Cobra - the name is compounded from the first letters of the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam - was a romantic movement and part of a wider manifestation of expressionist art throughout the Western world, including, among other things, American Abstract Expressionism and the work of the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Cobra called itself a ‘group of Barbarians’ or ‘Vikings’, a northern alliance against the aesthetic and intellectual Parisian abstractionists who dominated the world of art. Barbarians though they might have been, three members of the group provided the movement with a solid theoretical foundation. These three, the Belgian Christian Dotremont, the Dutchman Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Dane Asger Jorn, could be considered Cobra’s heart, though Asger Jorn has, in retrospect, turned out to be Cobra’s most important representative.

In 1974, Willemijn Stokvis published a history of Cobra and to this day, her book is the standard work. Clearly and candidly she describes the development of the individual members of the movement and also the way in which their manifestos and actions, which shocked the easygoing art world of their day, were received. She bases her story not only on a host of documents and art-historical sources, but also - and this is what makes her book so valuable - on extensive interviews with the artists, many of whom have since died, and on countless eye-witness accounts.

Stokvis has completely revised her book in this recent edition and updated it in the light of contemporary opinion. Thus she describes the Danish Cobra movement as a continuation of the movement round Helhesten which harked back to ancient, primitive Danish art. In the Netherlands, by contrast, Cobra marked the first breakthrough of modern art, and in Belgium, where the movement did not attain true importance until 1956, it must be considered a special moment in the slow development of Belgian surrealism.

Willemijn Stokvis’s Cobra book, now enriched by a great many colour illustrations, is an exceptional work, providing a broad and at the same time detailed picture of an important art movement.