.Narrative Figuration #2 - By Jean-Luc Chalumeau
Narrative Figuration in New York
Fifty-seven years after its appearance in Paris, Narrative Figuration is presented in New York thanks to the Richard Taittinger Gallery, essentially as a historical movement, which is good news. It was in 1964 that a now legendary exhibition was organized at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris: Daily Mythologies . This group exhibition immediately became part of the Paris-New York debate. Let's summarize the context at this time: Ileana Sonnabend moved to Paris in 1962 and, from 1963, she exhibited Andy Warhol's already famous Marilyns . Artists of all nationalities working in France were therefore directly confronted with pop art, as they had been for a long time with American abstract expressionism which had triumphed since the 1950s. A painting by the Icelandic Errò soon summed up a feeling widely shared by young painters: The Background of Pollock (acrylic on canvas, 260 x 200 cm, 1967). The tutelary figure of Pollock seemed to dominate and complete the history of art according to the pattern then imposed by Clement Greenberg: from Manet to Cézanne and from Cézanne to Pollock, the disappearance of the anecdote was complete. Painting no longer had to tell stories, it was time to abstain from any narration. Pop artists were certainly not abstract, but they were content to represent objects of industrial society, without commenting on them: they did not tell stories either. However, what brought the artists of Narrative Figuration together was the need to give meaning to their works, more precisely a political meaning.
Let us give just three examples which would dominate the early seventies: 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 imposture hidden behind the phraseology of the "cultural revolution" of the Grand Helmsman and had denounced it with exclusively plastic means. Secondly, the Italian Valerio Adami had produced Il Gile di Lénin (oil on canvas, 239 x 367 cm, Center Pompidou) in 1972, a painting with a precise and elliptical design, with a predominantly red color, which insisted on a typically small-scale clothing element. bourgeois: the vest. The tribute to the father of the October Revolution was therefore ironically critical! Thirdly, the Spaniard Eduardo Arroyo, an anti-Franco activist who took refuge in France, had painted El Caballero español in 1970 (oil on canvas, 162 x 130.5 cm, Center Pompidou), a portrait ridiculing a macho representative of the reactionary Spanish bourgeoisie, accompanied by A feminine high-heeled shoe parodying a 1937 image by Miró, a painter rejected 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 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 domination of various abstractions in galleries and cultural institutions around the world. At this precise moment Hervé Télémaque arrived in Paris, coming from Haiti via New York, where he himself had refused the influence of abstraction on young painters while observing with interest the first works of pop artists Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. Rancillac and Télémaque met at the first Latin American Salon in Paris in which the Haitian Télémaque participated, but his paintings had nothing to do with "Latino art", which Rancillac immediately noticed: the two young people got along well and rallied around them artists and critics who, like them, did not agree to bow to fashion and practiced in one way or another a critical vision of everyday life. Among them: Jacques Monory, Eduardo Arroyo, Peter Saul, the critics Alain Jouffroy and Gérald Gassiot-Talabot. The first, a friend of Rauschenberg, defended a “new historical painting” which he saw appearing in Paris, the second would soon give his name to Narrative Figuration and theorize it. For various reasons, Errò, Adami, Fromanger and Cybèle Varela would not join the movement until later.
Arroyo
Interested in pop art, Rancillac and his friends were not long fooled by what it represented: “we were present at all of Ileana Sonnabend's openings,” Rancillac told me. We also thought perhaps that we would exhibit there one day, something in which we really hit the nail on the head. Sonnabend found us sympathetic, but for her, what was being done in New York was much better than what we were doing! » This statement should naturally be qualified by other testimonies, in particular that of Monory (a memory that I collected in 2004): “At the time, I believe that the idea of 'resisting' pop art was not not formulated at all. The Narrative Figuration artists were influenced by pop art from a formal point of view and not only them. In Cuba, 'revolutionary' artists painted very militant things, very anti-American, 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 a substantive point of view, the break increasing further with the explosion of 1968. Very active in the framework of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture , some Narrative Figuration artists accompanied by Gérard Fromanger created “the popular workshop of the School of Fine Arts”. For a month, they invented and produced every night the famous screen-printed posters stuck on the walls of the Latin Quarter in the early morning. But these directly political works only lasted for a short time: in 1968 young artists read Herbert Marcuse in particular: “The more a work is immediately political,” he wrote, “the more it loses its power of decentring and the radicality, the transcendence of its objectives for change. » This was exactly what Fromanger, Arroyo and their friends thought: their model would henceforth be Rimbaud, not Jdanov. Everyone despised socialist realism and its epigones.
Monory
To tell the truth, the artists of Narrative Figuration have never constituted a real group. The critic Pierre Gaudibert observed in 1992 that it was nothing more than “a simple arbitrary grouping of those who wanted to restore a politically active function to painting. » These artists have therefore led essentially individual careers and, over the years, the opportunities to come together have become rare. The exhibition at the Richard Taittinger Gallery is therefore exceptional, and it is therefore appropriate to situate each of the nine artists gathered today, some of whom have unfortunately disappeared.
Complete file on the exhibition (French) here
Narrative Figuration 60s-70s preview (English)
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