Art: The Plumed Serpents

Their lines lash, writhe and slither like snakes conjured out of enchanted paint pots. Their color is alive with serpentine swirls, and beneath the agitated surface can be glimpsed figures festooned like confetti-draped masqueraders. Not French, though living in Paris, and not American, for all the superficial resemblances to U.S. abstract expressionism, the artists are known by the acronym COBRA, derived from the first letters of the capital cities of their birth: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam (see color).

These northern Europeans, who claim as ancestors both such German expressionists as Emil Nolde and the Norwegian Edvard Munch, represent an increasingly individual point of view. Their kind of psychic improvisation takes its cue from dense color and tightly woven forest. Fundamentally passionate paint slingers, they are equally adept with lithographs, a sampling of which went on view last week in Manhattan’s Lefebre Gallery. A few, such as Guggenheim International Prizewinner Karel Appel, are well known; others less publicized are:

∙ CORNEILLE (full name: Corneille Guillaume Beverloo), 42, was born in Belgium of Dutch parents. His splats and spatters of color mash nature out flat like culture-smear samples sandwiched between giant microscope slides. “I always need to latch onto exterior reality,” he says, “but I don’t do any preliminary work. It’s like jazz taking a theme: the rest is spontaneous, emotional creation.”

∙ ASGER JORN, 50, a Dane and a former pupil of Leger, makes art scampering with the mythical trolls who lurk in arctic forest shadows. Jorn has dissolved the haunted figures of Nolde and Munch. In his equally demoniac fantasy, man remains only as dismembered memories in a decorative dream, a roiling Rorschach test of tortured, teasing sensibilities.

∙ PIERRE ALECHINSKY, 37, is a balding Belgian who claims that copying nature bores him. Yet, says he, “my work, provoked by emotion and spontaneity, will never be abstract. It will always represent man.” But man is a strange creature to Alechinsky, brought up on a tradition of Hieronymus Bosch and James Ensor, and his provocations have led to a bestiary of amorphous animals, gloopy noggins, jumbles of legs. For him, “the canvas is a proving ground, not a screen to hide behind.”

No misery, however, is implied in the colorism of COBRA. Bogged down in the dark morass of existential despair, most postwar European art either has lacked the tenacity of U.S. abstract expressionism or was bowled over by the impact of pop. COBRA’S impish founders meld genial monsters with bright hues to make a joyful vision. Never sallow, slick nor stuffily sober, this art draws from dreams, not nightmares.