Karel Appel : Life-size and Larger

For some two years, Karel Appel experimented with this large instant format, with the fragmentation of the human being – either as a portrait or a nude – being the thematic common
thread. Titan Series no.7 is the second to last work from this group. With this thread, he dealt with one of the perhaps most fundamental themes of Western art history – consciously or
unconsciously, we will never know, but that isn’t relevant. For centuries, and till not so long ago, the ideal of beauty of the classical period formed the basis of academic training, but mostly just fragments of antique sculptures have survived. Until the 19th century, it was customary to complete them – until the realisation that their beauty could be brought out even more strongly by this fragmentation. The avant-garde technique of collage – first with the Cubists, then with Dada, Schwitters, the Surrealists – assembled fragments of reality, i.e. found objects, precisely to oppose the antique ideal of beauty. A similar strategy was employed by Neo-Dada and Nouveau Réalisme in the late 1950s and early 1960s – and Karel Appel drew inspiration from them. With his 1987–89 Polaroid works, he applied this assemblage technique to extremely realistic
photographs of human body fragments. After the end of his experiment with an unusual medium, he again devoted himself with all his might to the theme of the nude, this time using the medium of painting alone. source www.eenwerk.nl