Karel Appel, painter, sculptor, poet, was born on April 25, 1921, in Amsterdam and died on May 3, 2006, in Zurich. From 1942 to 1944, he studied at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Together with Corneille and Constant, he founded the Dutch Experimental Group in Amsterdam in 1948, which later in the same year merged in Paris with the newly established international group CoBrA, which existed until 1951. From 1950, Appel lived and worked in Paris. In 1957, he began to alternate between Paris and New York, later also spending time in Monte Carlo and, from the 1990s, Tuscany.