Karel Appel was an influential Dutch painter whose figurative abstractions employed expressive colours and forms. Like Jean Dubuffet, Appel found inspiration in the artwork of children and the rejection of sophisticated aesthetic tastes. In 1948, he helped form the CoBrA group, a collective of artists who were united in their rejection of rationalism and geometric abstraction. Appel’s works are presently held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.