COBRA.

CoBrA was born in Paris during the 1948 International Conference of the Center for the Documentation of Avant-Garde Art, organized by the group Surréalisme Révolutionaire (SR). At the conference the artists Joseph Noiret and Christian Dotremont (Belgium); Asger Jorn (Denmark); and Karel Appel, Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys ("Constant"), and Corneille Guillaume van Beverloo ("Corneille") from Holland joined forces to reproach Surréalisme Révolutionaire's dogmatic and theoretical tendencies. The dissidents got together later at the Café Notre-Dame, where they composed the manifesto La cause était entendue (The cause was understood). Several days later, Dotrement proposed a name for the group, CoBrA, composed of the initial letters of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. In their eyes, the only way to pursue an international collaboration was in the nature of an experiment. CoBrA championed the power of violence and spontaneity by mixing primitivism and oceanian arts with certain forms of automatic production inherited from surrealism.

The group brought together some twenty or more artists and writers, including Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, and Carl-Henning Pedersen from Denmark, and later the Belgian painter Pierre Alechinsky. The activities of its founding artists prior to the group's formation furnished springboards for the young movement, including the theoretical and technical explorations of the Surréalisme Révolutionaire in Belgium, the abstract-surrealist group Høst in Denmark, and the Dutch Experimental Group. They shared a common Marxist consciousness that drew them all in one way or another toward communism. Wishing to create collective works that allied writers and painters from every country, they began a series of "Meetings in Bregnerød" on 18 August 1949, in a student lodging in north Copenhagen. The meetings produced a wall mural in the living room, while Dotrement and Edouard Jaguer from France began writing Les artistes libres (Free artists), a series of journals whose covers were created by the artists who wrote them.

Tensions escalated when the group's first exhibition was held in Amsterdam in November 1949, leading to the withdrawal of the poets in the Dutch Experimental Group, and leaving only Appel, Constant, and Corneille as the remaining Dutch members. Dotrement represented another subject of discord because he exercised too much influence over the content of the magazine CoBrA, for which he was the editor in chief. Furthermore, at the Amsterdam Conference adjoining the exposition he successfully proposed transforming the group into an Experimental Artists Internationale (EAI), which was meant to welcome artists from all countries under the condition that they avoid the three great standards of formalism: naturalism, the old surrealism, and abstract art. Jorn retorted that it was necessary to maintain different national identities and reproached Dotrement for failing to clearly break with the Belgian Communist Party, which was following the party line set in Moscow. Dotrement completed his break with the party in May 1950 by publishing the pamphlet" 'Le réalisme-socialiste' contre la révolution" ("Socialist-Realism" against revolution).

For their part Appel, Corneille, Constant, and Jorn set up shop in Paris in September 1950 and mounted expositions at the Collette Allendy Gallery, the Maeght Gallery, and the Salon des Surindépendents. They deviated from the CoBrA principles in order to almost imperceptibly revive abstract formalism, a current that Dotrement and Alechinsky remained aloof to, moving instead to Copenhagen at the close of 1950 and then to Malmö. The following year Jorn left the group, but illness brought him together with Dotrement again for a brief period at the Silkeborg Sanitarium, where out of the ashes of CoBrA they produced a series of "word-paintings" dedicated to the life of the invalid. Just as Alechinsky was organizing a CoBrA exposition in Liège on 8 November 1951, three years after the signing of the manifesto "The Cause Was Understood," Dotrement sent him a letter announcing the dissolution of the group.

The group's failure was due to a number of reasons. In reality, the Danes, Dutch, and Belgians created it at a moment when their paths were crossing but not destined to converge. The Dutch were defining themselves by demarcating their national culture, and Jorn sought recognition for Scandinavian thought at the same level as Latin thought, whereas the Belgians considered the group's literary surrealism a subject of exoticism, though all the while adhering to it. The bridge between poets and plastic artists was never fully complete—on the whole the painters remained painters, and the writers remained writers. Furthermore, although in its origins CoBrA sought to be an anti-Parisian movement, it could not thumb its nose at the French capital for long. Far from leading to the group's downfall however, this illustrates the welcome and hospitality extended to the group's principles by artists living in Paris.

Still a certain spirit of the group persisted, and almost ten years after its dissolution Jorn and Constant rejoined Guy Debord as the core of Situationist Internationale, a synthesis of art and literature, with political goals. Jorn and Alechinsky joined forces again at the dawn of the 1960s, leading Alechinsky to follow new directions in the pictorial domain. As for Dotrement, he continued to defend the spirit of CoBrA through experimental collective works and his calligraphic poems, or Logogrammes. CoBrA remains a wonderful encounter between European artists, assembled at the core of a diverse group and nurtured to maturity by a strong pictorial program that attempted to forge its own path outside the dictates of the Paris School.

See alsoAvant-Garde; Painting, Avant-Garde; Surrealism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andersen, Troels, et al. COBRA: Copenhagen, Bruxelles, Amsterdam: Art expérimental, 1948–1951. Munich and Lausanne, France, 1997. Exposition catalog.

Jaguer, Édouard. Cobra au coeur du XXe siècle. Paris, 1997.

Lambert, Jean-Clarence. Le règne imaginal: Les artistes Cobra. Paris, 1991.

Miller, Richard. Cobra. Paris, 1994.

Virginie Devillez