Pierre Alechinsky

Pierre Alechinsky was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1927, and currently lives in Bougival, a French town near Paris. He studied illustration, printing and photography at the l’Ecole nationale supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts décoratifs de La Cambre, in Brussels, in 1944 to 1948 as World War II was drawing to a close. In 1949 he started the CoBrA art group with fellow artists Christian Dotremont, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn. In 1983 he became a Professor of painting at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, France; he received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels in 1994, and one of his designs was used on a 1995 Belgian postage stamp.