Personage in Blue is a limited-edition lithograph by Dutch artist Karel Appel, one of the founding figures of the CoBrA movement and one of the most recognizable European painters and printmakers of the postwar period.
Created in 1980, the work is executed as a lithograph on paper and measures approximately 74 × 56 cm / 29 × 22 in. It was produced in a limited edition of 175 examples, with individual prints documented as hand-signed by Appel and numbered from the edition.
The composition reflects Appel’s highly distinctive visual language: energetic drawing, heavily simplified figures, and intense areas of color that sit somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Human and animal forms often appear in his work as rough, almost childlike shapes, giving the images a direct and spontaneous quality.
Appel was a co-founder of the CoBrA group in 1948, alongside artists including Constant, Asger Jorn, Corneille, and others. The group rejected academic restraint in favor of spontaneity, experimentation, vivid color, and imagery inspired by children’s drawings, folk art, mythology, and so-called primitive art.
Although Personage in Blue was created decades after CoBrA’s short formal existence, the work retains many of the qualities associated with Appel’s earlier practice: immediacy, expressive distortion, saturated color, and a deliberately unrefined handling of the figure.
A strong collectible for admirers of Karel Appel, CoBrA, postwar European art, expressionist printmaking, signed lithographs, and limited-edition works on paper.
