COBRA: THE NAME

THE ART OF INTUITION

Cobra is a resonant name. Dotremont came up with it the day after Jorn, Appel, Corneille, Constant, Noiret and himself had joined forces as experimental artists on 8 November 1948 at a Paris café. The six rejected the sterile theorising of the Surrealists at a conference they had just attended with great expectations. In retrospect, the name was little more than an impulsive, spontaneous idea, an acronym for ‘COpenhagen’, ‘BRussels’ and ‘Amsterdam’ referring to the nationalities of the signatories. A reminder too that Paris no longer held a monopoly on the avant-garde. The group now had a name, moreover, that captured the movement’s linguistic mentality: an intuitive, absurd play on letters, sounds and words that immediately evokes an image.

Cobra quickly proved to be an excellent brand. It was adopted as the title of the group’s magazine, for which the Cobra pictogram lent itself to all sorts of exciting variations that alluded to their shared projects.

The image of an actual cobra also gradually emerged as an icon from under the shadow of the resonant name. The snake swiftly took shape in a joint lithograph by Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen and Egill Jacobsen for the cover of the first issue of Cobra magazine, and it was on the title page of the fourth issue that the motif first squirmed its way into the lettering of the word ‘Cobra’. This was clearly Dotremont’s work. Three little snakes form the ‘Co’, the ‘B’ and the ‘rA’, with the final element pinching the ‘r’ from the ‘B’ (for ‘Brussels’) to achieve a more balanced form. The typography was further adjusted in the title of issue number 6, where the snake now coils through the entire word.

For the cover of issue 6 (April 1950), Leo Van Roy came up with a cobra in the form of a tattoo on the back of a knife-throwing girl. This marked the completion of the magazine’s first annual run, to which the reader’s attention was expressly drawn on the back cover: ‘FIN DE L’AN UN DE COBRA’. The cover of Issue 7 features a semi-abstract cobra’s head executed by Raoul Ubac in a slate relief. To find the familiar Cobra icon that became the group’s lasting emblem, however, we need to turn to page 10 of that same issue: a coiled cobra, neck outstretched, with prey in its mouth and accompanied by two little stars. The reptile pops up there completely unannounced, in between a few small articles on the archetypal significance of the spiral form in tribal art. The image is implicitly associated with other ancient spiral forms, but with no further explanation. Readers at the time are likely to have understood the nod to the Danish art movement Spiralen, which had been subsumed into Cobra. Jorn borrowed the icon from a book on Babylonian cosmology by Robert Eisler (The Royal Art of Astrology, London, 1946). It subsequently assumed a life of its own as a logo on all manner of publications, invitations, posters and leaflets. It also formed the full-page illustration on the back cover of the magazine’s tenth issue, in which it was clearly stated that Cobra was disbanding. Jorn wrote about the image in a book, published in 1957, where he links it to the serpent motif found on a fourth-century hunting horn in Gallehus, Denmark. It was thus used sporadically by the Danes as a Cobra logo. The zigzag snake that Appel came up with in 1950 as a publisher’s emblem for Hugo Claus was clearly inspired by the image.