Karel Appel was an influential Dutch painter whose figurative abstractions employed expressive colors and forms. Like Jean Dubuffet, Appel found inspiration in the artwork of children and the rejection of sophisticated aesthetic tastes. “Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast,” he reflected. “To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life.” A member of the international avant-garde group CoBrA, founded in Paris in 1948, Karel Appel is broadly known for the whimsical style of his expressionist paintings. Considered the European counterparts of the American Abstract Expressionists, Appel and other members of CoBrA privileged spontaneity in an intuitive, almost child-like approach to painting.