s work, presented visually by means of repeated lines, colors, and forms in the painting, also suggest his appreciation for jazz music, another art form defned by its focus on spontaneity and a passion he shared with Doucet. Doucet’s work at the time (see Figure 2.2) set diminutive organiccubist shapes into playful scenarios related to children’s art or science fction, and

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often took inspiration from his friendships with jazz musicians. Doucet’s painting Homage to Armstrong celebrates the black American music of Louis Armstrong.137 The Cobra artists produced a pictorial equivalent to jazz music’s spontaneous riffs on preexisting popular melodies. Homage to Armstrong features a set of vibrant abstract forms in cheerful colors suggesting several musicians on a dark stage. Thin lines playfully delineate arms, instruments, and musical notes all at once, against a black background reminiscent of the “jazz caves” of Paris that the artists visited so often together. Corneille produced similar scenes at the time of playful shapes on a dark background, some of them inspired by his encounters with people of color in the night clubs. Not only did he appreciate jazz music as part of the vibrant international black culture he encountered in Paris, but his 1948 trip to Tunisia inaugurated a lifetime of global travels to the tropics, often resulting in his paintings of models of different races later in life. In the Cobra period, he produced an enigmatic painting of a black subject, simply titled Black Girl in Room (Plate 22). In a manner unusual for Corneille’s work, the painting radically questions what it means to be a cultural outsider. He painted it while himself an outsider in Paris, living next to Appel in a decrepit former tannery. If the painting represents a black female fgure, it does so abstractly. It translates this racially and sexually charged image – one so often depicted stereotypically and fetishistically in European painting, including Rooskens’s People of the Sun – into a large squarish form suggesting either a large face or the layout of an interior space. Smaller shapes seem to depict elements of furniture and stick-fgure human bodies, depending on how we read the painting. While the odd title Black Girl in Room suggests a domestic space, it’s more likely that the scene is a public jazz club. Doucet had connections to all the night clubs in the city. He took Corneille and Appel around to see many different performers. Appel recalls of that time, We spend the night at Claude Luter’s club, where we carry on like crazy; at around two a.m. a negress comes out on stage and everybody starts cheering, clapping, waving their arms and yelling.138 At the painting’s top left, two small black legs appear in an area of yellow suggesting a spotlit stage, outlined with a line scratched into the black paint. The legs may depict a singer wearing a yellow and black striped skirt, shown as if we are seated at her feet. The club may well be the Cobra favorite Le Vieux Colombier, famous for the American jazz of French clarinetist Claude Luter, a friend of Doucet’s, as well as saxophonist Sidney Bechet from New Orleans and the African-American singer Inez Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh, a jazz singer just coming into her own success at the time and about to open her own Parisian restaurant club, Chez Inez, frequently sang with Luter’s orchestra at Le Vieux Colombier.139 We are left, alas, to speculate on her identity since the painter has evidently forgotten her name. Other shapes in the room suggest tables, perhaps with colored lights and other black seated fgures. At the same time, small legs at the bottom center of the picture seem to transform the entire scene into the head of a black fgure. They produce a parallel representation, a double image-within-an-image of the black woman of the title. Does Corneille’s work make visible the “double consciousness” that black people experience in the famous description of W. E. B. Du Bois, referring to the situation of being continually defned by the

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dominant culture while experiencing their own radical difference from it? Corneille could not have experienced this situation himself, but he could have observed it as part of his appreciation for African-American jazz performers in Paris. Cobra’s proposal of intersubjective expression also means that a black viewer could interpret this work in different ways from a white spectator, for whom the scene is less personal. What is most striking about the painting is its refusal to represent the normally fetishized and hyper-sexualized body of a black female jazz singer. The use of intense black as the background color and the depiction of a fgure that we cannot fully read, hemmed in by pale layers of beige, not only evokes a nightclub space but also suggests the way white normative culture defnes black identity negatively. It tends to fetishize black identity as a stereotype, while failing to recognize black people as complex subjects. The painting’s foregrounding of abstract space instead of a coherent fgure underscores the lack of understanding among white audiences of the realities of black people’s experiences at the time. Corneille makes visible this absence or failure to comprehend black subjectivity in one of his profoundest artistic statements about contemporary life. The complexity of Black Girl in Room contrasts strongly with Corneille’s later, more stereotypical representations of black subjects. He would travel extensively around the world, often with his wife, photographer Henny Riemens, beginning in the Cobra period. Their trip to Tunisia in 1948 may have inspired the sandy colors of this painting. The couple then took a formative tour across the Algerian Hoggar mountains with Aldo van Eyck and his wife Hannie in 1952. Corneille would accumulate a large collection of African masks and sculptures from French dealers in Paris that he would appropriate in the stylized faces of some of the black female fgures that populate his tropical scenes of the 1970s and 1980s.141 These depictions of women unfortunately devolve into relatively shallow primitivist fantasies. Corneille spent time in North Africa, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and other places over several decades in search of subjects that embodied his deliberately optimistic vision of art’s ability to imagine a paradise on earth. Like Rooskens, Corneille espoused a fairly straightforward modernist primitivism, with its collapsing of various colonialist concepts of the childlike, the authentic, the non-Western, the non-rational, the sexual, and the spiritual into one synthetic idea projected onto people of color. He never admitted the way this ideology supported the continued subjugation of black people, even if artists expressed only admiration for their artistic traditions. Both Corneille and Rooskens, when they didn’t fnd the black paradise they sought, turned to the landscape itself, capturing the vivid sun and dry materiality of the desert in their paintings of the early to mid-1950s. As Graham Birtwistle observes, Corneille’s “geological” paintings and prints of circa 1955 to 1965 push the semiotic defnitions of natural versus cultural forms. These works explore complex analogies between people and architectural structures, communities and geological forms, vegetation and human or animal life. Corneille’s insights were in dialogue with those of Jorn, whose writings investigated theories about the relationship of symbol, signal, and sign, and considered all forms of imagery equally valid, from popular and non-Western art, to modern architecture to kitsch.142 Corneille had a wide-ranging appreciation of art from around the world. Like the Danish artists, he drew parallels among diverse forms that he encountered. For example, he noted that the suns, moons, wheels, and patterns he observed on the ancient tombs of Artussi warriors in Ethiopia on a 1956 trip across Africa “bear a kinship with the abstract art of the Scandinavian Bronze 140

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Age.” His 1950s paintings move from the childlike preoccupations of the Cobra period into explorations of the topographies he saw in Africa, in dialogue with the work of Dubuffet who also painted geological scenes in desert colors and textures after his own 1948 trip to Algeria. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, Corneille produced fgurative and fantastic paintings inspired by the vivid colors and patterns of the art and textile designs he encountered on his later travels through Mexico and South America. Corneille’s late work presents a colorful universe of women and animals delineated with a graphic fnish that pins the old primitivist attitudes in place just as they pin down the female body, most often shown nude and horizontal.144 It mattered little to Corneille that his preconceptions of people of color and the ways they lived in the world were shaped by colonial attitudes that denied the realities of black women’s experience. Corneille deliberately chose the optimistic attitude he shared with Appel and Brands rather than the critical provocations of Constant and Jorn. “I cannot use the misery that is around me,” he states. “As a human being, of course, I can experience it and that grieves me. But for my work I cannot use it at any price.”145 His incredible graphic inventiveness combined with his cosmopolitan embrace of world art allows his work to appeal to broad audiences, but his approach becomes problematic when his paintings of women represent them only as social others. He often depicts them with animal fgures in the absence of any men, in scenes constructed entirely for a masculine heterosexual gaze. Such images reinscribe racist stereotypes and do not allow the feminine subject any position other than the traditional ideas projected onto her: vapid beauty, naturalness, sexual hedonism. Like Gauguin, Corneille chose to deliberately paint the sensory paradise that he desired into being. Unlike Gauguin, however, he did not leave uncomfortable or odd juxtapositions in his late paintings to suggest an ambivalence toward primitivism as a European ideology.146 The sophisticated abstraction of Black Girl in Room cannot make up for the panoply of primitivist paintings that defne Corneille’s later career, but it captures the interests in childlike representation and spontaneity of Cobra expression at the time. Considered as a whole, Corneille’s work makes an important statement about the complexity of Cobra’s relationship to modernist primitivism. Cobra encompassed the full range of approaches from Cubist-inspired primitivism to the anti-colonial attitudes of the Danish Høst artists and the Surrealists. Corneille expressed his desire to “use […] everything that was pure and un-contaminated by culture,” citing a classic primitivist attitude that did not differentiate among children’s art, folklore, psychopathological drawings, and African masks.147 He drew on Jorn’s theories but did not address as the Danish artists did the social problem of racism in presentations of non-Western art – a critique also shaped in important ways by Ernest Mancoba, who explored traditional West African art from a black South African perspective. Still, Corneille’s Black Girl in Room, painted at the beginning of a decade that would see bitter wars of independence in Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, and other places in Africa as well as the development of black intellectual movements like Négritude and pan-Africanism, provides a glimpse of an unknown black female subject making her own way in the urban metropole. It presents an abstract vision of racial politics at the center of the European capital, told by means of a subtle use of color and composition. It breaks with the aggressive aesthetic of Expressionism in favor of a childlike vision appropriate to a modern European painting still just beginning to explore how to imagine an autonomous black or female subjectivity. 143

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Ernest and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Minoritarian Humanism Danish artist Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and black South African artist Ernest Mancoba attempted with a determined idealism to turn abstraction toward a new cosmopolitan expression of solidarity with marginalized peoples around the world, shaped by their own experience as an interracial couple on the margins of the Cobra movement and the art world in Paris. From the 1940s until their deaths (Ferlov in 1984 and Mancoba in 2002), Ferlov’s “Mask” sculptures and Mancoba’s paintings referencing African masks and what he called universal “Ancestors” attempted the paradoxical: a form of expression that was both minoritarian and universal, humanist in a global rather than merely European and therefore elitist sense. They based their approach like the other Cobra artists did, on a simple transformation of materials into symbolic forms. But instead of provocative or animalistic imagery, they created quieter forms that invite us to make our own connections with artistic properties of color, shape, and texture. Their experiences with social misunderstanding, racism, and political incarceration led them at frst to seek expressions of vulnerability and outrage, but ultimately to develop a more general expression of shared humanity. The Mancobas were both present in Cobra’s earliest international exhibition, the Høst exhibition in Copenhagen in 1948 (See Figure 0.3). After Mancoba’s fouryear internment in Paris during the war and the birth of their son Wonga after his release in 1946, the couple returned to Denmark in 1947 to live in the small village of Kattinge near Roskilde, an hour west of Copenhagen. They had high hopes of reconnecting with their old friends from Linien and building a new movement. Revisiting the aesthetic of Linien in the 1930s, the Mancobas developed in abstract sculpture and painting a form of humanism that claimed a common cause with post-colonial peoples fghting for their political independence from the colonial nations of Europe after the war. They attempted deliberately to develop a form of common human expression – Ferlov’s “expression for all” – even as they knew how precarious such an idea was. The Mancobas only related directly to the Cobra movement during their brief years with Høst in Denmark, although they remained friends with Asger Jorn afterward. Ferlov Mancoba states that Cobra “happened only because of Asger Jorn’s great energy and collegiality; apart from that I actually have nothing to do with it.”148 Their work has been marginalized in the history of Cobra until very recently, for complex reasons related to the tendency of European art history to overlook the work of women and black artists, the Mancobas’ own self-isolation once they returned to France, and the specifc perspectives proposed by their work, which do not ft the dominant perception of Cobra as a movement of brutal and childlike art.149 For a contemporary feminist and decolonizing investigation of what the Cobra movement stood for and what it means, however, Ferlov and Mancoba are essential parts of the story. To overlook their role in it would mean not only losing an important perspective on Cobra, but also a unique proposal about how art relates to the struggle for self-recognition among people marginalized due to their post-colonial status or social identity around the world. The Mancobas upheld an abstract, idealized concept of collective humanity in repeatedly quoting the Xhosa saying Umuntu ngu’ muntu nga ‘banye abantu, or “a person is a person through and because of other people.”150 Ferlov quotes the proverb as an epigram to her eulogy for Asger Jorn, a text she titles: “A Striving for Universal

218 Expression for All Wholeness.”151 While the Mancobas remained close to Jorn even after they returned to France, they did not stay in contact with the Belgian or Dutch Cobra artists. Their marginalization in the Cobra movement was overdetermined by the colonialist assumptions underlying modernist primitivism, which prevented many white Europeans from taking seriously a black artist’s contributions at the time. The Mancobas investigated European primitivism as an artistic method in their interest in pre-Columbian American and traditional West African sculptural forms, but their work ultimately exposes and pushes back against the opposition inscribed in Western culture between primitivism and humanism. These two terms, historically defned in opposition to each other, were in fact starting to break down as part of the larger global process of decolonization in the 1950s, leading to a greater recognition of the humanity of colonized peoples once dismissed as “primitive.”152 Cobra’s populism at times takes up an explicit critique of colonialism – for example, in Lucebert’s 1948 poem “Love Letter to Our Tortured Bride Indonesia” – but its responses to the racial politics of primitivism varied widely. Some artists like Corneille or Karel Appel felt free to appropriate forms of art they considered more “authentic,” in particular children’s and outsider art, and framed this appropriation in primitivist terms. The Danish Linien artists, however, critiqued primitivism already in the 1930s and rejected the racism of Fascist ideology. In the midst of the turmoil leading up to the war, they befriended Mancoba in Paris. Ernest Mancoba was born in South Africa just before the institutionalization of Apartheid. For a black, ethnically Fengu artist coming of age in 1920s South Africa, the only available path to studying art was at a segregated Anglican teacher’s college, where he learned wood carving. His renowned African Madonna from 1929 presents a postcolonial Christian icon: a fgure of the Virgin based on a black model and carved out of indigenous yellowwood.153 Mancoba would refuse an offcial offer of a position carving “native art” for tourists. He realized that his future was limited in his home country, where Apartheid would become law in 1948.154 Mancoba’s understanding of West African art and masks came just as it did for the other Cobra artists, through a European lens. Enthused by his reading of Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro’s book Primitive Negro Sculpture, he went to Europe.155 Mancoba was the frst black South African modern artist to move to Europe, arriving frst in London in 1938. After a formative visit to the British Museum to view African and Oceanic art, he left shortly thereafter for Paris, a city that seemed more open to black culture and experience at the time. Ferlov and Bille met Mancoba in 1938 through ceramist Christian Poulsen. Mancoba did not yet speak French, and soon became friends with the Danish artists who all spoke English. He regarded Bille as a “brother in spirit.”156 Mancoba later recalled the lack of understanding he encountered in Paris, even as the city fetishized blackness in the vogue for black music, dancing, and art: “Only a few were ready to draw the consequences of their admiration for African art, in the more general consideration of the one who made them: the African man.”157 Yet the Danish artists at least tried to listen. Perhaps it was Bille’s friendship with Mancoba that led Bille to critique British culture for its racism in Helhesten. He writes: The coolly closed Englishman, who has been raised by the English empire and colonization for a century, has developed the typical upper-class morality, which is also a master-race morality, where equality among people does not extend to the colored races.158

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In Paris, Mancoba studied nude drawing at the academy of La Grande Chaumière, but he soon broke with the fgure to develop a new approach to abstract sculpture that synthesized modernism and primitivism. The wood sculptures he carved in Paris fused the methods of Brancusi, Arp, and Giacometti with West African inspirations studied frsthand in the Musée de l’Homme. Mancoba’s early Composition of 1940 (Plate 23), painted in Paris soon after he met the Danish artists, recalls modern painting, Xhosa beadwork from South Africa, and traditional African art that he encountered in European collections, including Kuba masks from Congo and Kota reliquaries from Gabon.159 The aggressive colors and striking patterns of the painting are also indebted to the abstract painting of Ferlov and her Linien colleagues, which aspired more toward a revisionist humanism than primitivism, by means of spontaneous abstraction. Ferlov’s paintings and drawings from the 1930s depict abstract brush marks and symbolic shapes in vivid colors, in dialogue with Mancoba’s 1940 Composition, possibly his frst expressive oil painting. His Composition links modern and traditional, African and European signifers, as part of his own attempt to express transnational human connections. It explicitly rejects the representational Christian imagery and carving techniques for which Mancoba was successful in South Africa, in favor of painterly abstraction as a language both modern and universal – his very appropriation of the implicitly European language of modernism as a black artist makes a claim for its universality. Rasheed Araeen argues that the painting exemplifes the signifcant contribution of African modernism in pushing the global discourse of modernism in new directions.160 He observes in it the innovations of expressive brushwork combined with abstract references to geometric symmetries inspired by African traditions. He calls it an “allover” composition that collapses pictorial space into a synthetic, optical feld seven years before the breakthrough of Abstract Expressionism. Araeen deliberately attempts to frame the painting as ahead of the New York School in the grand narrative of modernism, but it doesn’t so much predate the American movement as parallel it with a different emphasis. Equally fascinating are the new and multiple lineages of modernism and contemporaneity that it opens up. It is comparable, for example, to Mark Rothko’s early work in his “mythmaking” phase, but without Rothko’s classical themes and restrained colors.161 Mancoba’s painting shares with Rothko a use of symmetry and patterning that recalls traditional modes of art-making, and an ambiguous content that actively questions mythic narratives. Each artist expresses his own kind of ambivalence toward a cultural heritage. Mancoba’s composition boldly responds to African art, prying open the social implications of traditional Congolese masks and Kota reliquaries as totems of collective identity. His aggressively fattened, vividly colored composition makes the mask into a subjective expression, questioning the very possibility of art’s symbolizing any kind of shared cultural identity. Instead, the identity it proposes is cosmopolitan and transnational, composed of a synthesis of diverse sources. Rather than a single collective identity, it presents real cultural unity as artifcial if not foreclosed, along the lines of Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of the “inoperative community.”162 The modern artist’s search for an idea of community made inaccessible by modern society and capitalism was especially politically charged for artists of color attempting to establish recognition for their own marginalized communities. In 1948, the Dutch Cobra artists could declare their solidarity with the communist desire to liberate people from the “slave society we live in,” in the same interview where Mancoba is forced to defend his work from the interviewer’s

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assumptions about the primitivism of all African culture. He describes becoming a black artist at a time when “every trace of the original African cultural foundation has disappeared.”163 Meeting the Høst and Cobra artists gave Mancoba the temporary hope that he would be able to “express the feelings and struggle of all races.”164 Yet in sympathy with the post-colonial developments he followed in the news over the decades, he never fully moved beyond the “sorrow of Africa” expressed in an interview from ten years earlier, just before he left South Africa. There, he says: Everything that I make is a striving towards an understanding of the past and a looking forward to the future. We are full of sorrow and disillusionment. We have the sense of having had everything taken. We are left with nothing except that which cannot be taken away. My people have […] learned the western way and the western thought. Now we have withdrawn within ourselves. My work shows our perplexity as we stand at the cross roads, wondering which road Africa will take.165 It is this sentiment of perplexity, of being caught between worlds, that his 1940 Composition conveys most effectively. As a form of minoritarian or “personable expression” Mancoba’s Composition foregrounds a spontaneous and vividly expressive interpretation of symbolic forms that openly questions the meaning of African art in the modern era. It uses symbols and methods once dismissed as “primitive,” but now reframed as basic human expressions; for example, the aggressiveness of the masklike face and the dramatic stripe patterns becomes a form of resistance to their appropriation or re-colonization by the European collectors and institutions of modern art. The art of Mancoba presents a new claim for expression made in solidarity with colonized peoples long denied access to Western notions of universal subjecthood. Both Mancobas’ search for a humanist abstraction at once timeless and post-colonial contradicted the anti-humanist emphasis on the savage and animal among Cobra artists like Appel, Constant, and Jorn, whose animal images instead attack colonialist notions of universal subjectivity embodied in purely abstract gestural painting. Yet both strategies replace the colonialist framework of humanism with a counter-discourse: a brutal counter-humanism in Appel, Constant, and Jorn, and a minoritarian cosmopolitanism in the Mancobas. Because the Cobra artists held divergent perspectives toward the antagonistic ideologies of primitivism and humanism, Cobra is a key movement in registering their breakdown in the period of decolonization after the Second World War. Non-Western art was increasingly collected and studied in the 1950s, and the idea of primitivism began to fade in favor of a greater recognition of the diversity of African and other non-Western cultural production.166 Europeans also began to recognize Western humanism as a colonialist idea. As French philosopher René Girard writes in 1957, “Our old humanism believed that its values were universal. But this does not distinguish it from other cultural myths.”167 The independence movements in Africa and Southeast Asia combined with primitivism’s attack on Western hegemony led to a greater recognition of non-Western cultural production on its own terms in the 1950s. The Mancobas supported the work of other African intellectuals of the pan-African movement in Paris, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. These theorists of “Black consciousness” or Négritude argued for greater recognition and autonomy for black people, through increasingly visible global networks such as the journal

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Présence Africaine. Mancoba writes in a related journal in 1953: “The world has become more and more of a single entity, to such an extent that we have to reconsider all our views and opinions on racial distinctions because they have become obsolete and dangerous.”168 In the wake of the particularly violent Algerian war of independence from France (1954–1962), white philosophers like Paul Ricoeur fnally admitted the possibility “that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others.”169 The colonialist ideology of humanism, as an individualist discourse founded on the classical heritage and a false sense of universalism, was falling apart, and global modernism opened the way toward more complex, multicentric, minoritarian, and cosmopolitan artistic practices. Cosmopolitanism – the ancient Greek idea that people should be viewed outside of national or cultural divisions as “citizens of the world” (kosmopolitês) – has been associated with privileged European intellectuals since the age of Enlightenment.170 The idea raises thoughts of elite travel, on the one hand, and the experience of diasporic peoples such as Jewish intellectuals, on the other. It involves migration that may be either chosen or forced upon people. The Mancobas were more sympathetic with the latter. Their art work suggests not only a minoritarian humanism in its celebration of embattled identities and values, but a cosmopolitanism, in the way it transforms traditional motifs from world cultures to which the artists felt personally connected beyond their own national origins. The minoritarian cosmopolitanism of their art work foregrounds connections among various global cultures while recognizing the colonial histories of violence that cause the subjugation and migration of certain people.171 Mancoba had a vivid memory of his ancestors’ own history of exile, when the Fengu people were forced westward across what is now South Africa, out of Zulu territory into Xhosa land and eventually to Cape Town. In the early 1800s, the Zulu warriors under Shaka waged war against the Ndwandwe and other peoples. The Fengu (formerly called “Fingo”) refused to fght for the Zulu army and moved into Xhosa land. “The word ‘Fingo’ it means ‘wanderers,’ ‘seekers,’ ‘miserable beggars’ who don’t know what to be,” Mancoba recalls.172 Long before Apartheid began, Mancoba identifed as part of a minority people within a larger black majority subjected to the white colonial state of British South Africa. His experiences in Europe made even more stark the status of black Africans in the colonial world. Ferlov shared his outrage at the injustices toward colonized people after the Second World War, when the Mancobas felt betrayed by the continuing colonial violence. As Wonga recalls: Mother felt, something is wrong in this liberation […] The historical occasion that this liberation could have been was not used to face the truth. […] A couple of months after France was liberated, France was sending troops to Indochina to reconquer the colonies, to reassert its colonial power over the Indochina people, starting this Indochina war which ended with the Americans, […] the fall of Saigon, 1975. One can say almost that from 1945 to 1975, for thirty years this war didn’t stop. […] It was necessary to have a new attitude toward the colonial people […] if France wanted to […] stand up to its values.173 France’s continuing colonial violence in Asia and apparent disregard for the humanity – and the political sovereignty – of the black African soldiers that helped it win the war were the political realities to which the Mancobas’ art responded.

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Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s perceptions of social inhumanity were shaped by her own experiences, as a Danish artist of the progressive Linien group and a woman artist married to a black South African artist in a time when it still had to be argued that she, too, was an artist and he, too, was a man. Her enigmatic abstract sculpture conveys “expression for all” by means of organic abstract forms spontaneously developed but referencing their cosmopolitan inspirations. The threatening aspects of her early sculptures have been overlooked by observers, just as with Else Alfelt’s painting.174 Yet like Alfelt, Ferlov developed a mature abstract art based on calm restraint. Her later sculpture is characterized by smooth surfaces and forms that often encircle themselves, giving the work an appearance of quiet composure and presence that resists the aggressively masculine expression of the more well-known Cobra artists. The frst issue of the Cobra journal in 1949, edited by Jorn, reproduced Ferlov’s early sculpture Owl from 1936, across from a much larger animalistic image by Pedersen (Figure 4.9). At the time Jorn, who likely chose the images, considered Pedersen the one “who has gone the furthest toward a universal language, simple and direct.”175 Still, the aggressiveness of his childlike face strikingly mirrors the creaturely abstraction of Ferlov’s Owl, which was the only work reproduced in two separate issues of the journal.176 Ferlov began her Owl in a spontaneous transformation of material into image. She started with an abstract “bottle” shape, and, as she recalls, “then I made this sharp wing jutting out, it was so wonderfully aggressive.”177 The

Figure 4.9 Cobra 1 (1949), 20–1. Carl-Henning Pedersen, untitled color lithograph, at left, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Owl, 1938, plaster (now destroyed), at lower right. CarlHenning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

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formal aggression was a breakthrough, I would argue, because it cuts through any potential associations with feminine beauty in the “bottle” form. Only by appropriating the masculine language of avant-garde aggression could Ferlov push her work toward a more universal abstract humanism. The male Cobra artists, in the tradition of Expressionism, incorporated feminine affect and intuition in order to develop spontaneous and brutal expressions that critique the masculine norms of instrumental reason. Ferlov’s work suggests that, for a female sculptor to be taken seriously, it was necessary to do the opposite: to modulate the expressive organic aesthetic with elements of clarity, strength, and perseverance. As the war shut down artistic experimentation across Europe, Ferlov would move away from the aggression of her 1930s work toward something more monumental and timeless (Figure 4.10). Her solid sculptures and masks produced upon her initial

Figure 4.10 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Maske: Krigens udbrud (Mask: Outbreak of War), 1939. Plaster, 36.5 × 28.5 × 13.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

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return to Denmark in 1939, such as Mask (Outbreak of War), seem both calm and imposing. They were made during a period of isolation, during a brief stay at home before Ferlov decided to return to Paris to marry Mancoba while he was interned. She represents the human through gender-neutral forms, using rectilinear contours that recall African carved headrests as well as Mexican stone sculptures.178 Troels Andersen identifes the aesthetic qualities of “resistance and life’s will” in her sculptures.179 Balanced between the geometric and the biomorphic, they seem to call to us from ages past, so that we might remember parts of ourselves we may have forgotten. “The artist interprets the eternal reality of human nature,” Ferlov writes, “which once sang but no longer expresses the voice of the whole people, reduced to silence by our individualistic and materialistic society.”180 Her work is primitivist in its quest for authentic expression through cultural forms that persist over the centuries, but minoritarian and cosmopolitan in its rejection of the racist characterization of colonized people. Dotremont aptly describes the “powerful, dramatic forces […] at work underneath the smooth, precise, and perfect surfaces” of Ferlov’s sculpture.181 He captures an internal contradiction that is crucial in understanding her work. Her sculpture combines disparate shapes inspired by natural processes and modernist, West African, or pre-Columbian art. As Alfelt does in painting, Ferlov fuses her sculptural forms into a subtly expressive synthesis, rather than blasting them apart in a burst of Expressionist energy like Jorn and Appel. In its contradictory evocation of strength and intimacy, her sculpture suggests a distinctly gendered response to the masculinist aggression of modernist primitivism and Expressionism. While the Mancobas exhibited with Høst after the war, they never found their place socially or artistically in postwar Denmark. By all accounts they isolated themselves, partly in response to the isolation they experienced as an interracial couple. Mancoba recalls a “silent opposition” to his presence in Høst and his relationship to Ferlov, and a feeling that he was “in their eye, some sort of ‘invisible man’ or merely the consort of a European woman artist.”182 Mancoba felt at the time that the European artists did not take him seriously because they did not know what to make of a subject considered secondary in his own country. As Chika Okeke observes, “modern artistic subjectivity is linked to political independence.”183 No political state existed at that time, however, that would regard the two artists as equals, the way they saw themselves. The Høst group split up in 1949 over arguments among representational and abstract artists.184 Wonga Mancoba (1946–2015), who also became an artist, says years later in a discussion with his father that, on the one hand, “there was no hope for us that Cobra could go further, and in a more universal way.”185 On the other, he admires (perhaps even more than his parents) Jorn’s idea of Cobra as a rejection of the rigid polemics about style that led to the breakup of Høst: “Cobra does not exclude. That is part of its philosophy.”186 The artists attempted to join the geometric abstract group Linien II with Richard Mortensen and others, but they found that group’s approach equally limited. “Cobra included in its defnition the material and the spiritual together, but the others refused,” Ernest Mancoba recalls of Linien II.187 While not excluded from either Linien II or Cobra, the Mancobas did not relate to the movements’ combative aesthetic politics. The Mancobas returned permanently to France in 1952, living in a small secluded town for nine years. The intimacy of the family seems to have become for them a microcosm of the human connection they sought to express in their art. Mancoba emphasizes that it was his and Ferlov’s “very

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conception of mankind and of art that not only contributed to our isolation from some in the group, but that invalidated us in the appreciation of the offcial art world.”188 Not until curator Troels Andersen approached Ferlov in the early 1960s did they start to exhibit their work again.189 In Denmark, Ferlov was described as a key player in the Danish avant-garde by fellow artists as well as male critics, in striking contrast to the minimal reception abroad that likely resulted from gendered assumptions about her work.190 Danish critics praise her work’s “strength,” “vitality,” and “clarity.”191 Yet in international histories of Cobra, her work is discussed in passing if at all.192 Jean-Clarence Lambert refers to her dismissively as a “Danish sculptress who lived in Paris with Giacometti.”193 It seems that the impact of gender for Ferlov was as decisive as the politics of race for Mancoba in keeping the two artists on the margins. Ferlov’s sculpture combines expression with restraint in what could be termed a feminist humanism. Only such an oxymoron – a critical revision of humanism as a discourse, a parallel idea to “minoritarian humanism” – captures the tensions inherent within it, tensions that only become apparent upon consideration not only of the sculptures’ fnal form but also the artist’s experiences and the critical discourse surrounding both. The plaster and later bronze sculpture The Little Careful One (Den Lille Nænsomme) from 1951 (Figure 4.11) presents an abstract head tucked slightly

Figure 4.11 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Den lille nænsomme (The Little Careful One), 1951. Plaster, 32 × 26.5 × 25.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA.

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toward one shoulder, with a textured surface and a compact solidity. Small bits of clay cover the surface like “scales” in a rhythmic pattern. These traces of Ferlov’s presence appear restrained, recalling the aged stone surfaces and indented eyes of the Aztec sculptures she admired at the Musée de l’Homme.194 The sculpture’s solidity and diminutive monumentality suggest an ancient and mysterious presence as much as a contingent subjectivity, a person tucking their cheek toward one shoulder. The work’s Danish title Den Lille Nænsomme was mistranslated as “Sweet Little Girl” in the 2008 Cobra exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, imposing a gendered reading on the work that is not inherent to either its form or its original gender-neutral title. The mistranslation is typical of the way women artists are often described. Modern criticism tends to frame their explorations of the childlike and the spontaneous as manifesting qualities of the childish and the inexperienced, qualities that become implicitly attached to the artist. The gender-neutral title in Danish is no more suggestive of femininity in particular than Jorn’s 1957 painting Le Timide Orgueilleux, or Timid Proud One, a painting that may also depict a little girl, but which Guy Atkins describes as a “monolithic, arrogant, Mussolini-like face [with] a startling simplicity and monumentality.”195 Such recognition of the substance and individuality of the depicted fgure was not accorded to Ferlov’s work in Brussels. Instead of the gentleness of conventional femininity, she actually proposes something more radical: gentleness or carefulness as a common human value, one implicitly threatened by contemporary social conditions. The intimacy and mute solemnity of her sculpture combined with Ferlov’s personal reticence and reluctance to exhibit, compounded by a notable gender bias in her international reception, has all contributed to her lack of reputation outside of Denmark today. Ferlov proposes an intimate sympathy with human complexity and frailty in the face of the political aggressions of war and colonialism. This aesthetics of resistance, restraint, and solidarity with minority cultures was actually a profound feminist statement in the 1950s, one equivalent to that made by other women artists internationally. American Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner’s work, too, was not only insistently compared to her husband Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, but also dismissed by critics for its “stress on discretion and restraint, quietude and harmony.”196 These qualities were deliberately emphasized by Krasner in order to avoid aesthetic competition with her husband at the time. That was the supportive role she consciously took on for herself until his death, when she was fnally able to push her art to its full expressive fruition in monumental scale. Yet the criteria used to dismiss her work in the 1950s are alternative values that reject the culturally masculine values of power and aggression. Their oppositional perspectives make the art works in question feminist regardless of the artist’s personal identifcations. In contrast to the contentious energy commonly associated with Cobra, Ferlov’s work could be described as “slow sculpture.” The very impersonal aspects that made the work more “universally” expressive to Ferlov and Mancoba made it appear a less spectacular political outcry against the inhumanity of the war and its aftermath to others. It is in part because the more aggressive and outspoken artists defned the movement that Ferlov and Mancoba have been marginalized in discussions of Cobra.197 Mancoba’s work has recently sparked global interest amid fervent efforts to decolonize art history as a discipline.198 Ferlov has been recognized in Danish art history but remains almost completely unknown abroad.199 The recent interest in Mancoba demonstrates that brilliant outsiders are still understood to be characteristically male.

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Critics and curators tend to focus on the movement’s stars, as Ferlov predicted, even though even the artists themselves were explicitly against such an approach. Yet to dismiss the role of Ferlov would not only limit our understanding of Cobra, but also adhere to a larger pattern of marginalization of women artists in the mid-century period, when the revival of expressive abstraction in both Europe and the U.S. was so frequently described in terms of masculine aggression. Ferlov and Mancoba explored the possibilities of symbolic abstraction to convey a broad, humane expression beyond the artist’s own gender, race, and cultural identity, culminating in their work of the 1960s and later. Mancoba shifted over the course of the 1950s toward a series of abstract images of “Ancestors” which he produced from the late 1950s until the 1980s (Plate 24). Mancoba developed the “Ancestor” fgures by frst laying down the loose, abstract structure of the central forms, which could be read as human faces or bodies, or abstract sculptural fgures. He then added successive colored brush marks to enliven the images. “They are drawing and they are color at the same time,” as Wonga Mancoba later observes.200 The central fgures relate to West African Kota reliquary fgures and prehistoric rock paintings from South Africa, while the use of colors on a white background recall Mancoba’s appreciation for the “chalk paintings” (kalkmalerier) in Danish churches, among other artistic infuences. In the 1960s, the fgures became more open and transparent. The fgure or face in these works appears to foat lightly, almost ghost-like, in a lively expressive space. Mancoba scholar Elza Miles suggests that the “Ancestor” series was a tribute to Mancoba’s own family: he frequently told the story told to him by his mother of a great-grandmother in his family, who while feeing the Zulu army with her people could not keep up, and thus stopped in order to allow her Fengu relatives to escape. They waved as they left, but never saw the woman again.201 But that is only part of the story the art works represent. While most of the paintings are untitled, Mancoba gave one from 1968 the title “The Ancestor” (L’Ancêtre) in French. The European title speaks in a general tone as Winnie Sze notes, indicating that the painting is not just a tribute to his own ancestors but “ancestors generally, and thus the painting, whilst personal, is also universal.”202 The paintings manifest visually Mancoba’s claim that “my people are the people of the whole world.”203 There is scientifc evidence for his claim: in the words of National Geographic, “Our species is an African one: Africa is where we frst evolved, and where we have spent the majority of our time on Earth.”204 Mancoba’s “Ancestors” parallel the attempts by African intellectuals he knew at the time, such as Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, to establish a shared heritage among African peoples and portray Africa as a cradle of human civilization.205 Yet Mancoba’s work was less polemically Afro-centric than Diop’s and more minoritarian humanist. His paintings depict playful and provisional signs of a generic human presence. They make a subjective, post-colonial claim to envision an African symbol of common human origins. In a 1994 interview, Mancoba refers to the ancestor as a “totem,” meaning “the concretization of our origins, our ancestor which represents our humanity.”206 He asserts, “We must always be conscious of this image.” It is an image of death in a world that pushes it aside, death as “a sign of a heritage […] which we’ve forgotten.” Even in a world where “we wait and we look and there’s been no solution,” art for Mancoba means the continuing presence of “hope and strength for our suffering.” Mancoba returns to Cobra’s foundation in spontaneous expression, stressing that art channels an “emotional experience instinctively expressed and not insisted upon.”

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This expression also fulflls an important human need for “exchange” and “dialogue.” It consists of “messages […] left for the coming generations to give them belief in their humanity and continuation of their human struggle and their human existence.” What the “Ancestors” express, therefore, is not a simple or naïve unity of all human experience, but rather the commonality of human struggles for recognition. Ferlov’s sculpture of the 1960s features forms recalling masks or interlocking fgures, with titles such as Quiet Growth, Courage of Life, Common Effort, and Accord.207 Such works accompany Mancoba’s “Ancestor” fgures in expressing the artists’ shared hopes for a spiritual expression of commonality among global peoples. Ferlov’s voice rings out in an undated statement signed by Ernest, Wonga, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba from the family archive: All authentic expression is, as it has always been, a refection of the face of man in his time, in his relation to others, in the face of his destiny in the universe; every authentic creation is the result of a need to breathe [and] to communicate, and to exchange in order to survive as a man.208 It is through the shared reality of spirit and matter, the Mancobas conclude, that this “profound reality can express itself.” Even though they were expressed in masculine terms, these views convey the Mancobas’ lifelong dedication to art as an expression of generosity and human interdependence.

Universality Through Struggle The Mancobas considered their expressions not personal but universal, building on the paradoxal ability of abstract art to generalize imagery by means of a particular material presence. Slavoj Žižek writes that the test of any great work of art is its ability to survive being torn out of its original context, entering thereby a generally perceived universality. “The authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough,” he writes, “occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes for itself, directly experienced as such (as universal).”209 Universality never exists in a vacuum, but always in tension with the particular historical context “inscribed into the very edifce” of a cultural expression. This also means that “every universality is haunted by a particular content that taints it; [and] every particular position is haunted by its implicit universality which undermines it.”210 Mancoba’s “Ancestors” appear to haunt the expressive canvas as the African fgures forgotten and marginalized by the European tradition of abstract painting that pretended it was the highest universal art worldwide. At the same time, Mancoba’s particular postcolonial humanist claims are haunted by his use of a medium defned as expressive in primarily European and masculine terms. What pushes the “Ancestors” toward greater universality is precisely the way these paintings maintain aspects of the particular and the universal in perpetual tension. Žižek reframes the understanding of universal humanity, away from a bland idea of shared human identity and toward a common experience of the very inadequacy of categories of identity. His defnition of the human condition leaves behind the “neutral frame which unites us all (in spite of our differences, we are basically all human […])” in order to recognize the “basic antagonism or antagonistic struggle in which we are both caught,” our precarious existence between the aspirational phantom of

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universality and the actual “experience of negativity, of the inadequacy-to-itself, of a particular identity.”211 Just as literary stories access deep human truths through fctional narratives, art accesses universal expression through the particular marks of its unique material presence, expressing a singular perspective that is inherently partial or marginal. While Jorn and Constant took up the perspective of the working-class subject and the art-world outsider, and Corneille the global tourist, Ferlov and Mancoba were pushed into a more overdetermined and, in the case of Mancoba’s wartime internment, violent outsider status. Yet all these artists attempted to achieve a universal connection by means of a partial and subjective expression, in complementary ways. For Žižek, the only actually existing universality today is global capitalism, which has succeeded in effacing all of its origins in European culture to extend its reach around the globe. Only a “universal emancipatory project” can resist it through the particular claims of linked subjectivities, united in their very diversity. Other prominent social theorists have expressed parallel ideas about seeking universality through, rather than despite, personal differences. Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues for a progressive “subaltern cosmopolitanism” that amplifes the voices of the dispossessed in the face of global disparities of wealth and power.212 For Susan Buck-Morss, the way the Haitian revolution shaped Hegel’s ideas about universal history, even though he never acknowledged its signifcance, demonstrates how universality emerges not through collective representations as Hegel believed, but rather through points of rupture that reveal their inadequacy. She writes: It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. […] Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. It is not through culture, but through the threat of culture’s betrayal that consciousness of common humanity comes to be.213 Universality does not appear through a shallow image of people’s underlying similarities. Rather, it is suggested through the stories of people’s struggles to overcome their differences and achieve recognition for their singular voices. One of Cobra’s primary contributions was the recognition that the art world, like any other social structure, reinforces hierarchies that allow certain individuals to shine over others. Stories that contest or complicate the standard narrative are suppressed unless we consciously revive them. The Mancobas’ work channels ideals of minoritarian and cosmopolitan humanism that are profoundly resonant today. Wonga Mancoba observes in an interview with his father: “You tried to make these young Europeans aware that humanity is not only the north, it is also the south.”214 Only a minoritarian viewpoint “from the South” could speak sympathetically for – or rather, with – the rest of humanity. Such a perspective could not be understood as universal at the time, but has become all the more important now. Today it seems harder than ever to believe in the possibility of universality at all, not only because the old Enlightenment claims to universality are now revealed to have been betrayed by the systems of colonialism, slavery, and class and gender inequality, but also because global capitalism has co-opted the very idea of universality. Under a global capitalist system where universality becomes homogeneous blandness, cultural expressions are repackaged, mass

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produced, and sold back to us, making the personal mark all the more meaningful as a singular protest. The artists of Cobra took alternative strategies in critiquing liberal humanism either through an aggressive creaturely approach or a more subtle, minoritarian expression. Along with the more well-known examples of animalistic Cobra art, Alfelt’s lyrical landscape forms, Mancoba’s “Ancestors” and Ferlov’s sculptural totems can speak to both popular and intellectual, Western and non-Western audiences, to children and to adults. Modern art becomes universal to the degree that it reaches a broad and diverse audience. The recognition of Alfelt and the Mancobas as an important part of Cobra’s artistic legacy alongside the work of Jorn, Constant, Corneille, Rooskens, Wolvecamp, and others broadens the movement’s audience and amplifes its signifcance. It is necessary to set their achievements in dialogue not only with each other, but also with the parallel currents of global modernism. The particularity of their experiences and the paradoxical expressions of identity and anonymity in their work add nuance and complexity to the movement. Cobra’s particular interpretation of artistic expression involves a spontaneous reworking of images and symbols by means of experimental and interdisciplinary practices rooted in artistic and political materialism. Its materialization of imaginative images makes our reception of the work equally spontaneous, characterized by a certain instability that enables our encounter with the work to inspire new ideas. Evaluation of the work becomes more subjective as its meanings open up to multivalent assessments, making the art work itself a commentary on how we ascribe value. The diversity and unpredictability of meaning in the art of Cobra counters the reductive homogeneity instilled by the global effects of capitalism, the mass media, and the uncritical celebration of technological progress. This art expresses in physical terms the momentary presence of a subjectivity that may be messy, emotional, or out of control. On a deeper level, the art of Cobra presents a personal connection with those left out of the prominent discourses not only of artistic expression, but of common humanity. Cobra proposes that art has an active function in society: to resist the limitations placed on expression by patriarchal, nationalist, and colonialist artistic institutions that professionalize art and in the process promote the voices of only certain types of people. Its interpersonal expression reworks historical and popular images without falling back on nationalism or identitarian principles. Instead, it invites dialogue across diverse identities and perspectives, a dialogue modeled in the often contentious history of the Cobra movement itself. Whether in the form of Jorn’s kitschy expressions, Ferlov Mancoba’s quiet sculptures, or Corneille’s childlike fgures, the art of Cobra expresses the marginal, the unpredictable, the forgotten, the seemingly useless, the playful, the emotional, and the oppressed. Cobra art works either cultivate our hostility or demand our sympathy with their brutal directness, humor, and vivid presence. They propose that the purpose of art, as Asger Jorn described in 1952, is no longer just to celebrate or commemorate, but also to move us.215

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Pablo Picasso, “Conversation,” 1935, quoted in Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, 270. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 18–19. Jorn, “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” 62. Ferlov Mancoba, Ingen skaber alene, 44. Vincent Van Gogh, letter to Theo Van Gogh, August, 1888, in Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, 34.

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6 See Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism. 7 Frankenstein, Karel Appel, 165. 8 Tolstoy, quoted in Read, The Meaning of Art, 218, passage underlined by Jorn in his personal copy, MJ. 9 Tolstoy, What is Art?, 50. 10 Read, The Meaning of Art, 38. Jorn was fascinated with theories of expression in aesthetics, and responded in his own writings from the Cobra period and later to texts by a wide range of writers and philosophers, including: Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, T. S. Eliot, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, John Hospers, Henri Focillon, Wassily Kandinsky, George Kubler, Julius Lange, Susanne Langer, Andre Malraux, Erwin Panofsky, Herbert Read, John Ruskin, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Wilhelm Worringer. See Graham Birtwistle, Living art; and Peter Shield, Comparative Vandalism. 11 Robert Vischer, Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Credner, 1873), 20, translated in Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” 139. 12 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 5. This phrase originated in the writing of psychologist Theodor Lipps, as described in Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” 146. 13 Asger Jorn later criticized Worringer’s theory for his refusal to break with classical art traditions based on naturalism. He believed Worringer’s theory presented a false development from abstraction to naturalism, situating empathy as merely a subjective interpretation of the classical aesthetics Jorn rejected. Asger Jorn, “Johannes Holbek,” 19; and Jorn, “Om billedkunst, mytologi og historieskrivning.” 14 Jorn, “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” 61–2. 15 See Hvidberg-Hansen and Oelsner, eds., The Spirit of Vitalism. 16 Ferlov, Ingen skaber alene, 7. 17 Bille, Picasso, Surrealismen, Abstrakt kunst, 111. 18 Ibid., 93. 19 Ibid., 96. 20 Jorn, “Ole Sarvig opruller et skævt billede,” 166–8. 21 Jorn, “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” 62. 22 Ibid., 66. 23 Ibid., 69. 24 Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts, 65. 25 For Atkins, “it is impossible to consider [the dark paintings of this period] outside the context of the personal crisis of which they are a direct expression.” Atkins and Andersen, Jorn in Scandinavia, 85. 26 See the iconographic identifcations in Andersen, Asger Jorn: En biograf, vol. 1, 226. 27 Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 54. Only in the 1960s would Jorn move away from Kandinsky’s theory, stating, “I don’t believe in the idea of inward necessity. When I hear of inward necessity I think of indigestion and circulation of the blood and that sort of thing.” English in original. Schade, Asger Jorn, 160. 28 These points are summarized in Wassily Kandinsky, “The Cologne Lecture,” in Harrison and Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–1990, 94–8. 29 Jorn, Held og hasard, trans. in Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, 355. 30 Alfelt et al., “Den Ny Realisme,” n.p. 31 See Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 31–4. 32 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xix and xxiv. 33 For a reading of Jorn’s painting through Derrida’s method of deconstruction, see Kurczynski, “Materialism and Intersubjectivity in Cobra,” 686–8. 34 Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle, 55. 35 Jorn, “Livet er en drøm,” 14. 36 Helle Brøns provides a fruitful reading of the gender politics at work in this image, suggesting a crisis in masculinity, in “Maskulin standhaftighed,” 106. 37 Bachelard, La Terre et les Rêveries du Repos, 1946, quoted in Jones, Gaston Bachelard, 11. 38 Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les Songes, 1943, 7, quoted in Jorn, Pour la forme, 62. 39 Dotremont, “Le grand rendez-vous naturel,” 5. 40 Asger Jorn, interviewed in Gelsted, “Atombomben.”

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41 Aramis, “Vi vil ikke skille skønhed og liv.” 42 See Karen Kurczynski, “Expressionism,” and “A Conficted Legacy: Asger Jorn and Expressionism,” in Friis Herbsleb and Kurczynski, Expo Jorn, 228–43 and 250–5. 43 Linda Nochlin explains the way the structure of artistic institutions functioned to exclude women artists in “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 44 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1. 45 Duncan, “Virility and Domination,” 292–313. Equally relevant is Alessandra Comini’s essay in the same volume, which argues that Expressionism has been framed in limited ways as an Oedipal “revolt of the sons against the fathers,” leading to the marginalization of the many women artists central to the movement. Comini, “Gender or Genius?,” 270–91. 46 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 4. 47 Ferlov Mancoba, Ingen skaber alene, 44. 48 Constant, “Manifesto.” 49 Breton, letter to Alechinsky, January 31, 1963, quoted in Putman, Alechinsky, n.p. 50 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 110. 51 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, 1970, translated on the Museum Jorn website, www.museumjorn. dk/da/sonja_ferlov_mancoba__100_aar.asp. 52 Korun, “Entretien avec Asger Jorn,” 46. 53 Jorn, “Déclaration du groupe expérimental danois,” 9. 54 Dotremont, J’écris, donc je crée, n.p. 55 The 16-page book was produced in a special edition of 30 with 12 hand-colored drawings. 56 Constant, from Het heilig vuur (television interview on TROS, 1976), quoted in Heil, Cobra International, 49. 57 See Stamps, ed. Constant: New Babylon. 58 Kouwenaar, “Goede Morgen Haan,” trans. in Vleeskens, No Holds Barred, n.p. 59 Constant, “Manifesto.” 60 Ibid. 61 Trudy van der Horst, “Biographie de Constant,” in Constant: Une rétrospective, 133. 62 Italics in original. “Comment ils s’encadrent,” 5. 63 See Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet. 64 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 65 See Nancy, Being Singular Plural. 66 Italics in original. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi. 67 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 381. 68 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 378. 69 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 147. See also Sanders, “Intersubjectivity and Alterity.” 70 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 168. 71 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 144. 72 The murals were fully restored in 2017, and include contributions from the three Cobra artists Appel, Constant, and Corneille. 73 Else Alfelt, quoted in Lundgren Nielsen, Else Alfelt: The Aesthetics of Emptiness, 26. 74 Alfelt, interview with Virtus Schade, “Den abstrakte maler søger følelser og stemninger,” Demokraten, Aarhus, December 7, 1955, translated in Pohl, “A Luminous Dream of Connectedness,” 38. 75 She hopes people who saw her mountain scenes “har oplevet rummet” (“experienced space”). Else Alfelt, “Det jeg maler,” catalog from the Students’ Association Jubilee Exhibition, 1964, reprinted in Else Alfelt, 22. 76 Ibid., 24. 77 Else Alfelt, “En Flaske og en Citron og det, man har i Sindet.” 78 Pedersen, “40 Lykkelige år med Månens malerinde,” 1. 79 Corneille, “Høstreport,” 4. 80 Ibid. 81 Unfortunately, Therkildsen’s paintings are no longer visible, even after the 2017 restoration. 82 See Dotremont, “Les rencontres de Bregnerød,” n.p.

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83 “To maleres Naturfølelse.” 84 Pedersen, “40 Lykkelige år med Månens malerinde.” 85 Claude Serbanne, letter to Asger Jorn, April 19, 1946, and a second undated letter from 1946, MJ. 86 Else Alfelt, untitled statement in Helhesten 2, no. 1 (1942), 15. 87 Else Alfelt, quoted in Virtus Schade, “Den abstrakte maler søger følelser og stemninger,” Demokraten, Aarhus, December 7, 1955, translated in Annette Stabell, “Dialogue with Nature,” Lundgren Nielsen, Else Alfelt: The Aesthetics of Emptiness, 78. 88 Alfelt, “Bjergernes malerinde stiger ikke bjergerne,” 13. 89 Anette Overgaard Nielsen, “The Art of Emptiness,” in Lundgren Nielsen, Else Alfelt: The Aesthetics of Emptiness, 64. 90 Alfelt, “Maanen min signatur.” 91 Jacobsen, “Else Alfelt,” 14. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Van der Gaag was reinserted into Cobra history by the art-historical intervention of Willemijn Stokvis. Stokvis writes that Lotti van der Gaag’s “own lack of confdence, the fragility of her sculptures and the egocentricity of the other artists were undoubtedly the reasons why her work did not end up in the Cobra exhibitions in 1951.” Stokvis, Cobra, 299, n. 248. 95 Constant and Corneille, 1998, quoted in Halem and Hummelink, Cobra: The Colour of Freedom, 18. 96 Italics in original. Jaguer, Else Alfelt, n.p. Alternate translation in Lundgren Nielsen, Else Alfelt: The Aesthetics of Emptiness, 17–20. 97 Jaguer, Else Alfelt, n.p. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Dotremont, Sonja Ferlov, n.p. 101 Dotremont, “Les rencontres de Bregnerød,” n.p. 102 Christian Dotremont, letter to Asger Jorn, March 4, 1949. Dotremont had also written to Jorn on October 21, 1948, that he and the Dutch artists considered the watercolors by Alfelt diffcult to show. Both letters MJ. 103 Bourdieu, Distinction. 104 Lambert, Cobra, 49. Lambert does not reproduce a single painting by Alfelt, but notes that the Dutch artists “found her too abstract” (64). 105 Lambert, Cobra, 64–5. 106 Willem Sandberg, typed letter to Asger Jorn, July 12, 1949. Sandberg invites the participation of Alfelt, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, Jorn, Ernest Mancoba, Pedersen, Erik Ortvad, and Erik Thommesen, but Alfelt’s name alone is crossed out in the same blue pen used to sign Sandberg’s initials. The undated response from Jorn states: “personellement j’aurait preferee une representation plus restreint des danois,” and proposes Sandberg contact Czech artist Ota Janecek, the editors of the Czech journal Blok, and Svavar Guðnason. The Høst group writes on July 21, 1949 to propose that Sandberg also include Ferlov and Tage Mellerup, but they along with Mancoba and Guðnason were not in the show in the end. SMA, dossier “3346 Tentoonstelling Experimentele Groep 1949.” 107 Pedersen, quoted in Anne Wolden-Ræthinge, Det står skrevet i stjernerne – Carl-Henning Pedersens liv (Copenhagen, 1989), 63, cited in Lundgren Nielsen, Else Alfelt: The Aesthetics of Emptiness, 30. 108 Per Hovdenakk, “Else Alfelt,” in Else Alfelt, 11. 109 See Mussari, “Farvens Sprog,” 489–99. 110 Jacobsen, 1979 letter, translated in Hovdenakk, ed., Egill Jacobsen, vol. 1, 64. 111 Bjerke Petersen, Symboler i abstrakt kunst. 112 Voorhis, “Germany and Denmark,” 179. 113 See the photograph of a German antitank installation in Jutland, c. 1943, in Mentze, ed., 5 Aar: Besættelsen i billeder, fgure 256. 114 Else Alfelt, Den sprængte bro, 1946, oil on canvas, Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum, Herning. 115 Hovdenakk, “Else Alfelt,” in Else Alfelt, 12.

234 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

145 146 147 148 149

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Expression for All Eva Pohl, “A Luminous Dream of Connectedness,” 39. Alfelt, Universets blomst, trans. in Pohl, “A Luminous Dream of Connectedness,” 39. Jacobsen, “Introduktion til Carl-Henning Pedersen’s Billeder,” 73–4. Newman, Barnett Newman, 95–6. Theo Wolvecamp, in Hengelosch Dagblad, 1955, cited in Wingen, Wolvecamp, 40–1. Translation modifed from the Dutch. Wingen, Rooskens, 28. Rooskens, cited in Wingen, Rooskens, 167. Rooskens, “De A von Cobra,” n.p. Anton Rooskens, Les gens du soleil, 1945, oil on canvas, 146 × 120 cm, Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen. Anton Rooskens, in A. Berkers, Anton Rooskens en Henk van Doorn (Groningen, 1985), 12, cited in Kerkhoven, Out of Africa, 16. Lautréamont, Songs of Maldoror, quoted in Wingen, “The Magical Ritual of Anton Rooskens,” n.p. Cinq Peintres d’Aujourd’hui. Stokvis, interview with Corneille in Paris, April 17, 1965, cited in Stokvis, Cobra, 76. Jonathan Fineberg, “The Paradigm of the Artist/Child,” in Klee, Klee and Cobra: A Child’s Play, 26. Cobra 40 jaar later, 120. Corneille, “About Cobra,” 64. See Huizinga, Homo ludens; Buytendijk, Het spel van mensch en dier; and Zondervan, Het spel. Constant, “Montée et décadence d’avant-garde,” 1964, 132. Constant, “New Babylon: Outline of a Culture,” 1965, translated by Paul Hammond in Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 163. See Constant, “The Friends of Cobra and What They Represent.” By the mid-1970s, when the idealism of the 1960s faded in the face of economic crisis and the neo-imperialist war in Vietnam, he returned to painting once again. See Van der Horst, Constant: De late periode. Corneille, in Arthur van Amerongen, “Ik een hoer?” De Groene Amsterdammer 43, October 25, 1995, cited in Bertheux and Zwart, Corneille: Zijn Wereld, 18. Jacques Doucet, Hommage à Armstrong, 1950, oil on canvas, 88.5 × 115.5 cm, Museum Jorn, Denmark. Appel, letter to Aldo Van Eyck, April 18, 1949, trans. in Ragon, Karel Appel: The Early Years, 224–8. See Braggs, Jazz Diasporas, 91–124. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” See Kerkhoven, Het Afrikaanse Gezicht van Corneille, which features detailed information on works in his collection; and Kerkhoven, Beauties, Beasts, and Birds. Birtwistle, “Perspectives on the Artist and His Graphic Oeuvre,” 18. See Birtwistle’s discussion of Jorn’s theories in Living Art. Corneille, “Journal of a Painter in Ethiopia,” in Corneille, cited in Birtwistle, “Perspectives on the Artist and His Graphic Oeuvre,” 15. See catalog 31–42 in Bertheux and Zwart, Corneille: Zijn Wereld. Unfortunately the exhibition exacerbrated the problem of primitivism by situating Corneille’s paintings next to assorted African masks from other collections with no information about what these works meant to the cultures that produced them. Corneille, Het Afrikaanse Gezicht van Corneille, trans. in Kerkhoven, Beauties, Beasts, and Birds, 80. See Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt. Corneille, in W.A.L. Beeren, “Signalement van Corneille,” Museumjournaal 2, 7th ser. (1961), 36, cited in Birtwistle, “Perspectives on the Artist and His Graphic Oeuvre,” 17. Ferlov Mancoba, Ingen skaber alene, 15. Ferlov and Mancoba were presented in Cobra exhibitions starting with the 1966 show that traveled to Louisiana from the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The 2015 Cobra exhibition at Blum and Poe gallery consciously foregrounded the work of Ferlov, Mancoba, and Tajiri. See Gingeras, ed., The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up. Mancoba, “Ejler Billes halvfemsårs fødselsdag,” 17.

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151 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, “En higen mod universel helhed,” in Andersen and Olesen, eds., Erindringer om Asger Jorn, 295. 152 See Kurczynski and Pezolet, “Primitivism, Humanism, and Ambivalence,” 282–302. 153 Miles, Lifeline Out of Africa, 20. 154 Mancoba, “An Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” 14. 155 Guillaume and Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture. 156 Mancoba, “Ejler Billes halvfemsårs fødselsdag,” 17. 157 Mancoba, “An Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” 18. 158 Bille, “Om nutidens grundlag,” 11. 159 See Thompson, ed., In the Name of All Humanity, 85; Miles, Ernest Mancoba, A Resource Book, 24; and Miles, Lifeline Out of Africa, 39. 160 Araeen, “Modernity, Modernism, and Africa’s Place,” 415. 161 See, for example, Mark Rothko, The Omen of the Eagle, 1942, oil and graphite on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 162 Nancy, The Inoperative Community. 163 Statements by the Dutch artists and Mancoba, respectively, in Aramis, “Vi vil ikke skille skønhed og liv.” 164 Ibid. 165 “The Sorrow of Africa: Interview with Ernest Mancoba,” The Church Times (London), October 28, 1938, n.p. JAG. 166 See Sherman, French Primitivism. 167 Girard, “Man, Myth, and Malraux,” 57–8. 168 Mancoba, excerpt of a 1953 letter published in Le Musée Vivant, translated in Thompson, ed., In the Name of All Humanity, 54. 169 Ricoeur, History and Truth, 278. 170 Robbins and Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics. 171 Pollock, et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 582. 172 Wonga Mancoba, interview with Ernest Mancoba, 2000, audio, tape 61 side 1. MA. 173 Wonga Mancoba, Interview with Ernest Mancoba, 2000, audio, tape 66 side 1. MA. 174 See Kurczynski, “Expression for Everyone: Ferlov, Mancoba, and Cobra,” in Bogh, et al., Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Mask and Face, 146–8. 175 Jorn, letter to Mogens Balle from Silkeborg Sanatorium, May 29, 1951, MJ. 176 Dotremont reproduces it again in Cobra 6 (April, 1950), 17. 177 Ferlov, quoted in Andersen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, 18, trans. in Stokbro, “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba,” 41. Stokbro also describes her mask fgures as “aggressive” (43). 178 See the Luba headstool from Zaire reproduced in Christiansen, Kjems, and Hobolth, eds., Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Skulpturer, 63. 179 Andersen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, 30. 180 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, typed manuscript page, undated. MA. The statement exists in both the Mancoba Estate archive and the archive of Elza Miles in Johannesburg Art Gallery, where it features the artists’ three signatures. Thanks to Winnie Sze for sharing the document from South Africa. 181 Dotremont, Sonja Ferlov, n.p., translated in Stokbro, “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba,” 45. 182 Mancoba, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” 20. 183 Okeke, “Modern African Art,” 29. Mancoba’s work was included in the landmark exhibition The Short Century and several exhibitions presented his work in South Africa a few years before his death in 2002. 184 Jespersen, De Abstrakte, 182–83. 185 Wonga Mancoba, interview with Ernest Mancoba, August 13, 2000, audio, tape 44 side 1. MA. 186 Wonga Mancoba, interview with Ernest Mancoba, August 13, 2000, audio, tape 44 side 2. MA. 187 Mancoba speaking in Wonga Mancoba, interview with Ernest Mancoba, 2000, tape 46 side 2, MA. 188 Mancoba, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” 20. 189 See Andersen, Ernest Mancoba; and Ferlov Mancoba, Ingen skaber alene. 190 According to Dahlmann Olsen, the works she made in the 1960s “fully proved her great artistic impact on recent sculpture.” Dahlmann Olsen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, 28.

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191 Dahlmann Olsen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, 28. 192 Stokvis, Cobra, 52. Michel Ragon and Edouard Jaguer do not discuss the work of Ferlov or Mancoba at all in their writing on Cobra. 193 Lambert, Cobra, 29–30. 194 See for example the Anthropomorphic Head, 1350–1521, volcanic stone, 22 × 19 × 25 cm, Musée du Quai Branly (former Musée de l’Homme collections), Paris, accession number 71.1932.62.1. 195 Atkins, Asger Jorn: The Crucial Years, 45. 196 Wagner, “Lee Krasner as L.K.,” 55. 197 Ferlov herself states that Cobra “happened only because of Asger Jorn’s great energy and collegiality; apart from that I actually have nothing to do with it.” Ferlov Mancoba, Ingen skaber alene, 15. 198 Araeen, “Modernity, Modernism, and Africa’s Place”; Smalligan, “The Erasure of Ernest Mancoba.” 199 I address Ferlov’s historiography in more depth in Kurczynski, “Expression for Everyone: Ferlov, Mancoba, and Cobra,” in Bogh, et al., Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Mask and Face. 200 Wonga Mancoba, interview with Ernest Mancoba, 2000, audio, tape 46 side 2. MA. 201 Miles, Lifeline Out of Africa, 138. 202 Sze, “Ernest Mancoba: Visible Man, Invisible Work?,” 108. 203 Interview with Bridget Thompson, quoted in Thompson, ed., In the Name of All Humanity, 13. 204 National Geographic Society, “Map of Human Migration.” 205 Bridget Thompson, “Beyond the Western Paradigm,” in Thompson, ed., In the Name of All Humanity, 55. 206 All statements in this paragraph are made by Mancoba in 1994, in Thompson, Ernest Mancoba at Home. 207 See Bogh, et al., Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Mask and Face, Cat. 31, 36, 40, 41, and 43. 208 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, typed manuscript page, undated. MA (see note 176). 209 Žižek, “What Does Europe Want?” 489. 210 Žižek, “What Does Europe Want?” 490. 211 Žižek, “What Does Europe Want?” 490. 212 Sousa Santos writes that the excluded populations of the world need a “subaltern cosmopolitanism” to express their needs and refect their condition: “Whoever is a victim of local intolerance and discrimination needs cross-border tolerance and support; whoever lies in misery in a world of wealth needs cosmopolitan solidarity; whoever is a non- or second-class citizen of a country or the world needs an alternative conception of national and global friendship. In short, the large majority of the world’s population, excluded from top-down cosmopolitan projects, needs a different kind of cosmopolitanism.” The task of intellectuals, then, is not to speak for but to amplify the voice of “those who have been victimized by neoliberal globalization, be they indigenous peoples, landless peasants, impoverished women, squatter settlers, sweatshop workers or undocumented immigrants.” Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito, eds., Law and Globalization from Below, 14, quoted in Harvey, Cosmopolitanism, 95. 213 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 133. 214 Wonga Mancoba, interview with Ernest Mancoba, 2000, audio, tape 46 side 2. MA. 215 Jorn, Held og hasard, op cit.

5

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Marcel Duchamp once said that “movements begin as a group formation and end with the scattering of individuals.”1 By the late 1950s, the Cobra painters Karel Appel, Corneille, Asger Jorn, and Pierre Alechinsky achieved renown throughout Europe and to some degree in the US, even as Jorn and Constant formed a new avant-garde movement highly critical of the art market, the Situationist International (1957–1972). The recognition of Cobra’s artistic innovations would be both the movement’s defning triumph and its major shortcoming. By the 1980s, as Neo-Expressionism brought expressive painting back to the public eye – in a larger-than-life scale and rhetoric to match – Appel, Jorn, and Alechinsky had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Cobra was taken up by the art market as little more than a “style.”2 It continues to be promoted as a national contribution to postwar abstract and Surrealist art in Belgium, Denmark, and especially the Netherlands. Some of the Belgian Surrealists, who were against limiting the movement to art alone and insisted on interdisciplinary activity, saw the situation coming already in the 1950s. In the words of Dotremont’s former colleague Marcel Mariën: With the appearance of Cobra, the Revolutionary Surrealist attitude, already most confused, tends rather quickly to dilute and then dissolve into a group activity whose primary concern is to promote the artistic success of the many painters who constitute its major part.3 Many former Cobra artists, including Dotremont and Noiret, but perhaps most pointedly Constant, would decry the misconstrual of the movement and its reduction to an artistic “ism” over the years.4 Constant and Jorn would later condemn Cobra specifcally for its ideological confusion. As part of the ultra-left and ultimately anti-art Situationist International, Constant and Jorn accused Cobra of creating nothing more than a new style of painting.5 But such a verdict is too simplistic, for while Cobra may have become known as “just” an art movement thanks to nationalist and market forces, its signifcance as a postwar avant-garde relates less to its market value than to the fexible connections it forged among diverse creative people, ideas, media, and methods. The Cobra artists continued to collaborate over several decades even as some of their individual careers took off, maintaining an interest in interpersonal expression and collectivism that countered the movement’s appropriation by the art market. Dotremont made “word-paintings” and “word-drawings” with ex-Cobra artists

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Alechinsky, Appel, Mogens Balle, Corneille, Carl Otto Hultén, Jorn, Joseph Noiret, and Serge Vandercam, among others. These works are expressive and evocative, but also relics of a conviviality to which nearly all the artists would point later as an epochal moment in their lives. Dotremont refers to the collective works as “anti-personal (and not impersonal) and interindividual creations.”6 In 1971, Alechinsky and Dotremont created a work that both symbolizes and extends Cobra’s interest in interpersonal expression, Our Thought II (Figure 5.1). Alechinsky develops playful symbolic forms in spontaneous brushwork that recalls the Asian painting methods that he began using in the 1950s (using ink on the foor applied with Chinese brushes he bought in New York). He draws a looming volcano-like form erupting vertically in the center that reads alternately as a hydra-like creature with multiple eyes or a vegetal monster made of tendrils and roots. His methods are the result of an extended dialogue with modern

Figure 5.1 Pierre Alechinsky and Christian Dotremont, Notre pensée II (Our Thought II), 1971–1983. India ink on paper, glued to canvas. 205 × 218 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / SABAM, Brussels.

Coda 239 Asian calligraphy begun in the Cobra period, when Christian Dotremont wrote of his fascination for abstract writing and its links to Asian calligraphy, and culminating in Alechinsky’s visit to Japan in 1955, when he made the landmark documentary flm Japanese Calligraphy (Calligraphie Japonaise) featuring the painters Shiryu Morita, Sogen Eguchi, and Toko Shinoda.7 Dotremont’s calligraphy flls the comic “thought bubble” emerging from the volcano. The text forms part of his larger series of “Logograms,” calligraphic works begun in the 1960s that operate between writing and painting. In response to Alechinsky’s image, it reads “Our thought is different from that of animals” (Notre pensée est différente de celle des animaux), a provocative message, perhaps, given Cobra’s avowed interest in the “human animal.” Yet the message is on the one hand almost entirely abstract – thus more like an incoherent bestial utterance than a philosophical proposition – and on the other, made ironic by its framing within a thought bubble itself emanating from some form of hybrid creature. Our Thought was begun in 1971 at Dotremont’s apartment in Tervuren, Belgium, as part of a major reconciliation between the two artists following a six-year silence. Alechinsky made some further additions to it in 1983, four years after Dotremont’s death, as a tribute to his friend. “Our thought” continues to develop, then, even after our deaths – a situation made possible by intersubjectivity, the basic framework for Cobra expression. Our thought presents itself not as a single voice but as an intersubjective utterance, and also suggests that “subjectivity” embraces more than just a human perspective. The “message” co-appears or com-pears, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s term, radiating outward from this hybrid, unnameable form that is neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, but some fusion of these. The work suggests the possibility of material thought – the intelligence of mute organic and inorganic nature – even as it materializes thought, manifesting the human imagination in visible and physical form. The work exemplifes the way Cobra “monsters” are not particular creatures but suggestions in the process of emerging out of the encounter of imagination and inorganic material. In Our Thought, the natural and the social world are overlaid in symbolic forms that are clearly human-made, both personal and culturally specifc. This overlay points to the Cobra insight developed by relating Marxist historical materialism to Gaston Bachelard’s “material imagination,” that nature only exists in relation to culture, and is affected by both social and technological developments.8 Cobra’s investment in interdisciplinary collaboration after 1951 is one of the most striking aspects of the movement’s legacy. In many cases, the former Cobra artists worked with others from movements considered opposed to their initial aims, including the Surrealist movement, de Stijl, and the Situationist International. Even Appel, who turned his back fairly quickly on Cobra as his individual reputation began to overshadow the other Cobra artists, remained friends and collaborated with his ex-Cobra colleagues. Besides Dotremont’s collaborations, Appel made works together with Alechinsky and poet Hugo Claus; Noiret with Balle and Vandercam; Constant with Aldo van Eyck, Gerrit Rietveld, Stephen Gilbert, and the Hungarian sculptor, Nicolas Schöffer; Alechinsky with Pol Bury, Hugo Claus, Jan Cox, Dotremont, Reinhoud, and Walasse Ting. Jorn collaborated throughout his life with nearly all of these people as well as Jean Dubuffet; Italian ceramists in Albisola; the Nuclear Art Group in Italy; Pierre Wemaëre and the weavers with whom he made a monumental tapestry in 1959; the German Gruppe Spur; his brother Jørgen Nash’s Drakabygget group in Sweden; and yet others in the movements he co-founded, the International Movement for an

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Imaginist Bauhaus (1954–1957), the Situationist International, and the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism (1961–1965). The collaborative works they produced materialize the artists’ ongoing interest in intersubjective experience. They implicitly invite the spectator to join the dialogue. As one critic observes: The plurality of artistic means implies, as a result, a plurality of viewpoints on the part of the receiver. […] The plurality of voices on the canvas demands the divided and plural gaze of the reader (lector) in his or her new position of recipient (perceptor).9 The recipient becomes part of the art work’s conversation among different voices. The Cobra and post-Cobra works of Dotremont, Jorn, and Alechinsky are deeply invested in the transformation of the written or painted gestural mark into material abstraction, multifaceted form, and visual image in dialogue with ancient, mythic, and popular symbols – like the serpent itself – which they believed arose anonymously and collectively in particular social contexts. Their pictorial writing (or poetic pictures) transform the traditions of modernist abstraction in order to contest the impersonality of technological reproduction. Their experiments appear increasingly signifcant today, among proliferating new forms of digital reproduction that appear to distance us from the human mark as well as facilitate its commodifcation. The use of pictorial abstraction pries meaning out of its conventional linguistic defnitions, and the spontaneous materialism of their methods reconnects it to the social context of its production. In the rapidly changing political climate of the 1960s, post-Cobra experiments helped re-envision urban experience as something more spontaneous and instinctive – but also more antagonistic. The Situationist International, a theoretically sophisticated collective co-founded by Jorn and Constant along with Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, and others, gave collaboration an explicitly political meaning. They developed the practices of détournement, the “subversion” of other people’s creative production into a new, seditious communication, and the dérive (“drifting”), collective wanderings determined by chance operations that critique social power in urban space. The experimental Situationist maps and artist’s books made by Jorn and Debord including Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires (1958) express the playfulness and unpredictability of the dérive.10 Jorn’s Situationist “Modifcations” on found fea-market paintings (1957–1962) produced monstrous forms by modifying Sunday painters’ hackneyed attempts at middle-class respectability. With their slapdash and graffti-like interventions on staid portraits and amateur landscapes, the Modifcations critique the modernist rhetoric of originality, reframing the idea of originality as a new perspective on already existing cultural forms. Jorn developed the idea for the Modifcations already in the Cobra period, when he was at work studying historical images and symbols for his Golden Horns book. He suggested to Constant at the time that they develop a “Section for the Improvement of Old Canvases,” and made a few prototypes by painting on famous art reproductions. Taking inspiration from Surrealist practices of juxtaposing disparate art forms in a single work, he pointedly chose to vandalize reproductions of Dalí in addition to Impressionist works by Manet and Renoir.11 The Modifcations continue a dialogue with anonymous imagery begun in Cobra, and suggest that all new creation is a response to a preexisting image. Alechinsky’s later drawings on old nautical maps and 18th-century letters and bank notes (1977–1984), made independently of the Situationist movement, develop yet

Coda 241 another form of material dialogue between the modern artist and the anonymous creator, whether amateur or professional, artist or non-artist. These collaborations resist the idea of an isolated master demonstrating “his” own inventiveness, suggesting instead that the creative process is a social interaction shaped by material possibilities, interpersonal expressive aims, institutional parameters, and cultural patterns or assumptions. By the 1960s the modernist rhetoric of purity and originality seemed utterly played out, and the idea of the “avant-garde” had itself become little more than a sales pitch. Jorn’s 1962 “Disfguration” entitled The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up suggests, in classic Marxist fashion, that the promise of the avant-garde lives on through art’s potential for dialectical negation of the existing society.12 The monumental paintings of Jorn, Appel, and Alechinsky after the late 1950s parallel the Situationist critique in their humorous and biting attacks on the purity of painting from within. At their best, these works reject the pretense to social order of a culture which Jorn and his Situationist colleagues viewed as dramatically unjust. Commenting on the fetishistic beauty of their painterly materials (and the fipside, their potential for monstrosity), Jorn and Appel’s late works in particular seem to make the paint come alive. Cobra was already neo-Marxist in the belief of Jorn, Constant, and Dotremont that creativity was essential to social liberation and not just a relic of the superstructure that serves to maintain the current system of social oppression. This position ultimately led Jorn and Constant to part ways with the anti-art Situationists, headed by Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, when the group offcially excluded all its artists in 1961.13 Art was rejected by Debord’s group as nothing more than “spectacle,” one of the food of impersonal, manufactured images that invade personal consciousness and instill passivity, making authentic experience or connection impossible. Debord’s publication of The Society of the Spectacle (La Societé du Spectacle) as a book in 1967 and a flm in 1973 redefned the landscape of critical theory and had a crucial infuence on later postmodern philosophy.14 Its relevance has only grown since the events of May 1968, when Debord himself along with Michèle Bernstein, Jacqueline de Jong, and other Situationists were directly involved in the occupations of the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in solidarity with union workers amid a general strike that paralyzed the country for weeks. The protests of 1968 are often considered the culminating moment of Situationist activity and a turning point in the youthful idealism of the 1960s in Europe. By accepting the reactionary defnition of art as a luxury commodity, however, the Situationists maintained its fetishistic status rather than attempting to break it down. Cobra and the artists involved in the 1968 protests attacked the divide that separates art from life by emphasizing the political possibilities of the aesthetic. The high-end art prints made in support of the protests by Alechinsky and Jorn may not have had the immediate impact of the street posters produced by de Jong and other young artists who appropriated the print workshop of the École des Beaux-Arts and distributed their oppositional propaganda images around the city.15 Yet they certainly capture the spirit of those times. Jorn’s slogans in street shorthand read: “BRISEZ LE CADRE QI ETOUF LIMAGE” (BREAK THE FRAME THAT SUFFOCATES THE IMAGE) and “PAS DE PUISANCE DIMAGINATION SANS IMAGES PUISANTE” (NO POWER FOR THE IMAGINATION WITHOUT POWERFUL IMAGES). These posters revisit the frst “word-paintings” made by Jorn and Dotremont in 1948, both in their spontaneous expressive aesthetic and their counter-culture messages.

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Jorn and Constant played important roles in the development of Situationist theories and art practices relating to playful and spontaneous action, even if their work has been overlooked in favor of Debord’s theoretical rigor. This is partially thanks to Constant’s own denouncement of the Cobra movement and disagreement with Jorn over the importance of painting after ten years of artistic evolution away from the spontaneous expression of Cobra. In the mid-1950s, post-Cobra, Constant experimented with architectural design and spatial constructions based on geometric forms and color inspired by Constructivism and De Stijl. He wrote (as the primary author of a collective text) in the Situationist journal in 1958 that while Cobra was founded as an ambitious Experimental Artists’ International, the “only effective experiment that Cobra could carry out was that of a new style of painting” and has only resulted in the proliferation of “wretched commodities” in the form of “decomposed repetitions of modern art.”16 Constant insisted that Cobra was a historical movement, and anyone defending its continued existence was only resisting the development of new experiments in politics and art exemplifed by the Situationist International. Constant’s “New Babylon” project was his most important artistic intervention of the 1960s. It was an attempt inspired by Situationist ideas to envision a new urbanism for postindustrial society, taking multiple forms as a fascinating collection of evocative designs and models as well as depictions of enigmatic humans in open-ended spaces. He brought the diagrams and models to life in the numerous slide lectures he gave around Europe at the time. The project responded to the rationalist plans promoted by postwar architects and urban planners to comprehensively redesign the destroyed cities of Europe. It also built on the all-encompassing attempts of earlier modern architects to design the ideal city between the wars, which led to postwar designs for large, impersonal megastructures like the massive apartment buildings that would eventually become sites of violent protests at the social exclusions of their inhabitants on the outskirts of Paris and other cities worldwide. Instead of a permanently occupied home, inevitably subject to exclusive rights of ownership and allied with an unequal distribution of space rigidly classifed into spheres of work and leisure, “New Babylon” promoted a utopian – but also in many ways, frightening and dystopian – scenario of people continually wandering from ambiance to ambiance and interacting with each other however they desired. Even if Constant later critiqued the failure of Cobra at the goals stated in his own manifesto of 1948 – to start a revolution in culture and liberate the creativity of ordinary people in a new, more playful and egalitarian society – he still acknowledged the importance of Cobra’s experiments and their crucial role in inspiring new ones.17 In a later text from 1964, he gave Cobra credit for recognizing that the old avant-garde structures and the overly intellectual premises of Surrealism were ineffective in 1948. In walking out of the conference on the fate of the avant-garde in 1948, they left its structure behind and started over, applying its premises of collective experiment and creative manifestoes to a new, emphatically trans-national and anti-organizational organization. By the 1960s, as a veteran of multiple experimental movements, Constant describes the pointlessness of declaring oneself “avant-garde” because the term has become nothing but the sign of conformity in the era of art’s commercialization. “Art is dead,” Constant asserts, with a cynicism based on his own experience in attacking the art-power system. “But those who abandon the struggle abandon everything, even the future.”18 Cobra’s trans-national and interdisciplinary experiments attempted to break down notions of center and periphery, anticipating the more complex situation of

Coda 243 contemporary art today, marked by a proliferation of “centers” whose importance is always assumed to be relative. Many contemporary artists became affliated with, or were directly inspired by, the ex-Cobra artists in Europe. The U.S. African-American artist Herbert Gentry (1919–2003) came to Paris on the G.I. Bill and met Shinkichi Tajiri in the drawing class at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière in 1950. Gentry opened a jazz club called Chez Honey (named after his wife, its star singer) that was frequented by the Cobra artists and existed from 1948 to 1951 – exactly the years of Cobra. He was friends not only with black expatriates like Richard Wright and painter Beauford Delaney, but also Cobra artists like Appel, Corneille, Ejler Bille, and Egill Jacobsen.19 Gentry found his own rhythmic, energetic, and humanist language in Cobra’s spontaneous transformation of images. Floating eyes and organic mask forms defne his vibrant paintings. Like Ernest Mancoba, he related the masks to his own African heritage as well as the more contemporary artistic and political insights of his Cobra friends. His paintings display webs of colorful brush gestures punctuated by masks and faces, with titles like Among Others and With Friends (Plate 25). They refect the people in his extensive and active social networks: “American, African American, […] people throughout the world, who are my friends.”20 As Jens Jørgen Thorsen writes, Gentry was himself whirled into the same postwar maelstrom as the Cobra group. Centrifuged in the same Existentialist bebop Paris, Scandinavia of dreams, wilderness Amsterdam. But Gentry was an American. And the A in COBRA did not stand for America.21 By the late 1950s, Gentry experienced an increased social pressure directed against people of color living in Paris due to the Algerian crisis and decided to relocate. In 1958, invited to exhibit at Galerie Hybler in Copenhagen, he moved there to paint in Bille’s studio for the next six months. After fve years in Copenhagen, he moved to Sweden, settling in Gothenberg in 1963 with his Swedish wife Ingrid Stenvinkel and their son before later settling in Malmö in 1980. Though he exhibited widely in Europe when he lived there, his work has rarely been seen apart from the history of African-American art.22 His painting methods have as much in common with Cobra as with the work of the other abstract black artists he knew, including Delaney, Ed Clark, and Larry Potter. Just as Cobra was open-ended enough to encompass the work of Mancoba, it also provides a context for the work of Gentry, one of many black American artists working independently in postwar Europe – a generation of foreign expats who found a more receptive audience in Paris than in the Jim Crow-era U.S., recently described in a major exhibition as “lost, loose, and loved.”23 Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939) was another painter directly inspired by the work of the ex-Cobra artists including Theo Wolvecamp. She met Wolvecamp through her parents Hans and Alice de Jong who collected his work in Hengelo, the Netherlands, and Asger Jorn, with whom she had a close relationship for ten years in Paris starting in 1960. De Jong was one of the only female members of the Situationist International and founded the interdisciplinary journal The Situationist Times (1962– 1967), a sort of experimental visual encyclopedia of topology.24 Based on her idea to publish an English-language Situationist journal, it came out in the end as a protest against the French SI’s sudden exclusion of all artists in 1961. De Jong responded with a dissident movement that, like Cobra, refused any membership list and accepted all

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sympathetic fellow travelers. While editing the journal in the 1960s, she also developed her own approach to painting, adamantly rejecting the dismissive anti-art attitude of orthodox Situationists like Debord and Vaneigem. She produced impressive compositions of monsters playing at love and war, emphatic commentaries on human psychosocial interactions that take direct inspiration from Cobra’s animalistic expressions.25 The way Gentry and De Jong developed their own work inspired by Cobra’s legacy signals both the movement’s unwitting exclusions and its unrecognized connections to younger generations of artists. Women played mostly traditional roles within Cobra, with a few exceptions such as Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and Else Alfelt. Yet younger men and women artists from Albert Oehlen to Nicole Eisenman have found the legacy of Cobra invigorating and liberating. Artists struggling to make sense of their relationship to contemporary history take direct inspiration from Cobra’s experiments at the start of the Cold War. Cobra’s prefguration of the neo-Marxist experiments of the Situationist movement relates it to contemporary interventionist art, street art, and radical urbanism in addition to new experiments in painting and assemblage. Cobra brought modern and historical, Western and non-Western, progressive and popular art together, and united artists from diverse backgrounds and continents. Its openended dialogue about cross-cultural recognition continues to develop today in ways that counter the social exclusions that the movement itself never fully addressed. In the face of a new economic and social crisis in 21st-century Western culture, the core values of Cobra remain vital. Explorations of the childlike and the animalistic as forces resistant to control and rational understanding are central to contemporary artistic practice. The messages of Cobra are profoundly relevant today, as our communities face similar challenges – namely the endless promotion of economic expansion and technological progress despite its human and animal cost. Artistic experimentation is still threatened with irrelevance or marginalization in a global capitalist society dominated by specialization in the overvalued felds of business, technology, and entertainment. Cobra stands for the importance of questioning those dominant values, by reminding us of something more fundamental: our ability to work together and create new values for ourselves.

Notes 1 Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Jean, “Views on Surrealist art,” 18. 2 Appel, Karel Appel, Catalogue; Alechinsky and Ionesco, Paintings and Writings; Asger Jorn; Alechinsky, Pierre Alechinsky: Margin and Center. 3 Mariën, L’Activité Surréaliste en Belgique, 441. 4 Joseph Noiret emphasizes Cobra’s “experimental” and “collective” aspects in Cobra et après. See also Noiret, Cobra. 5 “Ce que sont les amis de Cobra et ce qu’ils représentent,” 4–6. 6 Dotremont, cited in Descargues, Cobra Singulier Pluriel, 16. 7 Dotremont, “Signifcation et sinifcation,” 19–20. See Sergent, Essai sur le dialogue contemporain orient-occident; and Karen Kurczynski, “Poems Without Words: East-West Encounters in Postwar Painting” in Friis Herbsleb and Kurczynski, eds., Expo Jorn, 141–7. 8 See Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, 67–85. 9 Lupu-Onet, “Le texte-image.” 10 On Mémoires and the Situationist project in general, See Stracey, Constructed Situations. 11 See the discussion of Jorn’s “Modifcations” in Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, chapter 4. 12 Asger Jorn, L’avant-garde se rend pas, “Nouvelle défgurations” series, 1962, oil on found canvas, 73 × 60 cm, collection of Pierre and Micky Alechinsky.

Coda 245 13 Raoul Vaneigem declared at the Situationist Conference in Göteborg in 1961: “In order for their elaboration to be artistic in the new and authentic sense defned by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. There is no such thing as situationism, or a situationist work of art, or a spectacular situationist. Once and for all.” “The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg.” 14 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. On Debord’s legacy, see McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International. 15 For images, see Karen Kurczynski, “Cobra and the Human Animal,” in Golda and Meyer Marks Cobra Collection, 88–9. 16 “Ce que sont les amis de Cobra et ce qu’ils représentent.” 17 “Ce que sont les amis de Cobra et ce qu’ils représentent.” 18 Constant, “Montée et décadence de l’avant-garde,” 136. 19 Mary Anne Rose Gentry, “The Life of Herbert Gentry,” in Tolano, ed., Making Connections, 12–15. 20 Gentry, “Oral history interview with Herbert Gentry,” cited in Tolano, ed., Making Connections, 21. 21 Thorsen, “The Principles and Passions of the Organisms,” n.p. 22 Gentry was included in the small exhibition “Cobra: Contemporary Legacy” shown simultaneously with “Human Animals: The Art of Cobra” at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2016. 23 Guilbaut, ed., Lost, Loose and Loved. See also my exhibition review, Kurczynski, “Searching for New Ground,” 129–32. 24 See the facsimile edition, Jong, Kugelberg, and Ohrt, eds., Jacqueline De Jong: The Situationist Times 1962–1967; and Prestsæter, ed., These Are Situationist Times. 25 See Wingen, Jacqueline De Jong.

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Archives de l’art contemporain, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels: Archives of Cobra, Pierre Alechinsky, Pol Bury, Marc Mendelson, Reinhoud, Olivier Strebelle, Serge Vandercam, and Raoul Ubac Archives et musée de la littérature, Brussels: Christian Dotremont Archive Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum Archives: Personal scrapbook of Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelt Mancoba Archives: Ernest, Sonja Ferlov, and Wonga Mancoba, Galerie Mikael Andersen (now at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen: Helhesten archive Johannesburg Art Gallery Archives: Ernest Mancoba Documents Museum Jorn Archives: Robert Dahlmann Olsen and Asger Jorn Archives Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Serge Vandercam Archive Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, The Hague: Constant Archive Stedelijk Museum Archives, Stadsarchief Amsterdam

Abadie, Daniel. Alechinsky. Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1998. Adamson, Natalie. Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École De Paris, 1944–1964. London: Routledge, 2017. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———.“Commitment.” Reprinted in Aesthetics and Politics, ed., Fredric Jameson, 177–95. New York: Verso, 1977. ———. Prisms. Translated by Samuel, and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. ———. “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” In Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed., Geoffrey H. Hartman, 114–29. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Alechinsky. New York: Lefebre Gallery, 1965. Alechinsky, Pierre. “Abstraction faite.” Cobra 10 (fall, 1951): 4–8.

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Index

Page numbers in italics mark fgures. Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism (Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme) 110 ABS 203 abstract art 16, 50, 106, 122, 139 Abstract Expressionism 8, 66, 122, 139, 189, 219, 226 Abstraction and Empathy (Worringer) 182 Acker, Adolphe 88 Adorno, Theodor 40, 72, 137, 159–60, 166 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 159–60 African Madonna (Mancoba) 218 After the war poem 155–6 Agamben, Giorgio 56, 72, 172–3 “Aganaks” 46, 56 Alechinsky, Micky 13–14 Alechinsky, Pierre 12–16, 31–2, 43, 58, 63, 70, 82, 86–7, 100, 105–6, 119, 121, 140– 1, 143, 237–8, 240–1; Central Park 63, 123; The Dolls of Dixmude (Les Poupées de Dixmude) 117; “It’s by force that we become Fougeron” (C’est en forçant qu’on devient Fougeron) 105; Japanese Calligraphy (Calligraphie Japonaise) 16, 61, 239; Jesus Rabbit 58, 59; Le Poète Assassinée (The Poet Assassinated) 142, 175; marginal remarks 63; Our Thought II 238, 239; Saint Michael Floored by the Dragon 61, 62 Alechinsky d’après nature (de Heusch) 118 Alfelt, Else 7, 9–11, 21, 33, 100, 188, 190–1, 196, 197, 198–202, 204, 206–7, 222, 224, 244; Blue Mountain World 200; Exploded Bridge 205; Komposition, bjergtinder (Composition, Mountain Peaks) 204, 205 Alfelt, Kari 21 Alfelt, Vibeke 21, 199 Among Others and With Friends (Gentry) 243 Amsterdam 18; see also Netherlands Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts 69 Amsterdam Zoo 68

An Appeal to the Imagination (En appel aan de verbeelding) (van Eyck) 163 “Ancestor” paintings (Mancoba) 42, 227–8 Ancient Eternity (Dotremont) 12, 88 Andersen, Troels 224 animal imagery 31–2, 37, 42–3, 63–4, 65, 68, 71–4; ancient 54–5; in Surrealism 47–8; wounded 48–9 animals 37–9; as art materials 59; vs. humans 43 Animals (Constant) 69 animism 4 “Apollo or Dionysus” (Jorn) 61, 63 Appel, Karel 5, 12, 14, 18–20, 21, 30–1, 43, 56, 73, 96–7, 100, 108–9, 116, 120, 137–8, 157–8, 160–1, 166, 210–11, 213, 237, 239; Composition with Animal fgures 57; Innocence Accuses (L’innocence accuse) 164; Passion in the Attic 157; People and Animals 57, 113; poems of 56; “Questioning Children” series 136, 143, 155–6, 158–60, 161, 162–3, 165; Scream into Space 157; Totem 159; travel 22; The Wild Fireman 157 Appel, Tony 21 Araeen, Rasheed 219 Arcanum 17 (Breton) 84 archaeological photography 8, 9 archetypes, Jungian 52 Arendt, Hannah 40–1 Armstrong, Louis 214 Arnaud, Noel 12, 81, 86, 88, 97, 102, 104, 123 Arp, Hans 88 Arp, Jean 155 art: Cobra on 3, 80–1, 181–2; Jorn on 98; muzzling 1 “Art Against War” (Dotremont) 6 “Art in Freedom” (Kunst in Vrijheid) 209 “Artistes libres” series: Alfelt 201–2; Atlan 3 artistic expression 33

Index Asian calligraphy 61, 238–9 Ateliers du Marais 13–15, 59, 61, 64, 122, 138 Atkins, Guy 185, 226 Atlan, Jean-Michel 2–3, 5, 11–12, 14, 66, 72, 81, 83, 90, 119; monograph on 3; paintings by 2, 119; Untitled 28 Aubert, Nathalie 13 automatism 79, 83, 87 The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (Jorn) 241 Azoulay, Ariella 150–1 Bachelard, Gaston 32, 86, 94–6, 117, 124, 155, 185–6, 239 Balle, Mogens 7, 10, 239 bare life 72 Barricade (Constant) 113 Barthes, Roland 150 Bataille, Georges 48, 60 Bayer, Herbert 149 Bazaine, Jean 202 Beaudin, André 56 “becoming-animal” 73 Belgian Surrealism 84, 86–7, 89, 102, 104–5, 116, 123, 237 Belgium 12, 117, 145–6; Cobra in 14–15; Communist Party 16, 18, 85, 97–8, 104–5; Nieuwpoort 134, 145, 146; occupied 146 Bellmer, Hans 117 Benjamin, Walter 28, 71–2 Bennett, Jane 112 Bernstein, Michèle 240–1 Bille, Ejler 6, 9–11, 21, 43, 53, 100, 183, 188, 196, 218; Composition 8, 28 biopolitics 71 Birds in a Landscape (Pedersen) 50–1 Birtwistle, Graham 215 Bjerke-Petersen, Vilhelm 102, 205 black 66, 215 Black Girl in Room (Corneille) 214–16 blasphemy, themes of 58–9 Blaue Reiter Almanach 51 Blue Mountain World (Alfelt) 200 Blue Rider group 51, 58, 181 Blurb magazine 30 Bode, Arnold 29 “Bogs” (Fagnes) (Dotremont and Vandercam) 155 Bonjour, Satanas (Ernst) 47 Borès, Francisco 56 Bosch, Hieronymus 58 Boumeester, Christine 88 Bourdieu, Pierre 203 Bourgoignie, Paul 87, 100 Bousquet, Joë 89 Braak magazine 30 Braidotti, Rosa 74

267

Brands, Eugène 18–20, 24–5, 32, 56, 82, 109–10, 112–13, 157–8, 188, 207, 211; Heaven’s Arch 158; The Mask of God 110; paintings 112–14; Passion Written Down I 113; Passion Written Down II 113 Brassai 152–3 Brauner, Victor 102, 122 “Bregnerød Congress” 20–1, 22, 124, 141, 199, 202–3 Breton, André 11, 32, 79, 83–6, 88, 99, 102, 114, 118, 121–2, 125, 191 Bridge group 181 Brody, Jerome 63 Brody, Marléne 63 Brøns, Helle 73 Broodthaers, Marcel 58, 155 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 58, 70 Brussels 58–9; Cobra in 12; Dotremont’s home 13; 80, rue du Marais 13–15 Bucaille, Max 97, 104 Buck-Morss, Susan 229 Bulletin international du surréalisme révolutionnaire 97 Bury, Pol 12, 14, 16, 17, 87, 96, 100, 141, 148, 155, 239 Buytendyk, Frederik Jacobus Johannes 213 Café Notre Dame 4–5, 104 Cahiers d’Art 48 Calonne, Jacques 13, 87, 100 Campendonk, Heinrich 58, 163 Canonne, Xavier 149 capitalism 42, 46, 229 Carnival of Binche 141–2 Carroll, Lewis, Notes de zoologie 14, 61 cartoons/animated flms 27 “The Case Is Closed” manifesto 12, 97, 104 “The Cause Is Understood” manifesto 12, 97 “The Cause Was Understood” manifesto 4–5, 44, 104 Celtic coins exhibition 121 Central Park (Alechinsky) 63, 110, 123 ceramics 96–7 Cesaire, Aimé 40–2, 109 Chabrun, Jean-François 88 Chavée, Achille 87, 89–90 children 143, 146, 156, 158, 162–5; innocence 3, 38, 51, 70 children’s art 51, 180; child artists 21–2 church, irreverence to 59 Claessens, Bob 98 Claus, Hugo 23, 27, 117, 155, 239; The Sorrow of Belgium 146 Cobra 21, 26–7, 54, 90, 107, 119, 122, 126, 139–40, 144, 156, 180–1, 224, 230, 241–4; on art 3, 80–1, 181–2; children as artists in 20–2, 199; denials of 20, 237;

268

Index

Dotremont on 101; and imagination 96; inspiration sources 27, 29, 89–90, 116, 138, 159; origins of 1–2, 4–26, 42–4, 104, 135; and play 213; scandals 25, 112–13; snake symbol 39, 83; on Surrealism 48; values 20, 29–30 Cobra artists 42, 120, 138; see also individual artists Cobra Experimental Film Festival 118 Cobra flms 14, 117–18 Cobra journal 1, 11, 13–14, 16, 17, 21–2, 25, 28, 51, 83, 86, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 106–7, 115–16, 119, 122, 131n196, 138–41, 196, 211, 222 Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst 31, 201 Cocteau, Jean 89, 118 Cold War 31, 66–7, 72, 87, 108, 113, 122, 136 collaboration 37, 79, 97, 239–40; see also specifc works or artists Collective Invention (L’Invention Collective) journal 90 College of Pataphysics 123 Collignon, Georges 14 colonialism 39, 41–2, 109, 160, 218, 220 color 141, 200 Communism 83, 85, 88–9 Communist Party 18, 82, 85, 87, 89, 104–6; on abstract art 16, 32, 105 Composition (Bille) 8 Composition (Mancoba) 219–20 Composition with Animal fgures (Appel) 57 concentration camps 32, 66, 72, 136, 138, 147, 153, 166–7, 172–3 Concerning Form (Pour la forme) (Jorn) 15 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky) 189 Confno, Alon 172 The Conquest of the World by the Image (La Conquête du Monde par L’Image) 88 Constant 1, 5–6, 11–14, 18–19, 21, 30–1, 43, 47, 67–8, 73, 82, 100, 106, 108–9, 112, 114, 138–40, 175, 192–3, 195, 239, 242; Animals 69; Barricade 113; Dutch Experimental Group on 32; Entrapped Bird 70; Fauna 68, 69; “It Is Our Desire That Makes the Revolution” (C’est Notre Désir Qui Fait la Révolution) 114–15; life 69; “New Babylon” series 33, 68, 188, 193, 213, 242; The Scapegoat 69; “War” paintings 67–8, 70; writings 122, 138–9, 193–4 Copenhagen 52–3; Hjortøgade Kindergarten 196; National Museum 54; occupied 205, 206 Copenhagen Art Academy 20 Copenhagen zoo 21

Corneille 5, 12, 14, 18–19, 21, 24, 30, 56, 58, 86, 96–7, 100, 108–9, 116, 120, 125, 138, 157–8, 165, 188, 207, 210–11, 215–16, 237; Black Girl in Room 214–16; “Høst Report” 198–9; Improvisations 60; In the Heart of the Desert, There Is Still Room to Play 211; The Joyous Rhythms of the City 211, 212, 213; paintings 33; travels 215–16 cosmopolitanism 221 Coulommier, Julien 149 Cox, Jan 14, 239 creaturely life 72–3 Critique of Everyday Life (Critique de la Vie Quotidienne) (Lefebvre) 101 culture, Cobra on 93–4 “Culture and Counter-Culture” (Constant) 19 Dada movement 18, 27, 39, 101, 123 Dalí, Salvador 84, 114, 118, 122 “Danish Experimental Group” 13 Danish Surrealism 82, 104, 124 Danse Macabre (Rooskens) 209–10 de Heusch, Luc 14, 64, 87, 117–19, 142–3 de Jong, Jacqueline 33, 241, 244 Debord, Guy 240–1 “Declaration Internationale” 97 The Defnite Rejection of a Request for a Kiss 140 “Degenerate Art” exhibition 49, 188 Degottex, Jean 121 Deleuze, Gilles 10, 71, 73–4 Delvaux, Paul 117–18 Den lille nænsomme (The Little Careful One) (Ferlov) 225, 226 Denmark: and the Linien group 6, 99; occupied 49–50, 54, 205, 206 Derain, André 61 “Detourned Paintings” series (Jorn) 116 “The Developments of the Eye” (Les Développements de L’Oeil) exhibition 91, 135, 153–4 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 40 Didi-Huberman, Georges 147 Diop, Cheikh Anta 227 Discourse on Colonialism (Cesaire) 41–2, 109 Disney 27–9, 67 Documenta I exhibit 152, 174, 188, 190 Documenta II exhibit 29 “Documentation Center for Avant-Garde Art” 13, 82, 104 Documents 47–8 The Dolls of Dixmude (Les Poupées de Dixmude) (Alechinsky) 117

Index Dominguez, Oscar 14, 87 Dotremont, Christian 1, 5–6, 11–13, 16, 20, 30–1, 43, 58–9, 61, 64, 69, 87, 90–1, 100, 102, 103, 104, 112–13, 123, 154, 224, 237, 239; Ancient Eternity 12, 88; “Bogs” (Fagnes) 155; on Cobra 101; collaborations with Jorn 37, 80, 94, 98, 123; “The Great Natural Rendez-Vous” 60, 84, 94; “History of Cobra in Belgium” 87; life 26; “Logograms” 15, 81, 239; Our Thought II 238, 239; “‘Socialist Realism’ Against the Revolution” (Le ‘Réalisme Socialiste’ Contre la Révolution) 105–6; speech by 24; The Stone and the Pillow (La Pierre et l’oreiller) 15, 93; travel 21; The Tree of Evil and Evil (L’Arbre du Mal et du Mal) 89; and Vandercam 97, 155; word paintings 15, 37, 94, 123, 237–8; writings 80–1, 86, 88–9, 115–16, 118, 135, 140, 154, 171, 202–3 Dotremont Les Logogrammes (de Heusch) 118 Doucet, Jacques 5, 81, 90, 95, 96, 100, 119, 165, 213–14; Homage to Armstrong 214; Refex cover 95; Tightrope Walkers 95 Dove of Peace (Picasso) 70 dragons 61, 62, 71 Draguet, Michel 147 drawings, by Ubac 91 “Dream and Lie of Franco” (Picasso) 64 dreams 79 Dubuffet, Jean 27, 56–7, 116, 120, 123, 131n196, 158, 239 Duchamp, Marcel 102, 103 d’Ursel, Roland 117, 144 Dutch Experimental Group 18–19, 30, 32, 82, 86, 108–9, 112, 192 “Editions Cobra” books 13 Eggeling, Viking 27 Eichmann trial 136 Einstein, Carl 48 Eisenman, Nicole 244 Eisenstein, Sergei 28–9 Elburg, Jan 23, 25, 109, 113, 116 Éluard, Paul 79, 88, 90, 111 emotion 189–90 empathy 182 “The End and the Means” exhibition 14–16, 100–1, 203 Ensor, James 58 Entrapped Bird (Constant) 70 Eppinger, Margit 96 Ernst, Max 29, 47, 49, 80, 123, 158 Estève, Maurice 56 Estienne, Charles 119, 121–2 Étoile Scellée gallery 121

269

Existentialism 88, 97–8, 119, 121, 138, 140, 243 Experimentalism 108–15, 191 Exploded Bridge (Alfelt) 205 Explosion (Wolvecamp) 207, 208 expression 180, 191 Expressionism 29, 33, 44, 51, 66, 180–1, 184, 186, 188–91, 198, 223 “The Family of Man” exhibit 150–2 fantasy art 50 Fascism 41–2, 52, 150 Fauna (Constant) 68, 69 Fautrier, Jean 3 Félix Guattari 10 Ferlov, Sonja 6–7, 10–11, 21, 33, 42, 111, 181, 183, 188, 190–1, 201, 217–22, 225, 228, 244; Den lille nænsomme (The Little Careful One) 225, 226; Maske: Krigens udbrud (Mask: Outbreak of War) 223, 224; Owl 222, 223 Fierens, Paul 14 flm 27 Fineberg, Jonathan 211 Fini, Léonor 84 Five Painters of Today (Cinq Peintres d’Aujourd’hui) 56, 211 The Flame of a Candle (Bachelard) 186–7 fexible, as used in Cobra 116 Flocon, Albert 96 folk art 7, 159 folklore 98, 141 “Forms Understood as a Language” (Les Formes Conçues comme Langage) (Jorn) 108 Foster, Hal 46, 73, 153 Foucault, Michel 71 Fougeron, André 105, 108 found objects exhibition 101 France 221; Cobra artists living in 11 Franke, Anselm 4 Freddie, Wilhelm 124, 140 freedom, Cobra defnitions of 5–6 French Surrealism 32, 79, 82, 87, 89–90, 109, 111, 194; see also Breton, André Friendship Knot (Tajiri) 174 “Frivolous Pictures” series 97 frottage 124 Galerie du Luxembourg 119 Gear, William 5 Gentry, Herbert 33, 243 German imagery 66–7 Giacometti, Alberto 6–7, 16, 48, 87, 117, 147 Gilbert, Stephen 5, 100, 199, 239 Ginsberg, Allen 56

270

Index

Gischia, Léon 56 Glob, P. V. 8, 9, 49, 54 Glotz, Samuël 141 The Gnome from Jutland (Heerup) 25, 26 Godet, Marie 98 Goetz, Henri 88 The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune (Jorn) 44, 45, 46, 52, 122, 240 Golden Horns of Gallehus 44 Golden Swine (Jorn) 37, 38, 44, 46, 66 Good Grief (Reinhoud) 64, 65 Good Morning Rooster (Constant and Kouwenaar) 192–5 Götz, Karl-Otto 5, 14, 23, 82, 106, 107, 119, 190; materials used by 119–20; Zwei Figuren (Two Figures) 107 Goya, Francisco de 66 graffti 96 Grandville, J. J. 66–7 “The Great Natural Rendez-Vous” (Dotremont) 60, 84, 94 Greenberg, Clement 119 Guattari, Félix 71, 73–4 Guðnason, Svavar 205; Sankt Hans drøm (Midsummer Night’s Dream) 203 Guernica (Picasso) 47, 64, 66, 70 Guggenheim, Peggy 14 Guilbaut, Serge 121–2 Haesaerts, Luc 14 Haesaerts, Paul 14 Hager, Anneliese 5, 119, 190 Hainaut Surrealist group 90 Haiti 229 Hammarskiöld, Hans 149 “The Hand That Holds the Pen” group 12 The Hand That Holds the Pen (La Main à Plume) journal 81, 85–6, 88, 90, 154 Hannoset, Corneille 14, 93 Hansma, Tjako 18 Hartung, Hans 16, 90, 119, 155 Havrenne, Marcel 87 Havrenne, Paul 70 Heaven’s Arch (Brands) 158 Heerup, Henry 7, 9–10, 24–5, 26, 158 Helhesten group 8, 52 Helhesten journal 7, 10, 26, 30, 49–51, 53, 55, 81, 143, 200, 207, 218 “History of Cobra in Belgium” (Dotremont) 87 history painting 31 “History Pictures” series 65–6 Hitler, Adolf 42 Hoeber, Walter 100 Homage to Armstrong (Doucet) 214 Homage to Lautréamont (Rooskens) 209, 210

Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 213 Hooks (Crochets) (Vandercam) 147, 148, 149, 151–2, 154–5 Horkheimer, Max 40 horses 49 Hospers, John 140, 184 Høst group 1, 7–8, 10–11, 21, 47–9, 51–5, 82–3, 85, 98–9, 135, 196–9, 207, 217, 224 Hovdenakk, Per 204, 206 Hugnet, Georges 88, 90 Huizinga, Johan 213 Hultén, Carl Otto 11, 82, 123–4 “human animal” 39–40, 43 “The Human Animal” (Jorn) 39, 64, 72 humanism 10–11, 31, 150–2, 217–18; critiques of 39–40 “The Hunger Winter” (Hongerwinter) 56 Imaginist group 32, 123–4 Improvisations (Corneille) 60 In the Heart of the Desert, There Is Still Room to Play (Corneille) 211 “Inaugural Rupture” (1947) 85, 105 Informel painting style 118–22, 139, 189; see also Lyrical Abstraction Innocence Accuses (L’innocence accuse) (Appel) 164 “International Ceramics Encounters” 123, 155 International Conference on Revolutionary Surrealism 98, 108 International Exhibition of Surrealism (1947) 32, 83, 99, 101–2, 104 “International Exhibitions of Experimental Art” 23–4, 168–9 International Surrealist movement 87 intersubjectivity 191–6 Islamic themes 125 Istler, Josef 98, 100 “It Is Our Desire That Makes the Revolution” (C’est Notre Désir Qui Fait la Révolution) (Calais) 114–15 “It’s by force that we become Fougeron” (C’est en forçant qu’on devient Fougeron) (Alechinsky) 105 Jackson, Martha 165 Jacobsen, Egill 6–7, 9–11, 50, 52, 100, 196, 200, 207; mask motifs 53, 54, 55, 205; Ophobning (Accumulation) 7–8; Red Masks 53, 54 Jacobsen, Robert 119, 168 Jacqmain, Andre 14 Jacques, Calonne 13 Jaguer, Eduard 14, 81, 87, 97, 104, 112, 119, 124, 198, 200, 202, 205 Jaguer, Simone 119

Index Jamie, Rasaad 164 Japanese-Americans 72, 167, 171–2, 174 Japanese Calligraphie (Calligraphie Japonaise) documentary 16, 61, 239 Japanese calligraphy 61 jazz music 214–15, 243 Je Lève, Tu Lèves, Nous Rêvons 37, 79, 123 Jespersen, Gunnar 8 Jesus Rabbit (Alechinsky) 58, 59 Jorn, Asger 1, 3, 5–8, 9, 10–11, 13–14, 20–1, 31, 52, 60, 67, 69, 82–4, 87, 96–7, 99–100, 104, 106–8, 110, 119–20, 123–4, 137–8, 140, 151, 181–2, 184, 187–8, 191, 196, 199, 203, 226, 230, 237, 239, 242; “Aganaks” 46, 56; “Apollo or Dionysus” 61, 63; The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up 241; collaborations with Dotremont 37, 80, 94, 98, 123; Concerning Form (Pour la forme) 15; “Detourned Paintings” series 116; “Forms Understood as a Language” (Les Formes Conçues comme Langage) 108; “Frivolous Pictures” series 97; The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune 44, 45, 46, 52, 122, 240; Golden Swine 37, 38, 44, 46, 66; “History Pictures” series 65–6; “The Human Animal” 39, 64, 72; letters from 35n75, 115; life 26, 66, 69, 185; Luck and Chance (Held og hasard) 47, 185–6; media used 48–9, 116; “Modifcations” series 240; Pact of the Predators 66; The Right of the Eagle I and II 66–7; Signs Carved on the Churches of the Eure and Calvados (Signes Gravés sur les Églises de l’Eure et du Calvados) 93; and the Situationist International group 42; Stalingrad, No Man’s Land, or the Mad Laughter of Courage 7; Toy Picture 8, 44, 54; travels 11, 22, 82–83; “War Visions” series 65–6; word paintings 15, 26, 37, 94, 123; Wounded Wild Animal 49, 184–7; writings 12, 40, 43–4, 45, 46, 137, 143, 183 Jorn, Klaus 21, 22, 196 The Joyous Rhythms of the City (Corneille) 211, 212, 213 Jugendstil decorations 21, 37, 80 Jung, Carl 52 “junk sculptures” 25 Kafka, Franz 71–3 Kaiser, Franz-W. 165–6 kalkmalerier (“chalk paintings”) 55, 196, 227 Kandinsky, Vassily 29, 49, 58, 80, 180–1, 185–6, 188, 191 Kemény, Madeleine 5, 190 Kemény, Zoltán 5 Kernn-Larsen, Rita 102

271

Kjersmeier, Carl 53 Klee, Paul 29, 47, 49, 51, 56–8, 80, 95, 114, 211 “Knots” sculptures (Tajiri) 167, 174 Koenig, Théodore 87 Komposition, bjergtinder (Composition, Mountain Peaks) (Alfelt) 204, 205 Korean War 67, 87, 138 Koss, Juliet 182 Kossmann, E. H. 156 Kouwenaar, Gerrit 23, 109, 113, 192–3, 195 Krasner, Lee 226 Krauss, Rosalind 153 Kriland, Gösta 124 Kuspit, Donald 159, 164–5 La Révolution Surréaliste 47 Lam, Wifredo 11, 83, 102, 122–3 Lambert, Jean-Clarence 8, 203 Land og Folk newspaper 16, 83, 199 Langer, Suzanne 140 Laude, Jean 96 Lautréamont 59–60, 95; Maldoror 39, 60, 209; The Voices of Silence 40 Le Corbusier 11 Le Drapeau rouge 12, 105 Le Petit Cobra 13 Le Poète Assassinée (The Poet Assassinated) 142, 175 Lederer, Helmut 149 Lefebvre, Fernand 105–6 Lefebvre, Henri 101, 141 Lefranq, Marcel 87, 177n68 Léger, Fernand 11, 51 Lergaard, Niels 51–2, 99 Les Lettres Françaises journal 105–6 Liège exhibition 25–6, 61, 64, 117 Linien group 1, 6–7, 47, 81–3, 85, 99, 122, 135, 182, 218, 222, 224; exhibition of 1937 48 Linien journal 28, 43, 51 “living art” 10 “Logograms” (Dotremont) 15, 81, 239 Lorenc, Zdenek 98 Loubschansky, Marcelle 121 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art 26 “Love Letter to Our Tortured Bride Indonesia” (Lucebert) 42, 109, 218 Lucebert 1, 23, 25, 27, 30–1, 57–8, 109; “Love Letter to Our Tortured Bride Indonesia” 42, 109, 218; poetry of 30–1, 42; word paintings 109 Luck and Chance (Held og hasard) (Jorn) 47, 185–6 Lye, Len 27 Lyrical Abstraction 119; see also Informel painting style

272

Index

Mabille, Pierre 118 McLaren, Norman 27–8 McLuhan, Marshall 118, 160 magic 51 Magic and the Fine Arts (Magi og skønne kunster) (Jorn) 12 Magritte, René 12, 18, 20, 84, 89–90, 97, 101–2, 105, 108, 114, 116 Maldoror (Lautréamont) 39, 60, 95, 209 Mallarmé 199–200 Malraux, Andre 39–40, 140; Museum Without Walls 151; Voices of Silence 151 Mancoba, Ernest 6–7, 10–11, 21, 22–3, 42, 72, 111, 188, 190–1, 216–21, 224, 227–8; African Madonna 218; Ancestor series 42, 227–8; Composition 219–20 Mancoba, Sonja Ferlov see Ferlov, Sonja Mancoba, Wonga 21, 217, 221, 224, 227–9 Manessier, Alfred 202 Marc, Franz 58 marginalization 11; of the Mancobas 10–11; reframing 43; of women 11 Mariën, Marcel 12, 84, 89–90, 237 Marx, Carl 4, 38–9 mask motifs 53, 54, 55, 110–11, 205, 219 The Mask of God (Brands) 110 Maske: Krigens udbrud (Mask: Outbreak of War) (Ferlov) 223, 224 Masson, Andre 47–9, 123, 184, 202 material imagination 94–5, 155 materialization 194 Mathiesen, Egon 10 Mathieu, Georges 119, 139 Matisse, Henri 42 “Mayakovsky cell” poets 23–4 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 23–4 The Meaning of Art (Read) 182 Médium journal 125 Mellerup, Tage 11 Mendelson, Marc 14 Mer du Nord, Nieuport (North Sea, Nieuwpoort) (Vandercam) 134, 135, 143–4, 154 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 192, 195–6 Mesens, E.L.T. 111 Messages journal 90 Messagier, Jean 121 Mian, Ai-Li 13, 61 Michils, Freddy 14 minority expression 229–30 Minotaur Group 123 Miró, Joan 6–7, 18, 47–8, 57, 79–80, 101, 114, 123 modern art 162 “Modifcations” series (Jorn) 240 Moholy-Nagy, Lászlo 149 Mondrian, Piet 113, 186

“monsters” 74 Mortensen, Richard 6, 28, 47, 119 “Mud-ologies” (Boulogismes) 155 Mumford, Louis 173 Munch, Edvard 11, 37, 181 Munro, Thomas 218 murals 9–10, 20, 161, 162, 196, 197, 199; Bregnerød 20–1, 22, 199 Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1982 exhibition 31 Museum Jorn (Denmark) 26 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 11 Museum Without Walls (Malraux) 151 music, and Brands 110–11 mythmaking 84–5, 99–100; image creation as 51–2 myths 117 Næsgaard, Sigurd 8, 52 Nancy, Jean Luc 192, 194, 219, 239 NATO 138 NATO Pact 67 Nazis 7, 39, 150; and art 29, 49; buying artworks 157; concentration camps 147; in the Netherlands 19–20 Neo-Expressionism 237 neo-Marxism 109 Netherlands: occupation of 18–20, 69, 111; post-war 156–7; see also Amsterdam “New Babylon” series 33, 68, 188, 193, 213, 242 new materialism 4, 74, 78n131, 112 “new myth” idea 84, 99–100, 102 “The New Realism” manifesto 11, 99 Nielsen, Knud 21 Nieuwenhuys, Jan 18, 109 Nieuwpoort (Vandercam) 144, 145 “No quarter in the revolution!” manifesto 12 Nocturnal Geography (Géographie nocturne) journal 88 Noheden, Kristoffer 100 Noiret, Joseph 5, 12–13, 70, 87, 94, 100–1, 104, 155, 237, 239 Nolde, Emil 29 non-Western art 70, 110–11, 113, 125, 160, 200, 209, 220; Cobra attitudes towards 43 Nørredam, Mette 54 Notes de zoologie (Carroll) 14, 61 Nougé, Paul 12, 89–90, 97, 102 Nyholm, Erik 20 “The Object Across the Ages” exhibition 14, 58, 101 Oehlen, Albert 244 Ogden, C. K. 140 Okeke, Chika 224 “Olddansk Kunst” 9

Index Olivier Strebelle 13–14 Øllgaard, Hans 6, 47 Olsen, Robert Dahlmann 7, 49 Olson, Erik 102 Olyff, Michel 13–15, 61 “One-Day Sculptures” (Tajiri) 168, 169 Ophobning (Accumulation) (Jacobsen) 7–8 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 40–1 Orpheus (Orphée) (Cocteau) 118 Ortvad, Erik 7, 10, 21, 55 Österlin, Anders 11, 14, 82, 123–4 Oud, J. J. P. 163 Our Thought II (Dotremont and Alechinsky) 238, 239 Owl (Ferlov) 222, 223 Pact of the Predators (Jorn) 66 “Pages from the Book on Art” (Jorn) 12 painted rock carvings 55 Palais des Beaux-Arts 100; “International Exhibitions of Experimental Art” 23 Palais des Beaux-Arts exhibition (1951) 14 Paris 47, 93, 122, 135, 138, 214, 218, 243; Café Notre Dame 4–5; Charles Ratton gallery 52; Drouin Gallery 3, 56, 116, 158; Galerie Denise René 91; Musée de l’Homme 52; occupation of 3, 16, 33, 72, 95–6 Parisian Women at the Market (Parisiennes au Marché) (Fougeron) 105 “Pas de quartiers dans la révolution! (No quarter in the revolution!)” 97 Passeron, René 81, 86, 97, 104, 119 Passion Written Down I (Brands) 113 Passion Written Down II (Brands) 113 Paz, Ocatavio 63 Peasant Symphony (Symphonie Paysanne) (Storck) 146 Pedersen, Carl-Henning 7, 9–10, 21–2, 49–51, 55, 100, 124, 188, 196, 198–9, 202–3, 222; Birds in a Landscape 50–1; travels 11 peintures-mots see “word painting” experiments Penrose, Roland 111 People and Animals (Appel) 57, 113 The People of the Sun (Rooskens) 209, 214 Perséphone 14, 117–18 Petersen, Vilhelm Bjerke 53 The Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty) 195 photography, changing role of 147 photography techniques 90 Picabia, Francis 59 Picasso, Pablo 42–3, 47, 56, 64, 66, 70, 80, 83 Picasso, Surrealism, Abstract Art (Bille) 183 Pierre, Jośe 87, 125–6 Pignon, Édouard 56, 211

273

poetry 89, 100 “Poet’s Cage” 23 Pohl, Eva 206 Pollock, Jackson 139, 226 Post-Expressionism: Abstract Art, Neoplasticism, Surrealism exhibition 47 post-Surrealist movements 119 Potato (Miró) 101 potatoes 101 Poulsen, Christian 218 Prévert, Jacques 123 “primitive” art 3–4, 42, 70, 111, 160, 209, 218 Primitive Negro Sculpture (Munro) 218 primitivism 76n59, 76n64, 160, 178n107, 190, 207–20, 224, 234n144, 235n166 Prises de Terre exhibition 119 “Prolegomena to a third Manifesto of Surrealism” (Breton) 84 psychoanalysis 80; rejection of 52 Psychopathological Art exhibit 56 “Questioning Children” series (Appel) 136, 143, 155–6, 158–60, 161, 162–3, 165 Ra Group 98 Ragon, Michel 2–3, 83, 90, 119–20, 131n196, 164 Raine, Jean 27, 87, 118–19, 142–3 Raufast, Régine 154 Ray, Man 111 Read, Herbert 182 realism 108 The Red Flag (Le Drapeau Rouge) 97 Red Masks (Jacobsen) 53, 54 Refex group 108–9, 158 Refex journal 19, 30, 86, 95, 108, 110, 114, 193 Reinhoud 15, 48, 58, 64, 122, 239; Good Grief 64, 65 Reinout d’Haese 14 Restany, Pierre 159 Return to Life (La Joie de Revivre) (Storck) 146 Reverberations (Les Réverbères) group 88 Revolutionary Surrealism (Le Surréalisme révolutionnaire) 86–7 Revolutionary Surrealist group/movement 12–13, 16, 32, 70, 81–3, 85–90, 97–8, 102, 104, 108, 114, 211 Richards, I. A. 140 Richter, Hans 27 Ricoeur, Paul 221 Riemens, Henny 215 Rietveld, Gerrit 239 The Right of the Eagle I and II (Jorn) 66–7 Rimbaud, Arthur 12, 95

274

Index

Riopelle, Jean-Paul 119 Rius, Robert 88 Roh, Franz 149 Roos, Jørgen 140 Rooskens, Anton 18, 24, 25, 109, 112–13, 157, 188, 207–9; Danse Macabre 209–10; Homage to Lautréamont 209, 210; The People of the Sun 209, 214 roosters 192 Rothberg, Michael 136 Rothko, Mark 219 Rousseau, Madeleine 119 Royal Museum of Fine Arts, 2008 exhibition 31 Saint Michael Floored by the Dragon (Alechinsky) 61, 62 “Salon d’Octobre” 121 Sandberg, Willem 14, 18, 23, 111–13, 156–7, 163, 165, 203–4, 211 Sankt Hans drøm (Midsummer Night’s Dream) (Guðnason) 203 Santner, Eric 71 Sartre, Jean-Paul 147 Sasson, Selim 100, 135, 144 scandals 112–13; Cobra journal 25 Scandinavia 11 The Scapegoat (Constant) 69 Schierbeek, Bert 23, 113 Schneider, Gérard 90, 119 Schöffer, Nicolas 239 School of Paris 18, 43, 56–7, 121, 140, 165 Schwitters, Kurt 158 Scutenaire, Louis 90 Sentinel sculptures (Tajiri) 174–5 Serbanne, Claude 199–200 Sherman, Cindy 111 Signs Carved on the Churches of the Eure and Calvados (Signes Gravés sur les Églises de l’Eure et du Calvados) (Jorn) 93 Situationist International group 31, 33, 42, 237, 239–40 The Situationist Times journal 33, 243–4 Sköld, Otto 123 slate 91, 92, 93 Socialist Realism 16, 32, 105–6, 108 “‘Socialist Realism’ Against the Revolution” (Le ‘Réalisme Socialiste’ Contre la Révolution) 105–6 The Society of the Spectacle (La Societé du Spectacle) (Debord) 241 Some of These Days 124 The Sorrow of Belgium (Claus) 146 Soulages, Pierre 90, 119 Sounds (Klänge) (Kandinsky) 91 Souris, Andre 118 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de 229, 236n212

spontaneity 80, 82 spontaneous abstraction 7, 87, 99, 101 Stalingrad, No Man’s Land, or the Mad Laughter of Courage (Jorn) 7 Stedelijk Museum 1, 110; exhibition in 14–15, 57, 98, 110–11, 138, 158, 203, 209–11; “International Exhibitions of Experimental Art” 23–4, 168–9; “Young Painters” 18, 112, 157–8, 209 Steichen, Edward 150–2 Steinert, Otto 143, 149–50, 152 stereotypes, reinforcing 125–6 stone 91, 92, 93 The Stone and the Pillow (La Pierre et l’oreiller) (Dotremont) 15, 93 Storck, Henri 118, 146; Peasant Symphony (Symphonie Paysanne) 146; Return to Life (La Joie de Revivre) 146 Strebelle, Olivier 59 “A Striving for Universal Wholeness” 217–18 “Subjective photography” 143, 149–52 “Subjective photography” movement 143, 149, 152 Surrealism 3, 7, 32, 43–4, 47–8, 51, 60, 67, 79–85, 87–90, 97–9, 104, 109–10, 114, 117, 122, 125, 184 Surrealism and Painting (Breton) 83–4 Surrealism in 947 102, 103, 104 “Surrealism in Broad Daylight” (Surréalisme en Plein Soleil) 89, 102 Surréalisme révolutionnaire 97 “Surrealist Manifesto” 79 Surrealist Manifesto (1929) 84 Svanberg, Max Walter 32, 82, 86, 122–5 Swedish Imaginists 82 Sweeney, James Johnson 165 symbolic abstraction 53, 205 symbolism 74, 122, 134, 143, 184; Cobra on 44, 46; Jungian 52 Szemere-Kemeny, Madeleine 24 Tachism 116, 119–21 Tajiri, Shinkichi 5, 22–3, 72, 137, 158, 167–8, 243; Friendship Knot 174; “Knots” sculptures 167, 174; “One-Day Sculptures” 168, 169; Sentinel sculptures 174–5; “Warrior” sculptures 32, 136, 143, 166, 169, 170, 171, 173–5; Wounded Knee 171, 173 Tanguy, Yves 18, 47 Tapié, Michel 119–20, 165, 181 There Are More Things in the Earth of a Painting than in the Heaven of Aesthetic Theory 79–80, 100 Therkildsen, Agnete 7, 9, 21, 190, 196, 199 Thommesen, Erik 7, 9–10, 91, 196 Thorsen, Jens Jørgen 243

Index A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 74 Tightrope Walkers (Doucet) 95 Ting, Walasse 239 “To the Point” manifesto 112 Tollund Man 155 Tolstoy, Leo 182 totalitarian states 40–1, 71, 172 Totem (Appel) 159 totemism 37–8, 75n2 “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” (Breton and Trotsky) 85, 105 Toy Picture (Jorn) 8, 44, 54 Toyen 102 The Tree of Evil and Evil (L’Arbre du Mal et du Mal) (Dotremont) 89 Triumph of Death (Brueghel) 70 Trotsky, Léon 85 The Two Sisters (Les Deux Soeurs) 88 Tylor, Edward 4 Tzara, Tristan 100 Ubac, Raoul 12, 14, 26–7, 32, 82, 87–91, 93–4, 144, 153–4, 177n67; Cobra 92; drawings/paintings 91 United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights 66, 71 United States 46, 166–7, 171–2 Untitled (Atlan) 28 Untitled (van der Gaag) 201 Valentin, Curt 14 van der Gaag, Lotti 190, 233n94; Untitled 201 van der Horst, Trudy 68 van Domselaer, Jap 69 van Domselaer, Matie 18, 20–1, 69 van Eyck, Aldo 23, 24, 157, 162–3, 215, 239 Van Gindertael, Roger 155 Van Gogh, Vincent 181 van Lint, Louis 14 Vandalism, Scandinavian Institute for Comparative 240 Vandercam, Serge 14–15, 27, 32, 72, 96–7, 134, 137, 146, 155, 239; “Bogs” (Fagnes) 155; and Dotremont 97, 144, 155; Hooks (Crochets) 147, 148, 149, 151–2, 154–5; Mer du Nord, Nieuport (North Sea, Nieuwpoort) 134, 135, 143–4, 154; Nieuwpoort 144, 145; paintings 155; photography 134, 143–4, 146–7, 152–4 Vaneigem, Raoul 241, 245n13 Venice Biennale (1972) 15 Venus of Urbino (Titian) 116 Vieira da Silva, Maria Helena 188 violence, of war 39, 67–8

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Vischer, Robert 182 The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty) 195–6 The Voices of Silence (Les voix du silence) (Lautréamont) 40 Voices of Silence (Malraux) 151 Vrijman, Jan 166 war: art as witness to 32, 136–8, 164; E. Alfelt on 33; Ferlov on 33 “War” paintings 67–8, 70 “War Visions” series 65–6 “Warrior” sculptures (Tajiri) 32, 136, 143, 166–8, 169, 170–1, 173–4 Welles, Florent 14 Wemaëre, Pierre 83, 239 Wesselink, Claartje 157 wheel images 69–70 White, Minor 149 Wiggers, Harry 14, 100 Willems, Robert 87, 100 Wolvecamp, Theo 18, 25, 66, 109, 112, 158, 188, 207, 243; Explosion 207, 208 women 189–90, 198, 202, 206, 226–7, 244; depictions of 216; marginalization of 152, 199–201, 222 wood 159 “word-painting” experiments 13, 15, 26, 79, 94–5, 123, 192; Dotremont 37, 81, 237–8; Dotremont/Vandercam 97, 155; Golden Swine 37, 38, 44, 46, 66; Je Lève, Tu Lèves, Nous Rêvons 37, 79, 123; Jorn 37; Lucebert 109; There Are More Things in the Earth of a Painting than in the Heaven of Aesthetic Theory 79–80, 100 World War I 1, 39, 153 World War II 1, 7, 12, 32, 39, 42, 66, 72, 90, 102, 104, 138, 146, 153, 205; impacts of 135–6 Worringer, Wilhelm 182 Wounded Animal (Animal Blessé) (Masson) 48 Wounded Knee (Tajiri) 171, 173 Wounded Wild Animal (Jorn) 49, 184–7 Young, James 173–4 “Young Belgian Painting” (Jeune peinture belge) group 12, 14, 16, 100, 108 “Young Painters” exhibition 18, 112, 157–8, 209 Zadkine, Ossip 167–8 Zangrie, Luc see de Heusch, Luc Žižek, Slavoj 228–9 Zondervan, Henri 213 Zwei Figuren (Two Figures) (Götz) 107