To be or not to be Cobra. Esther Schreuder on Lotti van der Gaag and the Cobra movement (original) (raw)

Primitivism, humanism, and ambivalence: Cobra and Post-Cobra

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2011

Dotremont and Joseph Noiret. The group's major exhibitions in Amsterdam in 1949 and Liège in 1951 involved many more artists from Høst, postwar Surrealism, and other international contexts (there never was any official list of Cobra "members"; only those who were more or less active, and those included in each manifestation of the group).

Cobra: A Psychological, Political, and Artistic Response to the Second World War

This thesis explores the emergence of the Cobra Movement in the Netherlands, where the War and the Holocaust were especially brutal, and where the Post-War socio-political atmosphere was toxically stagnant. It is my purpose to contradict the interpretations of Cobra art that deem it cheerfully optimistic in favor of my own interpretation of the movement as a post-traumatic response to the Post-War Dutch condition. A thorough examination of the War and Reconstruction in the Netherlands informs the atmosphere from which Cobra emerged. I then expand on trauma theory to provide psychological evidence for my own interpretation of Dutch Cobra as a spiritual, philosophical, and political response to the Dutch experience of World War II and the reconstruction years. I identify the movement’s two central goals to be spiritual and artistic rebirth, and the systematic restructuring of society through the dissolution of traditional artistic institutions. Dutch Cobra turned to Danish avant-gardism and modern philosophy for ideas that could be transformed into tools to achieve their goals. The resulting Dutch Cobra ideology proposed a quasi-Marxist social revolution through art, and integrated Danish concepts such as anti-aestheticism, spontaneity, folklore, intersubjectivity, and materiality. Works by Corneille Beverloo, Karel Appel, and Constant Nieuwenhuys are visually analyzed to demonstrate Dutch Cobra’s central goals and the ideology developed to achieve them. These visual analyses also situate the movement within its post-traumatic, socio-political context. At its core, this thesis demonstrates the Dutch Cobra artists’ unwavering desire to heal both society and themselves. This thesis received Highest Thesis Honors and won the Madeline Caviness Thesis Prize.

Creaturely Cobra

October, 2012

In the aftermath of World War II, young artists in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam began to insist, at first separately and then together, on the necessity of a new approach to the brutal conditions of the time. They did so under the name "Cobra," an abbreviation of the names of the cities where they were based as well as a tribute to the snake they took up as an emblem. In Copenhagen a group of painters and sculptors had already formed around the magazine Helhesten (Hell horse), edited by the precocious Asger Jorn. Encouraged by the Copenhagen example, three young artists in Amsterdam-Constant Nieuwenhuys, Karel Appel, and Corneille-launched "the Experimental Group in Holland" in July 1948 with a magazine of their own called Reflex. Finally, in Brussels, where Surrealism lingered as a force, writers directed the scene, especially Christian Dotremont, who would soon edit the eponymous magazine of Cobra. Jorn met Constant in the fall of 1946, and contacted Dotrement the next summer; by late 1948 the three were able to forge a coalition, which was as fragile as it was intense, lasting little more than three years. Despite ample evidence of Stalin's purges, the three refused to abandon Communism, and they insisted on dialectical materialism as essential to artistic experiment. They were linked, too, in their opposition to both functionalist and formalist positions, with Jorn reacting against his early training in Paris under Léger and Le Corbusier, and Constant turning against his Dutch forebears in De Stijl. At the same time, Jorn and Constant wanted to depart from Surrealism, aspects of which-a painterly automatism above all-they appropriated nonetheless. "By means of this irrational spontaneity," Jorn wrote in the first issue of Cobra with this automatist technique in mind, "we get closer to the vital source of life." 1 Does the aim of "the vital source of life" make Cobra another belated Expressionism, one inflected by primitivism and Surrealism, or is there a distinctive program to be extracted from its different practices, a Cobra idea? Its concerns with the art of tribal peoples, children, and the mentally ill (which the Nazis had declared "degenerate" only a decade before) are familiar from prewar avantgardes, and even its involvement with folk culture (Jorn in particular was fascinat-1. Asger Jorn, "Discours aux pingouins," COBRA 1 (1949), p. 8. 2. Jorn and company hardly invented this idiom. As Guy Atkins writes, "What is now regarded as the typically 'Cobra' inventory of forms: strange birds, beasts, wizards, masks, a general melee of zoomorphic and human shapes-such motifs had figured in the paintings of Egill Jacobsen and others since the late thirties" (

Asger Jorn and Cobra – A Many-Headed Beast

A Cultural History of the Avant- Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950, 2019

This text examines the art works and collaborations of Cobra (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, 1948–1951), foregrounding the central role of the Danish artist Asger Jorn and his idea of the “human animal”. It describes the art of Cobra as a critique of both pre-war primitivism and humanism. Cobra’s populist attitude, interdisciplinarity, collectivism, spontaneity and materialism make the movement a unique Scandinavian contribution among postwar avant-garde movements.

People in Motion: Gego and Schendel's Moving Art

The Other Transatlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, , 2018

is an independent curator and writer. Most recently, she was the Transhistorical Curatorial Fellow at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem where she organized A Global Table: Still Life, Colonialism, and Contemporary Art (2017). In the same year, she curated Abstract Experiments: Latin American Art on Paper after 1950 (2017) for the Art Institute of Chicago. She was the Research Associate for Kerry James: Mastry (2016) at the MCA Chicago where she also organized Unbound: Contemporary Art after Frida Kahlo (2014) and Zachary Cahill: Snow (2014) as the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow. She also served as a graduate curatorial fellow at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. where she assisted Senior Curator Valerie Fletcher with Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space (2012). She earned a PhD in art history, at the University of Texas at Austin. In Austin, she was graduate curatorial fellow at the Blanton Museum of Art where she organized Manuel Álvarez Bravo and His Contemporaries (2010), Surrealist Prints from Europe to the Americas (2009), and Tracing Time: