The avant-garde art collective CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam) existed from 1949 to 1951. It included Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Christian Dotremont and grew to a group of 60 artists including writers, painters and sculptors from Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France and England. Alechinsky proclaimed: ‘CoBrA means spontaneity; total opposition to the calculations of cold abstraction... and to all forms of split between free thought and the action of painting freely.’