Christian Dotremont

The Belgian artist Christian Dotremont (1922-79) found his special place in CoBrA as the group’s poet and philosopher. He formulated CoBrA’s manifesto “The Case was Heard” in 1948 and served as the group’s primary spokesman and secretary until 1951. Asger Jorn later said that, without Dotremont, there would not have been a CoBrA. Dotremont’s career emerged from the intellectual atmosphere of Surrealism in 1940’s Belgium, where the way forward was a revolutionary way of thinking combined with artistic experimentation. In the CoBrA group, he found a way to interweave art and politics even more closely.

Dotremont’s Logograms
The written word was always Dotremont's starting point – even when he later began to supplement the poetry with a career as a visual artist in the 1960s. His painted works appear as almost calligraphic patterns, often completed by poetic text, bridging the gap between the otherwise separate worlds of the written word and the visual arts. He called these images “Logograms”, where he created smooth transitions between the meaning of the poetic texts and the graphic effect of the brushstrokes. 

Jorn, Alechinsky, Appel and Corneille
Dotremont’s work showcases CoBrA’s thoughts on the community and the collective experiment that became an artistic form of conversation between the group’s members. This was expressed in the “word paintings”, which he created together with Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel and Corneille. Another example of the collective experiment is Dotremont’s collection of poems “Vues Laponia” from 1957, where the individual poems were illustrated by the self-same artists.