After a career as curator and director in France, The Netherlands and Germany and a professorship at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Franz W. Kaiser is since 2021 the Director of the Karel Appel Foundation in Amsterdam. He has curated many exhibitions internationally, both as independent curator and within institutions, among which a significant number of Karel Appel exhibitions, and he has written and published extensively, primarily but not exclusively, on art of the 20th century.

‘Spontaneity’ as a common thread of the 1950s´ international avant-gardes - Its origins, meaning and implications for the conservation of paintings

After debunking a sensationalist cover story run by a Dutch national daily in 2016, which warned about a conservational timebomb hidden in Karel Appel’s oeuvre, Franz Kaiser qualified the stereotype ‘spontaneity’ associated with many of the avant-gardes of the 1950ies on both sides of the Atlantic: It turns out that one of the foremost figures of the Parisian ‘Abstraction Lyrique’, Hans Hartung, systematically used drawings as a starting point for his paintings, which squarely contradicts the stereotype, whereas Jackson Pollock ostensibly didn’t use drawings as a reference for his drippings. Appel, who often, but not always started from drawings must be placed so to speak in between.

The examples discussed and their interpretation may serve as a tentative frame of reference for judging about what is a damage to be restored and what is to be considered as being part of the work.