The CoBrA art movement was founded on November 8, 1948 and survived until November 1951. The CoBrA art movement can with some justification, and for the time being at least, be called the last great avantgarde art movement of the 20th century. The name CoBrA is made up of the first letters of those of the cities where its members lived and worked: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Later art movements, or even contemporary ones, do not seem to have that revolutionary élan so characteristic of avantgarde movements. After 1945, indeed, it was more often that not the art critics, galleries or museums that grouped artists together in any particular category.

The underlying motive for CoBrA's revolutionary activities was the Marxist philosophy which many of its artists adhered to, but propagated especially by the two leading members, the Belgian poet and letter calligrapher, Christian Dotremont and the Danish artist-philosopher Asger Jorn.

Apart from any affinity they shared on artistic grounds, it was with this conviction particulary that they found themselves to have common interests. The international fraternization and cooperation that existed for a short time within the movement is unique, and for this particular reason Cobra cannot be compared to any other avant-garde movement of this century. With Cobra, anti-aestheticism and anti-specialization were the order of the day.

Painters wrote poetry, poets painted and drew, they established contacts with filmmakers, fashioned sculptures, took photographs, made works of art from rubbish,worked together on murals, canvas and paper. Although these artists vehemently rejected every kind of formalism or stylization, a definite Cobra 'language' or style did evolve through their collaboration, at least in their paintings, which continued to develop even after 1951.

Some of Cobra's members, such as the Belgian Pierre Alechinsky, the Dutchmen Karel Appel, Constant and Corneille and the Danes Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Henry Heerup and Egill Jacobsen, were afterwards, during the fifties and sixties, to achieve considerable fame with their work. During and immediately after the war, however, they found it difficult to scrape together an existence.

Even so, they were not solely concerned with expressing themselves creatively with the materials they could lay their hands on. With the movement they founded, they propounded their ideal of a new society. In this new world, which they felt to be close and which they thought themselves to be pioneers, everyone would have not only the right to express himself creatively but the chance to do so as well.