Applicat-Prazan

To discuss the work of Charchoune from 1945 onwards only, is to leave out essential landmarks that, from an early age, showed him to possess a very personal plastic language which never permitted him to be ‘devoured’ by the avant-garde currents at the centre of which he was always present: «My Slav nature with its insatiable curiosity determined that I literally throw myself at the most advanced art, the most advanced poetry and ideas, at everything which is the latest thing» (interview with Pierre Brisset in Le Petit Bonhomme, in March 1987 during the Tribute at the Musée de Pontoise). Refusing any compromise and never making any concessions, he had already established his identity: solitary, secret and silent like his painting. A confirmed bachelor, he devoted himself to his art, a true calling which forced him to accept, with indifference one might almost be inclined to say, a miserable condition endured for many years: «I am passive with great determination,» he admitted with considerable dignity. For ten years prior to the Second World War, Charchoune lived as ‘an unemployed intellectual’, in maids’ rooms without heating or electricity, painting only small works and often, for shortage of money, drawing on pieces of paper. The lack of recognition to which Parisian artistic circles abandoned him did not in any way alienate his belief in his calling or his faith in his work. With his Slav nature, he possessed a profoundly rooted taste for freedom. At the age of fifteen, despite his family’s disapproval, he chose to become a painter although, for many years, this calling vied with that of poetry, in which guise, to use his expression, he wrote as a «literary anarchist». Charchoune wrote throughout his life, composing as a young man aphorisms or short poems in which the spirit of dada was already apparent, and later texts most of which remain to be translated. «I free myself, I get it out of my system by writing. For me literature is a valve…» he confided (he referred to the diary he wrote in Russian, between 1958 and 1969, as La Soupape). 

It was therefore perfectly natural that he should apply to the School of Fine Arts at Kazan; he was refused admission however. «I drew very badly. I have always hated drawing. Drawing and painting are in my opinion the greatest enemies» (op. cit.). His landscapes at this period were «lyrical», «done from nature», the generous nature of the banks of the Volga where he had spent his childhood. His painting was rooted in these surroundings and also impregnated by music, practised within the family circle, a habit for which he retained a feeling of nostalgia. Music permitted the soul to express itself, mirroring nature, fluid like water without whose presence he was unable to live. «Incapable of creating with premeditation,» he acknowledged owing everything to his «natural primitivism». His work was constructed by phases which, by their continuity, have a coherence that reveal to us the rigour of his artistic process. In 1909, he discovered the avant-garde in Moscow. Van Gogh, Gauguin, the fauves, the cubists and Rimbaud. Called up to do his military service, he however deserted, and in 1912 found himself in Paris where he worked at the cubist Académie La Palette with Metzinger and Le Fauconnier. In 1914, Charchoune travelled to Barcelona where he discovered pre-dadaism and the review 391 that had recently been launched by Picabia. He also developed a passion for azulejos, the Mozarabic art form which influenced him in the creation of his concept of ‘ornamental cubism’. In 1919, he was once again in Montparnasse, where he joined the Dada movement and met Picabia through Tristan Tzara. In Germany (he visited Berlin in 1922) he became interested in the experiments then being conducted by Schwitters. During this period he wrote a number of articles for reviews. He returned to Paris in 1923. In 1925, he took up Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, a school of thought which influenced his entire work and personality. 

Through André Salmon who, in 1929, wrote the catalogue introduction for Charchoune’s exhibition at the Galerie Percier, and to whom with Waldemar-George he said he owed his career as a painter, Charchoune met Jeanne Bucher who, in 1926, showed his work. 

In 1927 Nadia Léger introduced Charchoune to Ozenfant whose purism influenced him for a while. Ozenfant wrote a text for Charchoune’s exhibition at the Galerie Aubier.

He gave up purism and began working on various series in which a dadaïst inspiration was again apparent: Les paysages élastiques and L’impressionnisme ornemental (1929-193l). Charchoune had found his path. A mystical character began to appear in his works, asserting itself during a period of poverty dictated by the great economic crisis (1932-1942). In 1942, he obtained a studio in the Cité Falguière where he lived until 1960.

In 1944, Edwin W. Livengood offered him his first contract and, in 1945, Charchoune began working with the Galerie Raymond Creuze with which he exhibited for twelve years: in 1944 (from 1946 to 1948 the violin became a new expressive vehicle anticipating the musical series), 1947, 1948 peintures de 1926 à 1931, 1949 cycle marin with the reappearance of colour, 1951 œuvres récentes, 1952 Charchoune, Venise, 1956 Œuvres récentes. 

In 1954 and 1955 Charchoune was inspired by the writing of Kafka to make his series Métamophoses. Although, since 1912, he had been a regular attendant at the concerts Colonne, it was not until after 1956 that music became the sole media of his work: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaïkovski provided him with his «fuel». Intentionally, he gradually erased from his palette the earlier explosions of colour, favouring shades of ochre, often austere monochromes and shades of white from which emerged curves, signs, and furrows whose undulation from left to right recalled his relationship with water and music. He achieved a sobriety, where expressiveness and spirituality appear from the rich sensual texture. «Music gives me the subject. Listening to music, I can see the painting with my eyes closed, like a coloured thread unwinding, I see it first with primary colours and my painting starts out as very colourful. I listen and make telepathic marks on the canvas. It becomes ornamental. I begin to spit colour and it becomes decorative, very colourful.» (interview with Michel Ragon, Jardin des Arts, September 1966). His impatient desire to express on canvas his feelings while listening to music, led him to structure his composition with a sophisticated arrangement of brush strokes that achieve a synthesis in this series of works. In no way abstract, they have generous areas of pure painting, simultaneously luminous and sonorous. This is painting to enjoy and reflect on, but it has always had a limited success with the public, although his colleagues expressed their admiration. Jacques Villon: «I am delighted that I will soon be sharing your elegant sober work» (1941), Nicolas de Staël who every day contemplated the small painting which hung in his bedroom, Hosiasson: “What can one say about Charchoune who seeks the inexpressible…? Colour — when he uses it — is emptied of all resonance: his painting is inspired by murmurs… Whoever has glimpsed it will be unable to forget it…» (1957) and Picasso: «For me, there are two artists: Juan Gris and Charchoune». Nonetheless it is the adjectives «forgotten», «unrecognised», «ignored» that return to the pens of the most eminent writers and critics: Philippe Soupault, Alain Jouffroy, Charles Estienne, Gaston Diehl and Pierre Schneider… Nevertheless the exhibitions continued, even though fame was of little importance to the artist who stated: «I was and I remain a man of nature, but I was also born a man of Art, and these three elements, forest, river, music, rapidly became for me a pictorial harmony which I attempted to put on paper» (op. cit.). 

Exhibitions in Paris in 1957, Galerie J.C. de Chaudun (catalogue) and Galerie Dina Vierny. 

1958 Galerie Michel Warren, text by Patrick Waldberg. 1960 Galerie Henri Bénézit, Galerie Georges Bongers and Galerie Jacques Péron.

1961 Galerie Cahiers d’Art. 

Georges Bongers showed his work again in 1966-1967. 

1970 Galerie Jean-Louis Roque, text by Pierre Brisset and again in 1971 when he showed watercolours.

He illustrated several works of literature. 

1970-1971 First retrospective at the Musée Saint-Denis in Reims, followed in 1971 by the Musée national d’Art moderne. (Catalogue Archives de l’Art contemporain n° 18, preface by Jean Leymarie and several texts).

1974 Galerie de Seine Charchoune, harmonies blanches 1924-1974. Catalogue, text by Alain Bosquet, documentation by René Guerra. 

Abroad, he exhibited in New York (1960), Germany, Italy, Geneva and Luxembourg. 

Among the main group exhibitions: 1948 Ecole de Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer. 1951 Peinture d’aujourd’hui, Palazzo Belle Arti, Turin: France-Italie. 1952 L’Ecole de Paris, Librairie Hachette, Montreal. 1956 Dix ans de peinture française 1945-1955, Musée de Grenoble. 1957 Cinquante ans de peinture abstraite, Galerie R. Creuze; Art abstrait, Musée de Saint-Etienne. 1963 La grande aventure de l’art du XXe siècle, Château des Rohan, Strasbourg. 

Charchoune participated in the Salon Comparaisons from 1956 to 1961, at the Salon de Mai since 1960 and at the Réalités Nouvelles in 1956 with 7^e symphonie de Beethoven, in 1957 with Concerto pour piano de Tchaïkovski and from 1958 to 1963. He was given a tribute in 1976. 

1980-1981 S. Charchoune peintures 1913 à 1965. Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne. Catalogue, Cahiers de l’abbaye n° 39, Henri-Claude Cousseau, Michel Seuphor. 

1981 S. Charchoune œuvres 1913-1975, Galerie des Ponchettes, Nice. Catalogue, text by Michel Seuphor. 

1988 Charchoune œuvres de 1913 à 1974, Galerie Fanny Guillon Laffaille, Paris. Catalogue, text by Patricia Delettre. Biography, bibliography. 

1989 Charchoune, Centre culturel de la Somme and Musée départemental de l’Abbaye de Saint-Riquier. Catalogue by P. Delettre. 

Museums: Alès – Charleville – Dijon – Grenoble – Les Sables-d’Olonne – Nice – Paris, Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou and Ville de Paris – Pontoise – Reims – Roanne – Saint-Etienne – Strasbourg – Villefranche-sur-Mer – Villeneuve-d’Ascq and abroad. 

• Raymond Creuze: Charchoune, R. Creuze, Paris 1975-1976 2 vol. Catalogue raisonné of the paintings in preparation by Patricia Delettre.

By the time he arrived in Paris, in 1955, Chu Teh-Chun was already a professional artist. His profound knowledge of painting combined with his astonishing technical mastery make him an exceptional representative of modern Western art. Born into a cultured family (his father was a doctor and art collector), he studied painting from a very early age, an imperious calling served by talent and an aptitude for hard work that soon led to his being considered one of China’s leading artists. A graduate of the School of Fine Arts of Hang-Zhou (1941), his ability to reproduce traditional masters while assimilating contemporary styles led to his being appointed professor at the Central National University of Nanjing from 1944 to 1949, and then at the National University of Taiwan from 1951 to 1955. He was already leaning towards Western painting which, in his opinion, was more suited to expressing a modern sensitivity, and was influenced first by Impressionism and then by Fauvism whose characteristics permeated the works he exhibited in 1954, in Taipei, in Taiwan. 

In Paris, he hurried to the Louvre to see for himself the works that he already knew through mediocre reproductions. He installed himself in a hotel in the rue Lhomond and learned French at the Alliance française while attending classes at the Grande Chaumière. In the evenings, he painted in his room. Several decisive encounters then introduced him to the capital’s art world: Albert Féraud, who had won the Prix de Rome for sculpture and who was now back from Italy, and above all Père Régamey who put him in contact with Père Vallée, a Dominican at the couvent Saint-Jacques who, in 1954, had founded the Galerie du Haut-Pavé, at number 3 quai de Montebello where he showed the work of Bellegarde, Laubiès and Longobardi… 

Sacha Klerx, the artistic director, was very enthusiastic about Chu Teh-Chun’s paintings and organised his first Paris exhibition in 1958. In the mean time, the artist had assimilated various art movements.

In 1956 and 1957, he exhibited some portraits at the Salon des Artistes français that were awarded a prize. The first retrospective of Nicolas de Stael’s work had taken place in 1956 at the Musée national d’Art moderne and Chu confided: «It was a real revelation of the freedom of expression to me. From now on I freed myself from my twenty years of figurative work to follow my path in non figurative painting. I slowly turned towards the inspiring thinking of traditional Chinese painting. I discovered the poetry in it and its way of observing nature which is close to Western neo-impressionist painting and particularly to abstract art. Working unconsciously on a synthesis of the two cultures, I suppressed emotion as the driving force and prolonged it through pictorial expression,» (interview with Gérard Xuriguera, Les Années 50, Arted, 1984). 

These paintings were exhibited at the Galerie du Haut-Pavé and also shown at the Galerie de Beaune (1958). Around this time, he met Michel Ragon, then the artistic director of the Galerie Le Gendre. Replaced a few months later by Maurice Panier, he concluded a contract with Chu-Teh-Chun which lasted until 1963. Chu became friends with the gallery’s other painters: Arnal, Bott, Corneille, Revel and Sugai. 

Three exhibitions were held: in 1960, 1962 and 1963 accompanied by a preface by Gérald Gassiot-Talabot who wrote: «His painting flows naturally, warm and vibrant, impervious to definitions… it is a lyrical offering murmured in the secret of a serious life of meditation or bursting out noisily like a hymn, when the artist rediscovers the phrasing of great T’ang layouts.» We observe a process which at the same time as it leads him to abstraction permits him to reconnect with his original sources and express himself with total freedom. His paintings invite us on an inner journey that evokes the primordial relationship between mankind and the universe. They are the visual symbol of the artist’s constant dialogue with nature. To start with, the forms are large dark stains that seem to be suspended in space, opening onto an emptiness that envelops us, arranged against backgrounds in a subtle range of greys, ochres and earth punctuated with red. His graphics are the other main element of his painting. Derived from ancestral oriental calligraphy, their lyricism invades the canvas. No symbolism, no ideogram is to be sought in what become dreamlike landscapes, appealing to our imagination. In this recreated poetic space, each spectator can see whatever he wishes. These works are governed by a plastic cohesion that gives a depth of vision, to be found in mirage and illusion, which makes Chu one of the most sensitive painters of the lyrical abstract movement. 

In 1965 and 1967 there were exhibitions at the Galerie de l’Université. These were followed by a number of one-man exhibitions in Paris, the French provinces and outside France.

Among the group exhibitions that concern the period covered by this book we should mention: 1956 La peinture d’aujourd’hui, Palais Royal, Paris. 1958 Peintres de l’Ecole de Paris, Charlottenburg Museum, Copenhagen. 1959 Peinture d’aujourd’hui, Senlis, preface by Michel Ragon. 1960 Ecole de Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Paris; Expression d’aujourd’hui, Lunéville. 1962 Donner à voir, Galerie Creuze, Paris; L’œil de bœuf, Galerie 7, Paris; La boîte et son contenu, Galerie Le Gendre. 1964 50 jeunes peintres de la Nouvelle Ecole de Paris, Galerie Merlin, Athens. He took part in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1958, 1959, 1965 and 1967; in the Salon de Mai in 1958, 1961 and regularly since 1971; in the Salon Comparaisons in 1956. 

After 1974, Chu was regularly invited to take part in the Grands et Jeunes d’aujourd’hui.  1989 recent works at the Galerie Arlette Gimaray, Paris. Catalogue.

Retrospectives 1982 Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Havre. Peintures – Dessins 1955-1982. Catalogue. 1987 National Historic Museum of Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. Book catalogue. 

1992 œuvres des années 60. Galerie Arlette Gimaray, Paris. Catalogue.

Museums: Paris, Art moderne de la Ville, Fonds national d’Art contemporain – Dunkerque – Châteauroux – Nice – Le Havre – Marseilles – Fondation Septentrion – Mairie de Sochaux and abroad in Taipei – Mexico – Saint Louis – Liège. 

• Hubert Juin: Chu Teh-Chun, Le Musée de Poche, 1979. 
• Pierre Cabanne: Chu Teh-Chun, visite d’atelier. Cimaise n° 204. 1990. 

Corneille settled in Paris in 1950.

Corneille had exhibited in the capital the previous year at the Galerie Colette Allendy, with Appel and Constant, co-founders with himself of the groups Expérimental and Réflexe that preceded the group Cobra which was joined by Alechinsky, Dotremont and Jorn (1948). At the time the Galerie Colette Allendy was a meeting place for veterans of the avant-garde as well as for young artists. In 1951 and 1952, for instance, Corneille saw there Picabia’s two last exhibitions. He also met Wols at the gallery, as well as Yves Klein, Atlan, Bryen, Doucet, O. Gauthier and Jacques Audibert. Corneille’s painting already reflected a very personal world. After studying drawing at the Fine Arts Academy in Amsterdam, he had taught himself to paint. On a visit to Budapest in 1947, he observed how nature had been mutilated by the world war. The theme of wild organic elements appeared giving birth to the series jardins which he showed at Europa Iskola. The work of Paul Klee was a further decisive revelation for him. This approach was soon completed by study of the works of Picasso and Kandinsky, and reading the works of Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Breton and Eluard who confirmed his intuition that everything is related. From 1948, his journeys to North Africa permitted him to live a carnal relationship with the cosmos: in 1949, in the South of Tunisia, he experienced the revelation of colour, which was to be a constant feature in his work: in 1952, he stayed at Hoggar searching for Antinea, then in 1956-1957 Central Africa enabled him to acquaint himself with myths, beliefs and rites closely linked to signs. Journeys to South America followed in 1958, and between 1962 and 1966 to Brazil and Cuba, sources which nourished his work and which had no equivalent in the Paris art world of the 1950s. We will not consider here the Corneille of Cobra, rather the Corneille who, without ever renouncing an adventure based on shared ideas, aesthetic commitments and friendship, lived in the shared studio of the rue Sauteuil, drawing an energy and a desire to create which permitted him to discover himself. Over the years, he built up a specific thematic vocabulary dominated by primordial forces: the stars, the clouds, the sea, the construction of the earth. For instance the circular form, head or sun — source of light, of life, cloud and sap which increases and generates movement. An explosion of forms gives birth to a network of tangled lines suggesting a labyrinth, the universe after chaos, after the golden age in which man faces conflicts, described by Jean-Clarence Lambert as «nature, landscape is no longer this maternal breast on which man finds happiness, the ease of paradise. It is the great silence which only answers the voice that questions it by an echo» (Corneille, Musée de Poche). Ordered or chaotic, it is a landscape that Corneille always attempts to tame: the surroundings of the city, the country landscapes of the 1950s, animated by little imaginary grotesque figures from the 1970s; lunar and mineral desert landscapes from 1952, with fossils, stones, white rocks which arrange themselves around an elementary organic structure: the cell. Multiplied in concentric circles it emphasised the strength of the whole (La forêt des pierres), constituting another leitmotiv. Another constant feature, and a memory of Hoggar, were minerals filled with seed, recording the artist’s wish for order confirmed by a visit to Spain in 1953 (with a stay in Majorca to which he returned in 1961, the year in which he began painting with his canvases laid out on the ground; between 1962 and 1966 he spent the summers at Cadaquès and made a series of gouaches: these were shown in one-man exhibitions in 1962, at the Galerie Mathias Fels, in Paris, with texts by Hubert Juin, Jean-Clarence Lambert, Jean-Jacques Lévêque and Lasse Söderberg and in 1964 at the same gallery). We should note the constant duality present in Corneille’s work in the 1960s, with a search for rigorous, disciplined construction, counterbalanced by spontaneity, wild forms and colours plunging into plant anarchy provoked by the action of rains and an abundance of fertile seeds. The colour in his work takes on an exhilarating quality. The titles of the canvases — themselves little poems — give us an indication as to his inspiration always related to a specific vision that he finds moving. Through the texture, we assist at a metamorphosis of everything round about: «An overall view of Corneille’s work reveals it as a continuous Dionysiac ode to the luxuriance of nature… Everything here is chaos in movement, but the elements of this chaos nonetheless combine in a cosmic relationship. The artist paints a changing world in which things have not yet become objects». F. T. Gribling (Corneille et l’opulente monotonie, Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1972. Coll. Art et Architecture aux Pays-Bas).

Corneille had his first one-man exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Collette Allendy in 1953, followed by a second exhibition the next year — on the desert and minerals — accompanied by a text by Charles Estienne D’un style de germination in which the critic wrote… «a style of painting on a level with the human ear.»

Exhibitions followed in 1956, at the Galerie Craven, with a text by Sandberg La peinture de Corneille; 1959 Galerie Le Gendre; 1961 Galerie Ariel, with a text by Jean Louis Ferrier: «for him, as for us, the world no longer just stretches, beneath our eyes, but it has seeped into us in the same way that we have crept into it… our relationship with reality adopts the full register of crossings, slidings, transformations, mutations… Corneille takes a lop-sided view of the world, affronting it, enclosing it, dragging it after him. Like Cézanne, he seeks ‘geological foundations’ in landscape, but based on a movement of opposition. He creates the definitive archetype from scratch, carrying it within himself; he makes his self an objective place.»

1963 Galerie Creuzevault, with a text by André Pieyre de Mandiargues; Six propositions pour un spectacle de la nature, Galerie Point Cardinal, Paris.

Numerous exhibitions outside France: Netherlands, London, Brussels, Stockholm, New York.

Corneille participated in a large number of group exhibitions including: 1950, Mains Eblouies, Galerie Maeght, Paris; Tendances, Galerie Colette Allendy; 1953, second Salon d’Octobre, Galerie Craven, with which he signed a contract. 1955 Trente Peintres de la Nouvelle Ecole de Paris, Galerie Craven; Paroles visibles, Galerie La Roue; Alice in Wonderland, Galerie Kléber, preface by Charles Estienne. 1956 Dix jeunes peintres de l’Ecole de Paris, Galerie de France; Présence du bleu, Galerie La Roue; Divergences 4, Galerie Arnaud. 1957 Expression et non-figuration, Galerie Le Gendre; Divergences 5, Festival de l’Art d’avant-garde, Cité Radieuse, Nantes and Galerie Arnaud, and in Berlin. 1959 Peintres du dépaysage, Galerie La Roue. 1961 Wols, Corneille, Galerie Mathias Fels. 1964 Quinze peintres de ma génération, Galerie Ariel; Signes, Galerie La Roue. He was invited to the Salon de Mai very regularly from 1951, and was also a member of the committee; he was invited to the Réalités Nouvelles in 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1959 with Songes des pierres and in 1960 with Jardin propice à l’oiseau; to the salon Comparaisons in 1958 and 1959. Salon Grands et Jeunes d’aujourd’hui in 1964. Biennale de Paris in 1957, Ecole de Paris, Galerie Charpentier in 1961 and 1963. Abroad: 1953 and 1959 Sao Paulo Biennial. 1954, Venice Biennial.

Corneille made prints from 1953, studying with Hayter, as well as ceramics with Mazzoti at Abbisole-Mare in 1954-1955 where he met Jorn and Baj.

Let us leave Corneille to speak about his painting: «My themes are in the texture, colour, nascent lines, interlacings, entanglements, stains… For me, the bird relates its own trajectory, it is movement or eye, recording other trajectories… The subjects interpenetrate, merge, forming a turbulent whole, crying or armed with a terrible silence… The painting is no longer the woman seen from the back, or front, the nude odalisque, cleverly reconstructed with the help of cubes, squares or stains, but a woman seen by the bird, imagined by the stone, framed on a lake, finely written in the sky, the sand, the bird…» (interview with Charles Estienne and José Pierre, Medium, 1955).

1966 Corneille, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Catalogue. Text by Max Loreau: Corneille l’arpenteur.

Museums: Amsterdam – Haarlem – Paris, Art Moderne.

• Hubert Juin, Hugo Claus: Seize peintres de la Jeune Ecole de Paris. Le Musée de Poche, 1956.
• Jean-Clarence Lambert: Corneille, Le Musée de Poche, Georges Fall, 1960.
• André Laude: Corneille, Le Roi-Image. S.M.I. Paris Diffusion Weber, 1970.
• Marcel Paquet: Corneille. Dellile, 1988

Herbin worked in a cubist style from 1909 and, in 1912, he participated in the historic exhibition of the Section d’Or. In 1931, he co-founded the association ‘Abstraction-Création’ with Vantongerloo, the headquarters of which was at Herbin’s flat at number 26 boulevard Masséna and which brought together the short-lived group Cercle et Carré that included most of the abstract artists. A militant of pure abstraction, Herbin had to wait until the postwar period to receive general recognition, with his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Denise René held only in 1946. Other exhibitions followed in 1952, 1954 (paintings 1953-1954) and 1960 (catalogue text by Jean Cassou).

The principle of abstract painting on which he based his work is analysed in his book L’Art non figuratif non objectif (Galerie Lydia Conti, 1949). He added to a repertory of geometrical forms such as circles, squares, rectangles, diamonds and triangles, bright contrasting colours that owe much to Goethe’s Theory of colours and which were chosen according to their symbolic power. His pure sober work had a major influence on the younger postwar abstract artists and in particular on the practitioners of geometrical abstraction.

A founding member of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Herbin was a regular exhibitor there from 1946 until the end of his life and a member of the Comité Directeur until 1955.

Among the group exhibitions, we should mention: Tendances de l’art abstrait, Galerie Denise René in 1948 which, in 1950, also showed Quelques aspects de l’art d’aujourd’hui. In 1951 the Galerie organised Klar Form – Vingt artistes de l’Ecole de Paris, an exhibition shown in the Scandinavian countries and in Belgium. In 1952 he again showed at the Galerie Denise René in Paris in Douze tapisseries inédites woven by the Tabard workshops at Aubusson, with Kandinsky, Léger, Magnelli, Le Corbusier, Arp, Dewasne, Deyrolle, Pillet, Mortensen, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Vasarely, and in the exhibition Diagonale.

Herbin took part in all the group exhibitions organised by Denise René abroad: in Hamburg in 1953, in Liège at the A.P.I.A.W. with Bloc, Dewasne, Deyrolle, Mortensen, Poliakoff and Vasarely in 1954, in Rio de Janeiro in 1955, in Rouen Art 1955, Documenta Kassel 1955, in Grenoble Dix ans de Peinture française 1945-1955 in 1959 at the Leverkusen Museum, International Sezession 1956, Charleroi L’art du XXIe siècle 1958. In Paris Hommage à Léon Degand in 1958.

In 1959 the Galerie Simone Heller gave a first retrospective, followed by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1956, and Fribourg in 1958.

Other one-man exhibitions, in 1958 at the Galerie Henri Bénézit.

1972 Herbin. Galerie Denise René Paris. Catalogue, text by J. Lassaigne.

Retrospectives at the Musée Cambrai in 1980 and Vitry-sur-Seine, works from 1905-1960. Catalogues.

Museums: Paris, Musée national d’Art moderne – Le Cateau-Cambrésis (salle Herbin Musée Matisse). Grenoble.

• P. Peissi: Hommage à Herbin, text of the talk given on 28 April 1952 during a lecture cycle organised by the Atelier d’Art abstrait 44 rue de Rennes, Hofer, Paris, 1952. Témoignage pour l’art abstrait. Art d’Aujourd’hui, Paris, 1952.
• Massat: Auguste Herbin. Coll. Prisme, Paris, 1953.

Otto Freundlich is considered as a forerunner of abstraction. «He was the very first German abstract sculptor already making, before 1912, the year in which I met him, non figurative works with excessive proportions or on the contrary minutely calligraphed sheets…» (Hans Richter).

Committed, both politically and artistically, he expressed a certain «awareness of the world» through his life and works, which were to «become the place where is set forth everything which contributes to the essence of the world: that of the Word» (Guy Tosatto).

He studied history of art, philosophy and literature in Berlin, then in Florence and Italy and, in 1907, executed his first works, in the Jugendstil style. In 1908, he paid a first visit to Paris, and rented a studio at the Bateau-Lavoir. He became part of the bohemian life of Montmartre that included Picasso, Apollinaire, Braque, Juan Gris, Max Jacob and André Salmon. For ten years he lived between Paris, Munich and Berlin.

In 1911 Otto Freundlich made his first abstract works, little by little developing a very singular pictorial vocabulary comprised of flat coloured areas, defined by straight lines and curves that cover the entire surface of the painting.

Fascinated by different techniques – mosaic, tapestry, stained glass – he drew inspiration from the last of these and conducted research. From March to July 1914, he worked in the stained glass restoration workshop of Chartres cathedral and wrote to his friend Karl Schmidt-Rottluff: «For five months I was prisoner of the world at Chartres and I have emerged marked for ever…».

He was equally impressed by the architectural dimension of Cézanne’s work and by Van Gogh’s strong colours. He studied the tensions and balances of power generated by geometric elements and chromatic variations and gradually managed to compose, as his worked developed, a powerful syntax which connects and gives energy to the groups of coloured units.

Very active on the art scene, he took part in many exhibitions: Die neues Secession in Berlin, in 1910 and 1911, Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (first German Salon d’Automne) at the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. He wrote for various reviews, notably Die Aktion which, in 1918, devoted a special issue to his work. After the German revolution of 1918, he enrolled as a member of the Novembergruppe and, in 1919, organised with Max Ernst and J.T. Baargeld the first Dada exhibition at Cologne. In 1930 he was a member of the group Cercle et Carré then, in 1931, of the group Abstraction – Création.

As a theoretician of art, Otto Freundlich wrote in 1934 Die Wege der Abstrakten (The paths of Abstract Art). In 1936, in Paris, he founded a private academy called Le Mur where he taught painting, drawing and printmaking.

In 1937, Freundlich’s sculpture of 1912 L’homme nouveau figured on the cover of the catalogue of the travelling exhibition organised by the Nazis Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which denounced modern art. The exhibition included many Jewish artists. 14 of his works, in the collections of various German museums, were confiscated and destroyed.

When the war broke out, Otto Freundlich, who was of German nationality, was interned by the French authorities. Freed in 1940, mainly due to the intervention of Pablo Picasso, he took refuge at Saint-Paul de Fenouillet in the Pyrénées Orientales. Denounced and arrested on 23 February 1943, he was deported to Lublin in Poland to a concentration camp. He was killed on the day of his arrival, at the age of 65.

 «The artist receives the transformations of the world, he senses them in his acts and thoughts, like driving forces, long before they manifest themselves in the outside world. He has the faculty to gradually detach himself, lastingly, from the forms and truths that are generally admitted. He executes the wish of a new reality.»

Otto Freundlich

 

• Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg, Catalogue raisonné des travaux de l’Artiste, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, Rheinland-Verlag, Cologne, 1978.

A major figure of lyrical abstraction and one of the pioneers of abstract art acknowledged as the ‘father of tachism’. An originator of gestural abstraction, Hartung only really became known after 1945.

Hartung was born into a family of doctors and amateur musicians from whom he inherited a particularly developed musical sensitivity which encompassed both baroque and dodecaphonic music, and which in a way served as a constant echo to his painting. 

His early vocation was placed under the manifestation of instinct, speed and the mark. Natural elements presided over the elaboration of his future work’s plastic vocabulary rooted in his intense feeling for introspection. He later confided: «Painting has always meant for me the existence of reality, a reality embodied by resistance, fervour, rhythm and pressure, but which only exists for me if I capture it, define it, immobilise it for a moment that I would like to last for ever…» (Autoportrait, Monique Lefèbvre, Grasset, 1976). His desire to draw began when, aged six, he was frightened by a storm. He described a flash of lightning, a clap of thunder and the storm’s violence: «I caught the flashes of lightening as they appeared in one of my school notebooks. I had to finish drawing their zigzagging on the page before the thunder burst. Like this I managed to ward off the thunder. Nothing would happen to me if my line could follow the speed of the lightening. These flashes of lightening enabled me to understand the speed of the line, the desire to capture, in pencil or brush, the moment and they made me understand the urgent nature of spontaneity…» (op. cit.)

This passion for drawing never left him. In the schools attended by the nobility and upper classes in Basel, Leipzig and Dresden (1921-1924, Baccalaureat in Latin and ancient Greek), his masters observed: «You are again making your horrible ink stains to form the subject… In drawing after drawing, I had succeeded in no longer figuring anything…» (op. cit.). He made completely abstract portraits of his school friends in which they were able to recognise themselves through the lines and rhythms. He was also fascinated by astronomy and photography, anticipating his future plastic concerns. He made his own telescope with a camera attached to it. He observed fragments of reality despite their abstract appearance. Through photography, which he practiced throughout his life, he was able to capture the ephemeral, portions of reality visible to the eye (the first major exhibition of Hartung’s photographs was held at the Centre Noroit in Arras in 1976). Attracted by nature and religion, he considered becoming a minister. However, the call of art was stronger. He saw the work of Rembrandt for the first time and was profoundly affected. «Looking at the folds of the mother’s dress (The Family) I discovered that Rembrandt also made stains, stains that have their own existence, rhythm, colours and expressiveness. I knew then that I would become an artist.» (op. cit.). 

Hartung also studied Goya, Hals, El Greco and, in 1921 and 1922, the German Expressionists such as Nolde and Kokoschka who deformed appearance in order to achieve pure expression. The image gradually fades replaced by stains and tension. The subject is already of little importance. Unaware of the work of the great artists of the previous generation (Picasso, Braque, the Delaunays, Kandinsky and Klee …), Hartung’s first abstract watercolours, painted in 1922, can not be compared to anything that had been done before. With complete spontaneity the young artist marvels at the symbolic language of his line, inks and colours. He subsequently continued to use colour in a structured manner employed as a dynamic factor. These watercolours were shown as reproductions in an album published in 1966 with an introduction by Will Grohmann. They were followed in 1923-1924 by a series of charcoal and red chalk drawings in which speed of execution is already the decisive factor. 

In 1924, Hartung began to study philosophy and art history at the Beaux-Arts in Leipzig. In 1925, he met Kandinsky at a lecture given by the latter, and discovered another form of abstraction, although he remained critical about Kandinsky’s research which was opposed to geometrism and equally innovative. He turned away from the Bauhaus, refusing the avant-garde work of Mondrian, to whom he preferred the Beaux-Arts of Dresden (1925-26) and Munich (1928) where he continued to study classical tradition and techniques (his only figurative works, later destroyed during a bombardment). In 1926, Hartung received a fresh shock upon discovering modern painting as it was practised beyond Germany’s frontiers, during a visit to the International Exhibition in Dresden: impressionism, fauvism and cubism. He was particularly interested by the work of Matisse, Braque, Picasso and Rouault. He continued to make numerous copies of the works of the masters in museums and from reproductions. In the summer he made a bicycle tour of Italy. He decided to visit Paris, arriving in October 1926 and remaining in the city until 1931. This stay was interrupted by several journeys (to Barcarès near Perpignan in 1927, and to Holland and Belgium). He studied the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh and the cubists who were an influence on his work until 1932. He considered the relationship between aesthetics and mathematics (distances, proportions, rhythms). He ignored the free academies and visited museums and exhibitions. Extremely solitary, he had no contact with other artists. His meeting with a young Norwegian woman, Anna-Eva Bergman, broke this isolation however. In September 1929, five months after first meeting, they were married. 

The first exhibition of Hartung’s works took place in November 1931 at the Kühl Gallery in Dresden, and was followed the year after by an exhibition with his wife at the Blomqvist Gallery in Oslo. During this period the couple lived on an island in the south of Norway. He was deeply affected by the death of his father, in 1932, and, faced by the rise of Nazism, he leftGermanyto take refuge in theBalearic Islands. Passing through Paris, he left a few works with Jeanne Bucher. He built himself a small house near Fornells, a fishing port onMinorca, where he and his wife spent 1933 and 1934, a period that was to be highly productive. 

Abandoning cubism, Hartung now returned to the spontaneous experimentation of his early years. He did not give these works a title, simply dating them, after the letter T, or more rarely G, so that we are able to place them in chronological order. As his assets had been blocked in Germany, he travelled to Berlin to try and arrange his financial situation. He continued to push his work to its utmost limits and both artist and work became identified in a total quest. In 1935, refusing to comply with the rules for art dictated by Nazi political propaganda, he fled from Berlin and its police with the help of Will Grohmann and Christian Zervos. Hartung now settled permanently in Paris, finding a studio at number 19 rue Daguerre. He became friends with Jean Hélion and Henri Goetz, and also met Mondrian, Kandinsky, Magnelli, Domela, Miró and Calder with whom he exhibited at the Galerie Pierre. Up until the war, he took part in the Surindépendants. Between 1934 and 1938 he painted several series titled taches d’encre. All the characteristics of his mature style are already present here: contrasting masses and lines, stains and hatching, supported by a technical control in which improvisation remains ‘on probation’. It was this disconcerting style with its complete freedom, at the time entirely new to the abstract movement, which years after the war made him famous. Further financial difficulties obliged him, however, to move into a smaller studio at number 8 rue François Mouthon. A difficult period commenced, during which he drew on paper tablecloths in bistrots. His wife fell seriously ill, they divorced and Anna-Eva returned to Norway. Housed for a year by Henri Goetz, Hartung worked in the studio of his friend the sculptor Gonzalez and himself began to sculpt. 

An artist of exceptional stature, Hartung always remained true to his beliefs. In the political domain he continued his struggle against Nazism, enrolling on the list of volunteers against Hitlerism and, late in 1939, joining the Légion étrangère. In July of that year he married Roberta Gonzalez and, on demobilisation, lived in the Lot with the sculptor’s family, although Gonzalez himself died in March 1942. When the Germans occupied the zone libre, Hartung fled to Spain, with the help of Picasso. In Spain he spent a while in Franco’s prisons, before once more joining the Légion. He was seriously wounded during the assault on Belfort and had to have a leg amputated. In 1952 the two spouses met again, by chance, at a retrospective of Julio Gonzalez’s work at the Musée d’Art moderne in Paris. «It was the final day and crowded. Suddenly I recognised a familiar silhouette. I remained nailed to the spot, my heart beating wildly. Anna-Eva and I advanced towards each other.» (op. cit.). The power of destiny… Hartung remained convinced that «a work of art is a parallel manifestation of the artist’s life, an externalization of the forces within him, of everything which comes into play to push him into action, of everything which involves his impulses, his tendencies and experiences» (op. cit.). Roberta Gonzalez stepped aside and Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman took a studio in the rue Cels. 

On his return to Paris at the end of 1945, Hartung began to paint again and also became a French citizen. This introduction concerning the period which precedes that studied in this book is justified by the continuity in an œuvre that is already mature and in which Hartung continued to develop an innovative language, paradoxically to be overshadowed by the postwar abstract generation. It should also be pointed out that, because of his intentional isolation, «Hartung’s work has practically no repercussion between 1921 and 1945» (Mathieu, De la révolte à la renaissance, Gallimard, 1973). 

Despite an exhibition of his work in 1939 — the first to be held in the capital —with works by Roberta Gonzalez, at the Galerie Henriette, art lovers attending the first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, in 1946, discovered an unknown artist. Hartung was not a frequent participant at this Salon, preferring the Salon de Mai. He was in contact with Poliakoff, Schneider, Marie Raymond and Domela, showing his work with the latter in premises in the rue Cujas. This sufficed for him to be noticed by a number of well-informed critics, such as Charles Estienne, Wilheim Uhde, Léon Degand and Madeleine Rousseau, who in 1949 published in Stuttgart the first book about the artist, with prefaces by James Johnson Sweeney and Ottomar Domnick. 

It was equally Madeleine Rousseau who wrote the catalogue introduction to Hartung’s first one-man exhibition, held in Paris in 1947 at a small gallery named after its owner, Lydia Conti, and which had opened for this event at number 1 rue d’Argenson. Thirteen paintings were shown, dating from 1935 to 1947. Charles Estienne remarked on their tragic ‘intensity’. Up until 1957 Hartung’s works possessed a rebellious character. From 1945 onwards the grey stains appear and, around 1947-1948, the strong supporting line signals a new direction. It should be mentioned that until the end of the 1950s Hartung would work simultaneously on drawings and paintings. To be more exact, he worked on sketches, pastels and preparatory drawings for the paintings. When he began the final painting, however, the line remained just as elegant. Although Hartung’s work sometimes presents a similarity to ideograms, the artist always denied having been influenced in any way by oriental calligraphy. His line is indeed more emphatic and does not share the ideogram’s decorative character. 

In 1948, Hartung had a second exhibition in Lydia Conti’s gallery, showing drawings done between 1922 and 1948. Alain Resnais directed a film about the artist which he showed in Germany and at the Galerie La Hune in Paris in 1950. 

A number of group exhibitions during the period revealed this totally new form of painting. These were heroic years for abstract art whose practitioners were shown in the new galleries. In December 1947 an exhibition was organised by Georges Mathieu at the Galerie du Luxembourg in the rue Gay-Lussac, which Eva Philippe had opened the previous year. Under the title L’Imaginaire the artist presented works by Hartung, Atlan, Wols, Bryen, Arp, Riopelle, Ubac, Vulliamy, Brauner and Solier, with a text by Jean-José Marchand. This was followed in April 1948 by a second exhibition organised by Mathieu, this time at the Galerie Colette Allendy, which was given the enigmatic title H.W.P.S.M.T.B, the initials of each participant’s name: Hartung, Wols, Picabia, Stahly, Mathieu, Tapié and Bryen. A catalogue was produced with texts by each protagonist, except for Hartung and Stahly. Jean-José Marchand wrote: «Humour and tragedy combine here to strengthen (in appearance) old doctrines and produce (in fact) an entirely new art, which constitutes our original postwar contribution,» (Paru, June 1948). 

Colette Allendy showed Hartung’s work again in group exhibitions in 1949 and, in 1950 with D’une saison l’autre, with a text by Charles Estienne and which also included works by Schneider and Soulages and the young artists Doucet and Gauthier. 

In July 1948 a further exhibition was held at the Galerie des Deux-Isles, a new gallery run by Florence Bank. Mathieu showed beside his own work that of Hartung, Wols, Tapié, Picabia, Ubac, Arp and Germain with drawings, prints and black and white lithographs under the title White and Black. There were catalogue introductions by Michel Tapié and Édouard Jaguer who wrote: «For all those who are present here, the key lies in the conquest of a subconscious but real place…» and «a new phenomenon whose meteoric passage also illuminates writing…». That November, at the Galerie du Montparnasse, a former bookshop that had been transformed into a gallery and which was run by Gilberte Sollacaro, the first confrontation with American painting took place: Bryen, Hartung, Mathieu, Picabia and Wols were hung next to de Kooning, Gorky, Pollock, Renhardt, Rothko, Russel, Sauer and Tobey. Ultimately, in 1957, at Nina Dausset’s gallery, which had opened two years earlier in the rue du Dragon, Mathieu showed alongside his own work and under the title Véhémences confrontées a group of international artists: Bryen, Capogrossi, de Kooning, Hartung, Riopelle, Russel and Wols. A text was written by Michel Tapié. In the same year, Hartung participated in the exhibition Advancing French Art, in New York, Chicago, Baltimore and San Francisco. There were also group exhibitions organised by Denise René who in 1944 had opened a gallery at number 124 rue La Boétie. Hartung was included from 1946 onwards, with Schneider, Deyrolle, Dewasne and Marie Raymond (text by R. de Solier). These exhibitions continued in 1947, 1948 with Tendances de l’Art abstrait and 1949 with Quelques aspects de la peinture présente. We should also mention his participation in 1952 in Un art autre at the Galerie Facchetti, which took the title of a work by Michel Tapié published on the same occasion, and the exhibition organised by Charles Estienne in the hall of the Théâtre de Babylone Peintres de la Nouvelle Ecole de Paris; in 1954 in the group exhibition Divergences organised by R.V. Gindertaël, at the Galerie Arnaud, and in Individualités d’aujourd’hui at the Galerie Rive Droite. From 1954 until 1958 he was invited to participate in l’Ecole de Paris, at the Galerie Charpentier. 

These group events were important as they enabled critics and the public to follow Hartung’s progress, particularly as one-man exhibitions of the artist’s recent work were infrequent. 

The first of these one-man exhibitions was held in November 1956 at the Galerie de France and attracted a great deal of interest. Following the signature of a contract with Gildo Caputo, the gallery’s director, he showed pastels in 1958; paintings from 1922 to 1939 in 1961 (catalogue); recent works in 1962 (catalogue); fifteen paintings done in 1963 and 1964 in1964. 

These exhibitions were followed by exhibitions of recent paintings in 1966, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1974 and 1979. In 1977, the gallery showed twenty-five works from 1922 to 1952. 

From 1985 onwards, Hartung’s work was shown by the Galerie Daniel Gervis. 

His work also began to be shown in a growing number of galleries and museums in the provinces and abroad.

Among the most significant of these were: in 1957, a travelling retrospective exhibition in Germany. In 1959, a retrospective at the Musée d’Antibes (his first exhibition in a French museum). In 1960, the Venice Biennial, at which he was awarded the Grand International Prize for Painting, with a room in the French pavilion devoted to his work. In 1963-1964, a travelling retrospective exhibition inZurich,Vienna,Dusseldorf,BrusselsandAmsterdam. The complete list of these exhibitions is to be found in the catalogue published by the Galerie Marwan Hoss, Paris, for the presentation in 1990 at the FIAC of Hartung’s last works. 

Invited to the first Documenta atKassel, in 1955.

Between 1952 and 1954 Hartung began to develop a new pictorial language. He had abandoned the tachism of the years 1934-1938, replacing colour by line — counterpoint of the line against the background, with the addition of the stain-form producing a highly personal style of spatial dynamism — before introducing more complex forms characterised by curves, crescents and bundles of thick black bars executed with rapid fluid brush strokes against a neutral background, the sole counterpoint. This gestural dynamism then subsided to be replaced by a less spontaneous form of composition. Then, between 1955 and 1959, without renouncing one of the principal characteristics of his work, the antagonism between forms and signs and plain backgrounds, the rhythm of the lines becomes more intense suggesting clumps or bundles. The lines become tenser and adopt different thicknesses, an evolution also apparent in his graphic work, which in his opinion was as significant as the paintings. 

A first exhibition of his etchings was held in 1954 at the Galerie La Hune which, in 1958, also presented his lithographs. 

In 1956 the Galerie Craven showed drawings made between 1921 and 1938.

In 1955, Hartung was invited to the Biennial of Graphic Arts at Ljubljana at which he also showed his work on several subsequent occasions up until 1965, being awarded the Prize of Honour in 1967 at the VIIth Biennial. Three series of prints stand out: 1946-1947. Winter 1952-1953 done while he was participating for the first time with his paintings at the Venice Biennial. 1957 prints and lithographs, and a series of pastels continued until 1961 (he hardly painted in the years 1959 and 1960). In 1963, he began a new series of lithographs made at Saint-Gall. In 1964, Hartung-Bergman, a travelling exhibition of prints and lithographs, was shown in Israel. In 1965, for the publication of the catalogue raisonné of his prints (1921-1965), by the Galerie Rolf Schmücking in Braunschweig, an exhibition of Hartung’s entire graphic oeuvre was shown at the town’s museum. 

Reprinted, Basel, 1990. 

From 1961 onwards, a new period began characterised by scrapings in the still wet paint which allowed the canvas to show through. Appearance of interlacings, extremely delicate undulations tangled to give the illusion of bars, scratchings and streaks. The lines gradually disappear replaced by dark masses — like threatening smoke — without any graphic character, whose tones are superimposed against a lighter background, on huge canvases. 

Hartung’s work becomes stripped of any reference to the exterior world or anything that might reflect a state of mind, «we enter,” Hartung tell us, “the unknown, a zone that has yet to be created… internal movements can be a basis, just an incitement… » In 1969 colours reappear with a preference for lemon yellows, intense blues, brick reds, light greens and the ever present black, lending expression to a poetic inspiration which commands the gesture. 

In 1972, he moved with Anna-Eva Bergman into a large villa-studio above the town of Antibes, arranged to suit their needs. In 1959 he had already had a studio altered according to his plans near the Parc Montsouris. His wife died in the Antibes villa in 1987 and he himself died there on 14 December 1989. 

Action painting is rooted in the work of Hartung who had paid a first visit to the U.S.A. in 1964, although his works had been shown there since 1957. 

A large number of retrospectives with catalogues were held from 1965 onwards. 

1966 Museo Civico di Torino. 

1969 Musée national d’Art moderne de Paris, followed by Houston, Musée du Québec, Montreal. 

1974 Wallraf Richartz Museum, Cologne. 

1975 National Gallery, Berlinand Stadtische Gallery, Munich. 

1977-1981 Travelling exhibition of lithographs and prints organised by the Centre Georges Pompidou. 

1980 Musée d’Art moderne Ville de Paris: works from 1922 to 1939, text by André Berne-Joffroy. Musée de la Poste Paris: tapestries and woodcuts by Hartung and his wife. 

1981 Stadtische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf and Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich. Henie-Onstad Foundation, Norway. 

1986 Musée d’Evreux. Text by Pierre Daix. Biography and bibliography. 

1987 Premières peintures 1922-1949. Musée Picasso, Antibes. 

1991-1992 Hartung oeuvres extremes 1922-1989. Montbéliard andLudwigsburgMuseums. Catalogue.

Hartung achieved international recognition and was given many awards: 1970, Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris; 1977 member of the Institut Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris, among other distinctions, he continued to work far from the intriguing tumult of the capital. Universal, never referring to nature but drawing from it its energy, his work born from a profound asceticism goes beyond the visible to deliver us a message of great sensitivity with an economy of matter and precise gestures. He had a decisive influence on the following generation. 

Hartung’s works are preserved in many museum collections. In Germany, besides Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Hamburg, the Hartung rooms at Darmstadt (1984) and Munich (1982); United Kingdom, Australia, Austria, Brazil, U.S.A, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, and in France: Musée d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou and Ville de Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Antibes, Chalon-sur-Saône, Dunkerque, Grenoble, Lille, Lyons, Marseilles, Nantes, Rouen, Fondation Maeght St. Paul, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Strasbourg, Toulouse. 

• R.Van Gindertaël: Hans Hartung, Tisné, I960.
• Dominique Aubier: Hans Hartung, Musée de Poche, Fall, 1961.
• Jean Tardieu: Hans Hartung, Hazan, 1962.
• Special issue Cimaise, 1974 for the artist’s 70th birthday.
• Pierre Descargues: Hans Hartung, Cercle d’Art, 1977.
• Michel Ragon: Vingt-cinq ans d’Art vivant, Galilée, 1986.
• Pierre Daix: Hans Hartung, Bordas/Daniel Gervis, Paris, 1991.

Discontinuous in its appearance, Hélion’s work attracted controversy, misunderstandings and even sometimes incomprehension with a body of work whose perfectly logical development aimed to apprehend reality, without altering its nature, in an attempt to extract its deepest meaning. Despite his apparent ruptures, Hélion constantly attempted with absolute clarity to redefine reality, often working against the tide of fashionable movements, and this gives his work a very remarkable position in contemporary art.

Hélion abandoned the study of chemistry to travel to Paris to serve an apprentice-draftsman to an architect (1921). On his first visits to the Louvre, he was struck by the works of the ‘builders’: Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne.

He painted his first works in 1922 and in 1924 showed some street scenes at the ‘Foire aux croûtes’ in Montmartre. He saw the works of Cézanne, Matisse and Derain in the galleries. After signing a contract with Georges Bine, Hélion decided, in 1925, to become an artist 1925. In 1926 he shared a studio with Torrès-Garcia who introduced him to cubism. He executed a series of Autoportraits in red against a blue background and the first Boucliers in which he asserted the object’s functional outline while liberating colour. From the start of his career Hélion explored the everyday world of the street. He painted his first Femme au parapluie. He attempted to resolve the plastic problem at the same time as the problem of representation. The subject is dislocated, preserving only its geometrical elements that the artist considered to be physical realities. Hélion’s work gradually became non figurative and by a logical process arrived at abstraction — of which he was one of the pioneers — although he considered this term inappropriate, preferring that of ‘concrete art’.

Both a theoretician and a practitioner, Hélion was at the origin of avant-garde movements and their reviews.

He showed his first abstract works in a gallery in Barcelona in 1929 and on his return to Paris met Théo Van Doesburg, Otto Carlsund and Léon Tutundjian with whom he created the group Art concret and a review of same name whose unique issue appeared in April the following year. He met Arp, Mondrian and Pevsner. He wrote articles on modern art for the review Pyrénées, the first of many published pieces of art criticism (Hélion’s texts were collected by Daniel Abadie in Hélion ou la force des choses, Ed. de la Connaissance, 1975). Art concret expanded and, in 1930, Hélion was one of the founders of a second movement Abstraction-Création that included Arp, Herbin, Delaunay, Kupka and Gleizes, and for which, in 1932, he edited the first issue of the review of the same name. Hélion left the group in 1934. The decade which preceded the Second World War was essential for the introduction of abstraction and led after 1945 to the emergence of the second generation of abstract artists with their different orientations. Although the scope of this book does not permit us to consider Hélion’s influential role during the first period, we should mention his many contacts with other artists, such as Léger, Calder, Michel Seuphor, Giacometti, Ozenfant, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Miró… and also with writers, such as Georges Simenon who recommended him to write to earn a living, Tristan Tzara and Raymond Queneau. He travelled to the U.S.S.R. where he met Tatlin and equally to Berlin where he visited Naum Gabo (1930).

Hélion’s first one-man exhibition was given at the Galerie Pierre Loeb with Compositions orthogonales and Tensions courbes (1932) and the second occurred in 1936 at the Galerie Cahiers d’Art. He paid regular visits to the United States, exhibiting there from 1933 and living between Paris and Virginia where, in 1935, he built a studio. As he travelled, his circle of contacts began to widen and he participated in numerous group exhibitions: at the Galerie Pierre, in Switzerland, London and the U.S.A.: Gorky, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Kandinsky, Hartung, Picasso, Lipchitz. Fernandez, Magnelli, Gorin, Morris, Meyer Schapiro and Yves Tanguy, and also Henry Miller and André Breton.

In 1938 Hélion had another exhibition at the Galerie Pierre. The disbanding of Abstraction-Création had permitted Hélion to detach himself from the restricting codes of geometrics and neo-plastics. To avoid a dead end, he adopted a new structure introducing space and movement, suggesting an increasingly identical correspondence with reality: in this new arrangement of volumes and colours, he introduced Figures. This was the period of Grandes Figures abstraites (1937). He also made studies of trees from nature. In 1939 Hélion made his last abstract compositions (La figure tombée, priv. coll.) and also made a first attempt at a return to the identifiable with the series Têtes: Emile, Edouard, Charles, which led to his first major figurative composition Au cycliste (Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) that marked his final abandoning of abstraction.

Called up in 1940, Hélion was taken prisoner and sent to a camp from which, in 1942, he succeeded in escaping. He managed to reach Marseilles and met up there with Tzara, Duchamp, Brauner and Hérold, before obtaining a passage on a ship sailing for the United States. In New York Hélion found Mondrian, Calder, Max Ernst, Tanguy, Léger, Ozenfant and Breton. He painted the series Allumeurs, Fumeurs, and Filles aux cheveux jaunes followed, in 1945, by Figures de pluie. Les salueurs, Figures gothiques, Hommes assis. On his return to France, in April 1946, he spent the summer at Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he worked on Figures demi-nues. That autumn he found a studio in Paris, in the rue Michelet, where he worked until the end of his life. In 1947 he painted A rebours (Musée national d’Art moderne, Paris), an important milestone in his work which summarises his painting since the abstract period: an approach to reality in which he perceived a mechanical dimension. The theme of nudes is combined with a person in an everyday scene, a theme that was to recur in the following years, with open fruit such as pumpkins in still lives.

An exhibition of Hélion’s recent work was held in 1947 at the Galerie Renou et Colle. His style became more realistic – nonetheless retaining a picturesque character – without seeking to be descriptive, something he had always rejected. This is how he defined Réalité in the ‘Notes de travail’ which he kept throughout his career: «Any scene, however imaginary it may be, must coincide in some aspect (silhouette, colour, rhythm or whatever) with something ‘seen’. It must only include objects or persons which one day made an impression on me, separately or together. These objects or persons must be made with forms and colours that are part of a process.» (1950, Carnets, donated by Hélion in 1979 to the Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale, Paris). He moved towards representing reality working from nature (Chrysanthèmes 1950, Grand Brabant 1958, Chou 1960), keeping as he says to the ‘seen’ and the ‘lived’. «Real — Realism — Possible. Realism is the quest for Real through the appearance of what we meet, without changing anything: The window of the café of the Val-de-Grâce is like this, with this grandeur: appearance. Realism. But the man seated in it constitutes an archetype of ‘a seated man’. This is the passage from realism to real.» (1966, op. cit.).

Between 1948 and 1950, Hélion painted a number of series that tended towards surrealism: Journaliers and Natures mortes à la citrouille, followed in 1949, after a visit to Italy, by female nudes, Journaleries, compositions that placed the nude in an everyday setting. This period was closed in 1951 by Les Mannequineries. He contrasted the allegorical with the everyday in realistic compositions that differentiated him from the art scene of the time in which abstraction triumphed (Allégorie journalière 1951-1952, large charcoal on canvas, Fondation Christian et Yvonne Zervos, Vézelay). His subjects are derived from events observed or experienced. In 1952, in a second spacious studio on the avenue de l’Observatoire, he painted a number of still lives with loaves, pumpkins and rabbits. He visited Spain to look at the works of Velasquez, Goya and El Greco. In 1953 he spent the summer on Belle-Ile where he bought a house, returning to Paris with a large number of landscape studies. In 1954 he executed a major composition of the Jardin du Luxembourg for which he had first made a large number of thumbnail sketches of strollers, benches and chairs, sweepers sweeping the dead leaves and statues. He completed this painting in the summer of 1955 on his return from a trip to Holland. This period marks a new phase in Hélion’s work in which he achieved a synthesis of image and sign. In 1956 he returned to the subject of Couples au parapluie and painted his first works on Belle-Ile, where he spent the summer. In 1957-1958, in the studio at the top of the building in the rue Michelet, he painted a series of interior scenes: portraits of his wife Pegeen sitting on a couch and a still life with a white soup ladle; Carmen; Toits; Vanités in which the innovate technique allows light to shine through the windows. In 1959 he began a series of portraits of friends, poets and collectors: Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet, Jean-Pierre Burgart, Georges Bine and Pierre Bruguière (Musée Ingres, Montauban).

In 1960-1961 he returned to the theme of Luxembourg in the autumn and also Toits with figures. He returned to Holland to look at the works of Hals and Rubens. In 1962 he bought a property at Bigeonnette, near Chartres, with a spacious studio in which he was able to paint large works, while also continuing to paint on Belle-Ile and in his Paris studios. During these years he developed a form of gestural language which recalled the works of Magnasco that he seen in Venice and Genoa during his first visit to Italy in 1947, and accomplished a perfect blending of object, sign and colour. He painted using acrylic which permitted greater spontaneity and freedom. His interest was attracted by the Rues de Paris with their animation, and by les Halles which led to the series Bouchers. La voiture de fleurs et le boucher (Musée d’Art moderne Ville de Paris) illustrates this new style in which colour stains erase the precision of line and detail, while the imaginary gains ground with characters that are simultaneously real and imagined. In 1966 a new series of Rues led to Triptyque du Dragon, exhibited at the Galerie du Dragon in 1967.

From 1951 onwards, Hélion’s work was the subject of regular exhibitions, often with accompanying texts by his poet friends.

Abroad: 1951 Hanover Gallery, London, paintings from 1947 to 1951, text by Francis Ponge; Sala degli Specchi, Venice, paintings from 1928 to 1951, presentation by Peggy Guggenheim, text by Christian Zervos; Galleria Del Millione, Milan, recent works, text by Christain Zervos; 1964 Gallery of Modern Art, New York, paintings from 1928 to 1964, texts by Pierre Bruguière and Christian Zervos. 1965 The Leicester Galleries, London, paintings from 1929 to 1965, text by Pierre Bruguière.

In Paris: 1953 Chez Mayo; in 1956, Galerie des Cahiers d’Art where he showed his recent works in 1958 and 1961. 1962 Galerie Louis Carré, peintures de 1929 à 1939, text by Raymond Queneau. 1964 Galerie Yvon Lambert, trente ans de dessins, text by Francis Ponge. 1966 Galerie du Dragon, peintures de 1937 à 1966, texts by Jean-Pierre Burgart, Pierre Bruguière, A. du Bouchet, Alain Jouffroy, Francis Ponge, Pierre Schneider and Christian Zervos.

Refusing to divorce himself from realism, he continued his series inspired by news items: he drew the events of May 68 which he experienced as a meticulous observer on the barricades, filling a number of sketch books Choses vues en Mai. He also drew circus performers at the Cirque d’Hiver. He resumed his series of street scenes: entrances to the metro or sometimes its corridors, second-hand clothes shops, couples on benches and amateur street orchestras (1971-1972). In May 1973 he settled permanently at Bigeonnette, where he painted the cabbages in his kitchen garden and the market stalls at Châteauneuf-en-Thymerais. In 1975, during his annual stay on Belle-Ile, he made studies of lobsters and the wholesale fish merchants: these gouaches served him for the oils and pastels executed the following year. Periods of creative activity were interspersed with trips abroad that provided inspiration for his work: in 1976 New York inspired the series New York Scène. He was captivated by many different aspects of daily life: roadworks, café terraces, urinals, flea markets, to name a few of these. From 1981, Hélion’s eyesight began to deteriorate. He returned to his early subjects and painted large canvases. In a simplified style, employing a riot of colours, he remained faithful to his figurative investigation which he described as follows:

«From 25 to 29: forceful painting with an instinctive reaction to nature and the object.

From 29 to 33: development of a system of signs.

From 34 to 39: attempt to express myself and the world through abstraction.

In 39 and from 43 to 46: attempt to change the surrounding world with my abstract structures.

From 47 to 51: search for visual and human archetypes.

From 51 to 54: attempt to express everything through close contact with the object. Attempt to include appearance in the essence.

From 55 to 58: light.

After 58: free. Everything at once» (op. cit.)

With his singular career, Hélion was considered by his admirers as a ‘revolutionary.’

He participated in the Salon de Mai from 1947 to 1949, 1957, 1958.

In 1975, the Galerie Karl Flinker in Paris inaugurated its series of exhibitions of the artist with: Cinquante ans de peintures 1925-1975. Catalogues.

1986 Hélion, les années 60. Galerie Karl Flinker. Catalogue.

In 1970-1971 the first retrospective of Hélion’s work was held at the Grand Palais in Paris. Cent tableaux. 1928-1970. Catalogue. Archives de l’Art contemporain.

At the same time the Maison des Jeunes et de La Culture de Paris showed 40 ans de dessins 1930-1970. Catalogue. A travelling exhibition organised by the Centre national d’Art contemporain was shown in fifteen French museums. Catalogue.

Among the exhibitions and tributes we should mention:

1978 L’œuvre figuratif de 1928 à 1978. Musée Ingres, Montauban. Catalogue. Texts by A. Jouffroy, B. Noël, Fr. Ponge, J. Hélion.

1979 Dessins 1930-1978. Travelling exhibition organised by the M.N.A.M. Pinacothèque Athens. Catalogue Pontus Hulten and Daniel Abadie. At the Musée de Rennes in 1980.

1979 Peintures et dessins 1929-1979. Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Saint-Etienne. Catalogue, text by Richard Crevier.

1980 Retrospective in Peking, Shanghai and Nanchang.

1984-1985 Hélion, peintures et dessins 1925-1983. Musée d’Art moderne Ville de Paris. Catalogue. Also shown in Munich and Lisbon. Texts Pierre Bruguière and Anne Moeglin-Delcroix. Complete Biography and Bibliography.

1987 Hélion, peinture de 1929 à 1983. Galerie Louis Carré, Paris. Catalogue.

1988 Hélion. Campredon, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Catalogue.

Hélion’s work is present in many museum collections in France and abroad, in particular Paris, Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou where a Hélion room was opened in 1986 – Musée d’Art moderne Ville de Paris – Grenoble – Beauvais – New York – Philadelphia -Buffalo – Saint Louis – San Francisco – Chicago – Liège – Venice – Tel-Aviv – London.

• Pierre Bruguière: Jean Hélion. SPEI, Paris, 1970.
• René Micha: Jean Hélion, Flammarion, 1979.
• Journal d’un peintre (Note books 1929-1984 preserved at the BN), A. Dimanche, Marseille, 1987.
• Henri-Claude Cousseau: Jean Hélion, Editions du Regard, Paris, 1992.