Figuration Narrative #2 - By Jean-Luc Chalumeau
Narrative Figuration in New York
Fifty-seven years after its emergence in Paris, Narrative Figuration is being presented in New York thanks to the Richard Taittinger Gallery, essentially as a historical movement, which is good news. It was indeed in 1964 that a now legendary exhibition was organized at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris: Mythologies Quotidiennes (Daily Mythologies). This group exhibition immediately became part of the Paris-New York debate. To summarize the context at that time: Ileana Sonnabend had settled in Paris in 1962 and, as early as 1963, she exhibited Andy Warhol's already famous Marilyn series. Artists of all nationalities working in France were thus directly confronted with Pop Art, just as they had long been with American Abstract Expressionism, which had triumphed since the 1950s. A painting by the Icelandic artist Errò soon summarized a sentiment widely shared by young painters: The Background of Pollock (acrylic on canvas, 260 x 200 cm, 1967). Pollock's tutelary figure seemed to dominate and conclude the history of art according to the scheme then imposed by Clement Greenberg: from Manet to Cézanne and from Cézanne to Pollock, the disappearance of anecdote was complete. Painting no longer had to tell stories; it was time for the abstention from all narration. Pop artists were certainly not abstract, but they contented themselves with representing objects of industrial society without commenting on them: they, too, did not tell stories. However, what united the artists of Narrative Figuration was the need to give meaning to their works, more precisely a political meaning.
Let's give just three examples that would dominate the early 1970s: First, the large painting In China, in Hu-Xian (oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, National Museum of Modern Art - Centre Pompidou), painted in 1974 by Gérard Fromanger following a trip to Mao's China, which exploded as a challenge to the Maoist conformism of many intellectuals of the time. The painter's critical intelligence had detected the gigantic deception hidden behind the phraseology of the "cultural revolution" of the Great Helmsman and denounced it with exclusively plastic means. Secondly, the Italian Valerio Adami had created in 1972 Il Gile di Lénine (Lenin's Vest) (oil on canvas, 239 x 367 cm, Centre Pompidou), a painting with precise and elliptical drawing, predominantly red chromatic, which emphasized a typically petty-bourgeois clothing item: the vest. The tribute to the father of the October Revolution was thus ironically critical! Thirdly, the Spanish artist Eduardo Arroyo, an anti-Franco activist who had taken refuge in France, had painted El Caballero español (The Spanish Gentleman) in 1970 (oil on canvas, 162 x 130.5 cm, Centre Pompidou), a portrait ridiculing a macho representative of the reactionary Spanish bourgeoisie, accompanied by a high-heeled feminine shoe parodying an image from 1937 by Miró, a painter criticized because he had not left Franco's Spain. These three examples alone allow us to understand why the most important thinkers of the 20th century were keenly interested in the painters of narrative figuration through landmark texts: Jacques Derrida on Adami, Jean-François Lyotard on Monory, Pierre Bourdieu on Rancillac, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze on Fromanger, etc...
Adami
Let's return to historical facts: it all started with Bernard Rancillac who, in 1962, was disgusted by twenty years of the domination of various abstractions in galleries and cultural institutions worldwide. At that precise moment, Hervé Télémaque arrived in Paris, coming from Haiti via New York, where he himself had rejected the enterprise of abstraction on young painters while observing with interest the early works of Pop artists Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. Rancillac and Télémaque met at the first Latin American Salon in Paris, in which Télémaque, from Haiti, participated, but his canvases had nothing to do with "Latin art," which Rancillac immediately noticed: the two young men became friends and gathered around them artists and critics who, like them, refused to conform to fashion and practiced, in one way or another, a critical vision of everyday life. Among them: Jacques Monory, Eduardo Arroyo, Peter Saul, and the critics Alain Jouffroy and Gérald Gassiot-Talabot. The former, a friend of Rauschenberg, advocated a "new history painting" whose appearance he saw in Paris; the latter would soon give its name to Narrative Figuration and theorize it. For various reasons, Errò, Adami, Fromanger, and Cybèle Varela would only join the movement later.
Arroyo
Interested in Pop Art, Rancillac and his friends were not long deceived by what it represented: "we were present at all of Ileana Sonnabend's openings," Rancillac told me. "We perhaps also thought that we would exhibit there one day, in which case we were completely deluding ourselves. Sonnabend found us likeable, but for her, what was being done in New York was otherwise better than what we were doing!" This statement would naturally need to be qualified by other testimonies, particularly that of Monory (a memory I collected in 2004): "At the time, I believe that the idea of 'resisting' Pop Art was not at all formulated. The artists of Narrative Figuration were influenced by Pop Art from a formal point of view, and not only them. In Cuba, revolutionary artists painted very militant, very anti-American things, but in a style perfectly consistent with Pop." The influence of Pop Art from a formal point of view was certainly real, but obviously not from the point of view of content, the rupture growing even more with the explosion of 1968. Very active within the framework of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, some artists of Narrative Figuration, accompanied by Gérard Fromanger, created "the popular workshop of the École des Beaux-Arts." For a month, they invented and produced every night the famous silkscreen posters glued to the walls of the Latin Quarter in the early morning. But these directly political works were only temporary: in 1968, young artists notably read Herbert Marcuse: "The more immediately political a work is," he had written, "the more it loses its power of decentering and the radicalism, the transcendence of its objectives of change." This was precisely what Fromanger, Arroyo, and their friends thought: their model would henceforth be Rimbaud, not Zhdanov. All despised socialist realism and its epigones.
Monory
In truth, the artists of Narrative Figuration never constituted a true group. The critic Pierre Gaudibert observed in 1992 that it was merely "an arbitrary regrouping of those who wanted to restore a politically active function to painting." These artists therefore pursued essentially individual careers and, over the years, opportunities to gather together became rare. The exhibition at the Richard Taittinger Gallery is thus exceptional, and it is therefore appropriate to situate each of the nine artists reunited today, some of whom have unfortunately passed away.