Cobra : the history of a European avant-garde movement 1948-1951

Radical and transnational (the group’s name derives from the main urban centers of the movement--Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam), Cobra caused a revolution in modern art in just three years of active work that continues to influence artists to this day. Willemijn Stokvis’ classic text on the group, Cobra: A History of a European Avant-Garde Movement was first published in 1974, and is now fully updated. In this comprehensive, richly illustrated volume, Stokvis (a leading authority on the movement) presents the history of Cobra through primary documents, conversations and correspondence conducted with the artists themselves and the movement’s eyewitnesses.

Cobra was active from its founding in November 1948 to its official disbanding in 1951, and included artists such as Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Constant and Corneille. Creative freedom, experimentation and social engagement were the driving forces of the movement, which married a primitivist eye for the raw creativity in the art of children and the mentally ill with a Marxist interpretation of the world to come. Rejecting both naturalism and pure abstraction at the end of the Second World War, Cobra valued unbridled experimentation and creative freedom, manifested in brilliant, colorful expressionist paintings of distorted figures that provided a more emotional and ideological European counterpoint to the roughly contemporary “action painting” of the Abstract Expressionists in the United States. After the group’s dissolution, some of Cobra’s members were inherited by the Situationist International.