Karel Appel: Polaroid Series
Franz W. Kaiser
Anyone born before 1980 will remember the ubiquitous Polaroid cameras. Before the dawn of digital image media, this was the only technology accessible to everyone making it possible to have the photograph in hand almost immediately after pressing the button. In the 1970s, Polaroids were all the rage: 8 cm squared images within slightly larger passe-partouts. Artists worked with them as well: David Hockney, for example, assembled collages of them, and Andy Warhol always carried a Polaroid camera with him - for quick shots that could be used as models for portrait paintings. At the end of the 1970s, Polaroid introduced a camera one could take instant 20 x 24 inches pictures with (51 x 61 cm approx.).
This gigantic instant picture format was primarily intended for taking conventional portraits and to replicate works of art from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The camera, which is about the size of a refrigerator, was never mass-produced. Moreover, its use required some professional skills. In 1986, John Reuter and Dutchman Eelco Wolf, Polaroid’s communications director, set up a studio in New York, a Mecca for artists back then,
which had turned out to be the most regular customers: Apart from the high image quality and sharpness of detail, enthralling a photo-realistic painter like Chuck Close or a detail-obsessed photographer like Robert Mapplethorpe for example, a Polaroid picture is always unique and irreplaceable - just like a painting. Even Andy Warhol used them, followed by Julian Schnabel and William Wegman, among others.
It appears quite a surprise that Karel Appel, who is not exactly known as a photographer or as having worked with photography, also started working with 'Polaroid 20x24' (the name of this product) in the late 1980s. This can perhaps be explained partly by Eelco Wolf's Dutch origins, leading him to the Dutchman Appel, who as a painter pur sang was not an obvious choice in the first place. But above all, his Polaroid paintings reveal an attitude that was characteristic of him and that runs through his entire oeuvre. Pierre Restany, the French art critic, and founder of Nouveau Réalisme put it as follows: ‘Appel says loudly and clearly that he hates repetition, and in his art and in life, he constantly calls into question everything routine.’ And to avoid lapsing into a routine, he repeatedly sought friction with the new, the still unknown. These could either be drawings of children or the mentally ill, found objects or, indeed, photographic images.