After the prolonged trauma of the Second World War, young artists across Europe converged with relief on Paris. Sickened by all the destruction and Hitler’s savage attempt to condemn adventurous modern art as “degenerate”, they were in a mood for new beginnings. None more exuberantly than the ebullient rebels who formed an avant-garde group called Cobra. It was an acronym of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, the cities where the group’s members originated. Above all, though, the image of a snake appealed to them. At once unsettling and exotic, it summed up Cobra’s determination to give fresh life to a damaged world “bereft of all belief”.

Carl-Henning Pedersen was one of the group’s most outstanding Danish members. He and his friends, including the equally rebellious Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Constant, announced Cobra’s birth at the café de l’Hôtel Notre-Dame on November 8, 1948. They were convinced that “a new society will follow this and then man will do, by nature, what currently demands a fierce struggle: he will be a living creature”. Like his allies, Pedersen saw Cobra as a northern monster, bent on creating an art of unashamedly explosive emotion.

He was already 35, a seasoned painter with a considerable career behind him. After wanting at first to become a writer, he had been encouraged by his first wife, the artist Else Alfelt, to concentrate instead on painting.

Pedersen held his first solo exhibition in Copenhagen at the precocious age of 23, and at that stage committed himself to an intricately structured, geometric abstraction. But once he made contact with Egill Jacobsen, who would also join the Cobra group, Pedersen broke through to a greater degree of freedom. Near the end of the 1930s he became obsessed by a new source of inspiration, describing it as “the land of myths that lies hidden in every man and to which he should subjugate himself in order to resurrect his ancient primitive urge to create images and symbols.”

Initially, his watercolours and chalk drawings showed the greatest amount of vitality. He defines a Happy Figure, dancing and grinning with garish red teeth, who owes an overt debt to children’s art.

But Scandinavian folklore and prehistory prompted Pedersen to explore darker themes as well. In a large painting called The Eater, leering predators devour their helpless victims. Pedersen was capable of tenderness in images like Red Horse, where the dominant animal smiles and feeds its offspring despite the alarming airborne creatures hovering nearby. Bird and Sun may appear an equally optimistic watercolour, yet the ferocity of the sun’s colour suggests that it will exterminate everything around it.

The increasingly fearful mood generated by the war ensured that Pedersen continued to give vent to apocalyptic visions for several years. Influenced above all by the German Expressionists at their most vehement, he discovered how to make his brushmarks more raw and menacing. The world seems constantly threatened by omnipotent, malicious deities who burn and break everything around them.

Only in 1948, the year of Cobra’s birth, did he allow himself to indulge in hope. A big painting called The Red Ship shows a vessel watched over by a benevolent yellow god, who smiles as he fills the canvas with his luminosity. Pedersen had developed his own “spontaneous Pointillism”, learning from the French Neo-Impressionists how to make images that shimmer and dance in front of our eyes.

Patronage for his work during the grimmest period of war had been given by audacious Danish collectors like Elna Fonnesbech-Sandberg, who did not hesitate to hang Pedersen's most cacophonous paintings on the walls of her home. He felt confident enough to return to writing as well, producing in 1945 a volume of poetry illustrated with his own unfettered drawings.

Pedersen soon gained an international reputation, showing his painted work in official exhibitions sent abroad from Denmark. The State Museum in Copenhagen proved supportive, too, and in 1948 he was among the artists chosen to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale.

The following year proved particularly rewarding for the Cobra group. It grew, spontaneously, into a leading cosmopolitan network of like-minded young artists, who corresponded and, despite lack of money, travelled extensively.

Staying in each other’s homes, they often became close friends and collaborated freely. Refusing to restrict themselves to a single medium or way of working, these restless young innovators experimented with collage, assemblage and film as well as painting, drawing and sculpture.

Cobra’s general secretary, the Brussels-based Christian Dotremont, was appointed editor-in-chief of the group's magazine. The first issue, published in Copenhagen and simply called Cobra, announced its flamboyant existence with a lithographic cover jointly designed by Jorn, Jacobsen and Pedersen. Among its mêlée of wildly drawn forms, maniacal birds flaunting turbulent wings can be detected. The issue contained Jorn’s classic essay Discours aux Pinguins, where Cobra’s aims were defined as an urge “to escape the rule of reason — which is and always has been nothing other than the idealised rule of the bourgeoisie — in order to achieve the reign of life”.

In the summer of the same annus mirabilis, a large gathering of Cobra members participated in a congress at the village of Bregnerod near Copenhagen, and spent a month living together in an English architects’ cottage. They painted the entire interior with brash, outspoken images, allowing their own children to join in as well.

The right-hand wall of the living room was painted by Pedersen with festive, wide-eyed creatures all jostling for attention beneath the sloping, wood-beamed roof. The door in the middle of this riotous mural was decorated by Klaus, Pedersen’s seven-year-old son. And on the other side of the room, Dotremont's words proclaimed a defiant message: “Don’t destroy your dreams when you enter / Put it on your shoulders like a backpack / And join in with us.”

After Bregnerod, the passion for painting walls spread throughout the Cobra movement. And the group’s first significant international exhibition was held in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

By now, Pedersen’s work had become direct and improvisational, boldly reliant on bright, unmixed colours bound together with tangled lines. Although Cobra was dissolved in 1951, both he and many of its other members stayed faithful to the liberated philosophy they had developed during the movement’s feverish heyday.

Pedersen continued to work with undimmed energy, and never lost his commitment to a mythical world dominated by great birds, horses, suns and gods. Often described as the Hans Christian Andersen of Danish painting, he once declared in a poetic text that “I want to ensnare the golden sunlight and capture it on my canvas”.

His work grew looser in later years, and the forms more monumental. The pointillist spots he had favoured during the Cobra period became larger, while the dazzling colours were gradually replaced by softer and more hazy alternatives.

But Pedersen lost none of his appetite for working on a large, mural-like scale. In 1968 he produced a colossal ceramic wall for the city of Herning on Jutland, 170 miles west of Copenhagen. Called Fantasy Play Around the Wheel of Life, it demonstrated his steadfast involvement with exclamatory figures caught up in a dithyrambic dance.

Although he sometimes worked only in one colour, Pedersen always remained faithful to this fervent, intoxicating vision. Even when commissioned to produce a titanic decoration in mosaic for the walls of a Danish cathedral at Ribe in 1985, he did not hesitate to invest Jacob’s Dream and The Ascension of Eliawith a boisterous, highly dramatic intensity.

In 2001 Herning made him a Citizen of Honour, recognising his generous donation of 3,000 paintings, drawings and sculpture to the city. Pedersen had originally offered this collection to Copenhagen, but the capital turned down the offer, claiming that no money was available to display it. Herning promptly accepted his gift, building a museum to house the works. It remains the largest collection of his work.

Only a month before his death, he had donated 40 of his works to the Statens Museum for Kunst in the Danish capital. They include two of his most impressive achievements, the 1972 Red Firebird and the 1988 Out in the Wide World.

His first wife died in 1974, but Pedersen is survived by his second wife, Sidsel Ramson.

Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter, was born on September 23, 1913. He died on February 20, 2007, aged 93