A life in photographs by Nico Koster
WAANDERS PUBLISHERS, ZWOLLE JASKI GALLERY, AMSTERDAM
KAREL APPEL THROUGH THE EYES OF NICO KOSTER This book of photographs takes you on a journey through the life of one of the Netherlands’ most famous artists, Karel Appel, to mark the centenary of his birth. But this book isn’t just about Appel. It’s also an homage to the master photographer Nico Koster, who documented the artist for over thirty years. Koster’s pictures guide us through the life of a colourful and rebellious artist. Appel was one of the founding members of the Cobra movement in 1948. Who he was and how significant a role he played on the Dutch art scene and in the international art world is discussed extensively in the accompanying essay by Willemijn Stokvis, a leading expert on the Cobra movement. Looking back, Appel himself said of Cobra: “We painters sought to renew the art of painting; we wanted to free ourselves from the war and the cultural isolation of the occupation. We founded the movement to bolster our position in society. The general public saw us as a bunch of misfits. We were stronger together.” Cobra’s existence may have been brief (1948-1951) but the movement has had a lasting impact, inspiring and influencing contemporary artists and wider society to this day.
Nico Koster’s hundreds of photographs offer an intimate portrait of Appel’s life. I’d like to share with you three instances in my own life where Appel and Koster played a role. My first conscious encounter with Appel’s work was in 1988. It was then that I was approached by the journalist and filmmaker Jan Vrijman, coincidentally also my neighbour on Amsterdam’s Vondelstraat. Vrijman had previously directed a wonderful documentary on Appel, De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel (The Reality of Karel Appel), which won a prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1962. Vrijman and Koster came to me with the idea of mounting a major Cobra retrospective, forty years after the movement’s breakthrough exhibition in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1948 under Willem Sandberg, the museum’s visionary director at that time. This time the works for the exhibition would be drawn from the extensive Cobra collection of Karel P. van Stuijvenberg, then one of Cobra’s foremost collectors. The Cobra Foundation was set up to organize the exhibition, together with the team of the Nieuwe Kerk, the church on Amsterdam’s Dam Square where the exhibition would take place. All went as planned. The Nieuwe Kerk exhibition was a runaway success, sparking a veritable Cobra revival and even leading to the creation of a
new museum, the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen. Nico Koster also came up with the idea of asking Cobra artist Corneille to customize a tram. This colourful Cobra tram continued to ply its way through the city for many years. The Cobra 40 Years Later exhibition in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk in 1988 numbered many of Appel’s colourful works, while his famously controversial Questioning Children was used for both the exhibition poster and the cover of the catalogue to this historic retrospective. Alongside the exhibition itself there were also lectures and debates, sparking numerous encounters and conversations between Cobra’s painters, art critics and fans. For many of the participating artists it was a kind of reunion, as they came together for the first time in many years.
It was at that time, in the Nieuwe Kerk, that I really got to know Nico Koster as a master of observation. By then he had already made a name for himself as a photojournalist with an unfailing eye and ear for capturing the decisive moment. But Koster’s work goes beyond photojournalism – it is not only current, with a vision and passion for art, but also aesthetic. What he records for posterity is in itself a work of art. Koster was so moved and inspired by the colourful and abstract paintings by Appel and his fellow artists that he teamed up with Tom Okker to start a gallery on Amsterdam’s Spiegelstraat, concentrating mainly on work by Cobra artists. As a preliminary to writing this introduction, I visited Nico Koster at his home, where all the photographs for the book lay spread out on the floor. I meandered through them, gazing