Human Animals: the Art of Combra

An exploration of the avant-garde post-World War II European Cobra artists’ use of animal images, and how they functioned as forms expressing popular visual culture, Human Animals also demonstrates Cobra’s exploration and critique of ideas about human and collective cultures, especially those relating to the animalistic, instinctual, or “primitive.” The imagery of these artists paralleled and predated Abstract Expressionism, and since the 1950s, Cobra has influenced the work of many modern and contemporary artists who will also be the subject of this extensive study. The exhibition, which is the third in the museum’s, series of Cobra exhibitions, derives in large part from the Museum’s Golda and Meyer Marks Collection the largest collection of Cobra art in the United States, and also reunites key works in American collections with those in Europe.