COBRA (1948- 1952) was an international expressionist art movement of painters and writers. The name is derived from the first letters of the three northern European cities—Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, cities where the founder artists came from. Among its foremost practitioners are Pierre Alechinsky, Christian Dotremont, Reinhoud D’Haese, and Raoul Ubac. Influenced by poetry, folk art, children’s art, film, and primitive art, the semiabstract canvases by these artists display brilliant color and spontaneous, violent brushwork. They stood against every form of aestheticizing academicism since to them it pointed only the intellectual size of art out. Thence, the use of easy form, lines color and pure spontaneous movements in which they didn’t hesitate to revert to the so called Primitive art. COBRA had a great impact on the development of subsequent European Abstract Expressionism.
