Translation: Victor Hugo Yes, I am a dreamer …

Ivan Shishkin, Forest

Yes, I am a dreamer; I am the friend

of little golden flowers on a crumbling wall,

and the interlocutor of trees and the wind.

You see, all of them know me. I often have

conversations with the gillyflowers,

in May, when the branches are full with perfumes;

I receive advice from the ivy and the cornflower.

The mysterious being that you think is mute,

leans over me and comes to write with my quill. 

I hear what Rabelais heard; I see laughter

and crying; and I hear what Orpheus heard.

Do not be surprised at all about what nature

says to me in ineffable sighs. I chat 

with all the voices of the metempsychosis. 

Before beginning the sacred great concert,

the swallow, the bush, the white water in the meadow,

the forest, enormous bass, and the wing and the corolla, 

all of these soft instruments, talk to me; 

I am the regular of the divine orchestra;

If I were not a dreamer, I would have been a sylvan.

Thanks to the calm in which I reflect,

by speaking softly to the leaf, 

to the raindrop, to the striped feather, I ended up  

descending to such point in creation,

this abyss where a shy trembling quivers, 

that I do not even chase away a fly!

The blade of grass, vibrating with an eternal excitement,

becomes tame and familiar with me,

and without noticing that I am there, the roses

do all kinds of things with the bumblebees;

Sometimes, through the soft blessed branches,

I fully place my face over the nests,

and the little bird, worried and saintly mother,

is no more afraid of me than we are of fear,

us, if the eye of the good Lord looked into our niches; 

The prude lily watches me approach without fury,

when she opens at sunset; the violet, 

the most modest, bathes herself in front of me; 

For these beauties I am the discreet and sure friend

and the fresh butterfly, libertine of the sky,

who cheerfully rumples a half-naked flower,

continues, if I come and pass in the shadows, 

and, if the flower wants to hide in the lawn, 

she tells her: “You are silly! He is one of us.”

Theories of Beauty

Summary of the Theory of Beauty, according to George Dickie’s “Introduction to Aesthetics”

The theory of beauty dates back to Plato, who holds a usually antagonistic and suspicious view of art since he views art as a representation of a representation, giving precedence to real material objects, which in turn are inferior to ideal Forms. Plato posits that there exists a Form of Beauty that is present in everything that we recognize as beautiful, whether in the manmade world or in nature. He influenced Lord Shaftesbury in the 18th century, who still held that the contemplation of beauty is a rational process while introducing the idea of a faculty of taste that governs the apprehension of beauty. Shaftesbury also introduced the idea of disinterestedness in the contemplation of beauty, which would be adopted by numerous other philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Theories of taste, which unified the objectivity of the material world with the internal senses, governed the 18th century. In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer introduced the idea of aesthetic consciousness, a special and rare state of mind, which unlike the faculty of taste presupposed a complete subjectivity of aesthetic experience.  

1. Plato — Beauty is not embodied in anything physical or spiritual. It is a single, ideal Form that has a real existence beyond our sense perception. All beautiful things have the accompanying quality of unity. Beautiful things share the qualities of measure and proportion. The appreciation of Beauty involves contemplation.
   (Forms, contemplation)
   
   
2. St. Thomas Aquinas — Forms are part of the sensory world. Cognition is important to the experience of beauty. The mind grasps a Form that is embodied in the object of experience. There is no single Form of Beauty.
   (Forms, cognition, experience)
   
   
3. Lord Shaftesbury — His theory of beauty unifies Platonism with a single faculty of taste that governs moral judgment as well as our judgment of what is beautiful. The sense of beauty is a cognitive faculty. The contemplation of beautiful things is separate from the desire to posses them. Therefore, the contemplation of beauty is disinterested or not vested in any personal interest.
   (Faculty of taste, cognition, contemplation, disinterestedness)
   
   
4. Francis Hutcheson — The perception of beauty is the object of our sensory faculties. It is in our private consciousness and is a feeling. There are several internal senses that allow us to perceive beauty. The experience of beauty is immediate, free of thought and calculation, therefore it cannot be premeditated and selfish. All beautiful things share the quality of uniformity in variety.
   (Sensory faculties, disinterestedness, uniformity in variety)
   
   
5. Edmund Burke — The sublime is separate from beauty. Beauty arises from the emotion of love, while the sublime arises from delight. Delight arises from the removal of the possibility of pain or the possibility of the anticipation of pain in experiencing. Love is disinterested, therefore our appreciation of beauty is disinterested.
   (Sublime, disinterestedness)
   
   
6. David Hume — The nature of taste should be an empirical investigation into human nature. Beauty cannot be rationally intuited, but is founded in experience. Beauty is the sum of the varying tastes of individuals, but in order to be part of the survey group from which our understanding of beauty will be derived, individuals must posses “a delicacy of taste,” and not be motivated by prevailing trends or ignorance or envy. Beauty is a feeling and it is possible to have universal agreement and objective judgments about what is beautiful because there exists a range of normal subjects to be investigated on what their sense of beauty is.
   (Experience, normative evaluation of beauty)
   
   
7. Archibald Alison — There are no special internal senses that detect beauty. There is only the association of ideas. The ordinary cognitive functions and affective faculties operate to generate an emotion of taste from all material objects in the world indiscriminately through the association of ideas. In order to give rise to the emotion of taste, material objects must become a sign of or expressive of a quality of mind. Simple emotions, simple thoughts, and simple pleasures give rise to complex emotions, complex thoughts and complex pleasures in the imagination to produce delight through sequential arisings. One association triggers another, and so material objects reflect qualities of mind. There exists a disinterested state of mind which is most favorable to the emotion of taste.
   (Association of ideas, cognition, emotion of taste, disinterestedness, any object can be beautiful)
   
   
8. Kant — Beauty is not a concept. Beauty is a reflective judgment, but since reflective judgments seek to derive new concepts from existing ones, beauty is a reflective judgment looking for a nonexistent concept. A judgment of beauty must be disinterested (we should not actively desire for an object of beauty to exist), universal (because beauty is a reflective judgment, the imagination cannot derive a new concept from beauty and so engages in free play, a universal faculty), necessary (if one person feels pleasure from the apprehension of beauty through the free play of cognitive faculties, then all people must feel the same pleasure because the cognitive faculties are universal), and recognize a form of purpose (since the recognition of a purpose in an object of beauty would entail the use of a concept, Kant states that we recognize the Form of Purpose in an object of beauty.)
   (Form of purpose, reflective judgment, disinterestedness)
   
   
9. Arthur Schopenhauer — Beauty is the object of aesthetic contemplation. To perceive beauty, the ordinary cognitive faculties function in an unusual way and slip into aesthetic consciousness, “in which knowledge tears itself free from the service of the will.” Aesthetic consciousness takes as its object a relationless Platonic Idea, which distances the subject from the object of perception, thus producing disinterestedness.
   (Aesthetic consciousness, cognition, contemplation, disinterestedness)

Translation: Charles Baudelaire Hymn to Beauty

Xavier Fabre, The Judgement of Paris, 1808

Do you rise from the deep sky or the abyss,

Oh Beauty? your gaze, infernal and divine,

Pours both of goodness and of crime,

And for that, we can compare it to wine.

In your eye you contain both dusk and dawn;

You cast your perfumes like a stormy eve;

Your kisses are a potion and your mouth an urn

That turn heroes cowardly and children brave.

Do you rise from the dark chasm or descend from the stars?

Charmed destiny chases after your skirts like a dog;

At random you sow joy and disasters,

And you rule over all and answer for nothing.

You walk over the dead, Beauty, whom you mock;

Of your jewels Horror is not the least charming,

And Murder, among your most dear trinkets,

On your proud belly dances amorously.

The ephemeral moth flies toward you, candle,

Crackles, blazes and says: Let us bless this flame!

The panting lover bent over his belle

Seems like a ghost caressing his tomb.

Whether you come from the sky or from hell, what does it matter,

Oh Beauty! enormous monster, frightening, naive!

If your eye, your smile, your foot open the door

To an Infinity I love and have never known?

From Satan or God, what does it matter? Angel or Siren,

What does it matter, if you make — fairy with velvet eyes,

Rhythm, perfume, sheen, oh my only queen! —

The universe less hideous and the moments lighter?

Translation: Art Is Life but on a Different Rhythm

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 188-189.

As we walk, through the continuity of our movement without spurts, and because our culture demands it, we try to restore what we believe is the essence of life: unimpeded efficiency and fluid performance that through the absence of rupture portrays the vital élan with which we accomplish everything. Here, the cheetah in action is the norm; all its gestures are harmonious; we cannot distinguish the first one from the one that follows, and the racing great beast seems like a single and long movement that symbolizes the deep perfection of life. But as Japanese women break up the powerful deployment of natural movement with their intermittent steps, at a time when we should feel the torment that overcomes the soul at the sight of nature affronted, on the contrary, we experience a strange bliss, as if rupture had given rise to ecstasy and the grain of sand to beauty. We perceive a paradigm of Art in this offense to the sacred rhythm of life, in this impeded walk, in the excellence born of constraint.  

And so, propelled beyond a nature that demands for it to be continuous and becoming both renegade and remarkable through its discontinuity, movement attains the level of aesthetic creation. 

For Art is life but on a different rhythm. 

Translation: Flavor of Green Tea over Rice

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 186-188. 

Two reasons, both related to Ozu’s films. 

The first rests in the sliding doors themselves. Since I saw my first film, “Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice,” I have been fascinated by space in Japanese life and by those sliding doors that refuse to slice through the air, sliding gently on invisible rails. When we open a door, we transform our surroundings in tiny ways. We introduce an obstacle into their full extension and an ill-advised breach of inadequate proportions. If you think about it, there is nothing uglier than an open door. Like a rupture, it introduces a provincial interference in the room that breaks the unity of the space. In the adjoining room, it foments a depression, a gaping yet stupid fissure, lost in a section of wall that would have preferred to have been whole. In both cases, it disturbs continuity without any other benefit than the ability to circulate, something that is possible through other means. The sliding door avoids pitfalls and glorifies space. Without altering its balance, it allows for its metamorphosis. As it opens, two places communicate with one another without offending each other. As it closes, it restores integrity to each. Division and coming together take place without intrusion. Life is a calm promenade, whereas otherwise, it resembles a series of break-ins.        

“It’s true,” I say to Manuela. “It’s more practical and less brutal.”

The second reason comes from an association that led me from sliding doors to women’s feet. In Ozu’s films, there are numerous shots where an actor pushes aside a door, enters, and takes off his shoes. The women, especially, demonstrate a special talent as these actions unfold. They enter, slide the door along the wall, and in two small, rapid steps inch their way to the foot of the elevated space found in living rooms. Without bending over, they remove their laceless shoes and, through a gracious and fluid movement of their legs spin around after having climbed the platform they approached with their backs turned. Their skirts swell lightly. The bending of the knee, necessitated by the ascension, is energetic and precise. The body effortlessly follows this pirouette performed on the feet. As if the ankles were tied together, a curiously broken gait ensues. However, while usually, impeded gestures evoke a sense of constraint, the small steps animated by an incomprehensible halting gait grant the seal of a work of art to the women’s feet as they walk.  

Translation: Art Is Emotion without Desire

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 253-255.

What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief but dazzling illusion of the camellia, enabling an emotional breach in time that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is born of the mind’s ability to sculpt the sensory domain. What does Art do for us? It shapes and makes our emotions visible, and in so doing places on them the seal of eternity found in all works of art that are capable of embodying the universality of human affects through a particular form.

The seal of eternity … What absent life do these meals, dishes, carpets and glasses suggest to the heart? Beyond the edges of the painting, most probably, there’s the chaos and boredom of life — that endless and vain race worn out by projects; but within, there’s the plenitude of a moment of human covetousness suspended in time. Human covetousness! We cannot stop desiring, which both gives us glory and kills us. Desire! It transports and crucifies us, leading us back to the battle field each day — where we lost the previous day but that in the sunlight appears once more like a terrain full of conquests. While death is certain, desire makes us build empires destined to turn to dust, as if our knowledge of their impending doom did not affect our thirst to erect them now. It moves us to continue to want what we cannot posses, and in the early morning tosses us onto the grass strewn with dead bodies. Until our death, it bequeaths us projects that are reborn as soon as they are completed. But it is so exhausting to desire nonstop … We soon aspire to pleasure lacking quest. We dream of a blissful state that does not begin or end, and where beauty is no longer an end or a project but becomes the evidence of our very nature. Yet, this state is Art. 

Did I have to set this table? Do I have to covet these meals in order to see them? Somewhere, elsewhere, someone wanted this meal, aspired to this mineral transparency and pursued the joy of caressing with his tongue the silky saltiness of a lemony oyster. This project was necessary. It was contained in 100 other projects and made 1,000 others spring to mind. This intention to prepare and enjoy a feast of shellfish, this project belonging to someone else in real life, was necessary for the painting to be realized. 

But when we look at a still life, as we enjoy without pursuit the beauty that carries the glorious and unmovable portrayal of things, we rejoice for what we did not have to want; we cherish what we did not have to desire. Then, because it portrays a beauty that speaks to our desire but is born of the desire of another, because it indulges our pleasure without being part of any of our plans, because it gives in to us without our making the effort to desire it, the still life embodies the quintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. Without life or movement, the mute scene embodies time exempt from projects, perfection removed from duration and its weary greediness, pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.

Because Art is emotion without desire.

Translation: Are There Universals or Only Particular Things?

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 314-316.

However, it is fascinating in principle. Are there universals, or are there only particular things? As I understand it, that is the question to which William [of Ockham] devoted the crux of his existence. I think it’s a fascinating question. Is each thing an individual entity — in which case, the similarities between things are just an illusion or an outcome of language, which works through words and concepts; through generalities that designate and incorporate many particular things? Or are there really general forms, in which singular things participate and which are not simple effects of language? When we say a table, when we call the table by name, when we form the concept of the table, do we only refer to the table in front of us, or do we really go back to a universal table entity, which is the basis for the reality of all existing particular tables? Is the idea of the table real or just part of our minds? In which case, why are certain things alike? Does language artificially group them into categories for the sake of making them convenient and understandable to humans, or are there universal forms in which all specific forms participate?

For William, things are singular, and the reality of universals is erroneous. There are only particular realities; generalities exist only in the mind. Believing that there are general realities complicates the simplicity of things. But are we so sure? Just last evening, I was asking myself about the congruence between a Raphael and a Vermeer. The eye recognizes in both a shared form. Both participate in it. It is the form of Beauty. And I believe that that form must be grounded in reality, that it is not simply an expediency of the mind categorizing in order to understand, discriminating in order to apprehend. You cannot classify anything that is not classifiable, group anything that cannot be grouped, or bring together anything that cannot come together. A table will never be a “View of Delft.” The human mind cannot engender this dissimilitude, in the same way that it does not have the power to give birth to the profound solidarity that unites a Dutch still life to an Italian Virgin and Child. 

Everything, like each table, has an essence that gives it its form. All works of art are part of a universal form that alone seals them. Sure, we do not directly perceive this universality. That is one of the reasons why so many philosophers have objected to considering essences as real — because we never see anything but the table in front of us and not the universal “table” form; we only see the painting in front of us, and not the essence of Beauty itself. Yet … yet, it is there, in front of our eyes. Each painting by a Dutch master is an incarnation, a striking apparition that we can only contemplate through the singular, but which gives us access to eternity, timelessness, a sublime form.

Eternity is looking upon the invisible.

Translation: The Grace of Art

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 116-117.

Eternity escapes us.

On those days when all of our romantic, intellectual, metaphysical and moral beliefs — which years of instruction and education have attempted to inculcate in us — capsize on the altar of our profound nature, society — that territory charged with sweeping hierarchies — drowns in the nothingness of Meaning. Gone are the rich and poor, thinkers, seekers, decision-makers, slaves, good and evil, creatives and conscientious, union supporters and individualists, progressives and conservatives. They become no more than primitive hominids whose grins and smiles, posturing and finery, language and codes, written on the genetic map of the average primate, boil down to this — maintain your social standing or die.

On such days, you desperately need Art. You ardently strive to reconnect with spiritual illusion. You passionately hope that something will save you from biological destiny, that poetry and greatness will not be ousted from this world.

Then, you drink a cup of tea or watch an Ozu film in order to withdraw from the rounds of jousts and battles, the daily fare of our dominating species, and bestow the grace of Art and its major works to this pathetic theatrical show. 

Translation: Exercise Without Love

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 116. 

Sometimes though, life looks like a phantom comedy. As if torn from a dream, we look at ourselves acting, and stunned to realize how much of our lives we expend in maintaining our most primitive needs, we ask ourselves stupefied, what is Art? Our frenzy of grins and glances suddenly seems utterly insignificant; our cozy nest, the fruit of a 20-year indebtedness, a pointless barbarian custom; and our position in the social ladder, so painstakingly acquired and so eternally precarious, an unsophisticated vanity. As for our progeny, we contemplate it anew, and we are horrified because without the guise of altruism, the act of reproduction seems profoundly displaced. We are only left with sexual pleasures, but gone down the river of primal abjection, they flounder accordingly — exercise without love does not fall within the bounds of our well-learned lessons. 

Translation: A Thirsty Tick on a Large, Warm Dog

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 115-116.

So, how do we go about life? Day after day, we bravely strive to maintain our role in this phantom comedy. Since we are primates, the basis of our daily activity is the maintenance and upkeep of our territory, so that it may protect us and flatter us. We strive to climb rather than fall in the hierarchical ladder of the tribe and to fornicate in all possible ways — even as phantoms — as much out of pleasure as for the promised progeny. Also, we use a significant part of our energy to intimidate and seduce. These two strategies alone ensure the territorial, hierarchical and sexual quest that animates our conatus. But we do not realize any of this. We speak of love, good and evil, philosophy and civilization, and we hang onto these respectable icons like a thirsty tick on large, warm dog.

Translation: What's an Illusion, Power or Art?

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 114-115.

I am sitting in the kitchen in silence. The lights are off, and I soak in the bitter feeling of absurdity. My mind slowly drifts. Pierre Arthens … brutal despot, thirsty for glory and honors. Yet, torn between his aspiration to Art and his hunger for power, he strove to the bitter end chasing after an elusive chimera through his words … Where lies the truth after all? And what’s an illusion — power or Art? Isn’t it through well-learned discourse that we admire the creations of man while denouncing the thirst for domination, which drives us all, as a crime of illusory vanity? Yes, us all, including a poor concierge in her tiny loge, who having given up ostensible power, still pursues dreams of power in her mind?

Translation: Back to the Origins of Art Brut

"Art does not lie down in the beds we have laid for it; it escapes as soon as we say its name: what it likes is being incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets its name."

This article by Laurence Chauvy was originally published in French on Le Temps on March 7, 2016.

For its 40th anniversary, the Art Brut Collection in Lausanne returns to the genesis of its foundations and pays homage to Jean Dubuffet, artisan behind the recognition of autodidactic and marginal practices.

After having founded Art Brut, in a way, Jean Dubuffet shaped it with his own hands, or at least, he made the concept essential until it was considered a form of art — sure, a slightly unusual and marginal form but one that was accepted and even popular. On the occasion of its 40th anniversary — the museum opened in 1976 — the Art Brut Collection suggests going back in time even further, to the year 1949 to be exact, when Dubuffet was exhibiting Art Brut — the title of this historic showing — for the first time in a gallery.

Well-located and frequented, the René Drouin Gallery, Place Vendôme in Paris met with a skeptical, even hostile public. The exception was the small Surrealist circle of aficionados. While most (164 out of 200) pieces shown at the time have been reunited because they belong to the Lausanne museum, we are not talking about a reconstitution, clarifies the museum’s director Sarah Lombardi.

Without viewing rooms, the hanging system is unprecedented: unprecedented and well put together, with an introduction allowing us to discover Dubuffet's still extensive interests in the field of autodidactic practices during that period, as well as the curiosities of his collection, like children’s drawings (in the absence of explanatory signage, we bet that we would confuse them with the work of certain Art Brut creators), naive paintings, primitive or extra-Occidental art. All this is followed by the work stemming from different psychiatric institutions in Switzerland and France. We notice that the “little story” that retraces the journey of the pieces toward the collector and theoretician, and his own journey toward the creators, is often charming and enlightening because it is made up of meetings, word of mouth sayings, friendships, and love at first sight. But it is also made up of deals — I will give you the material if you give me the artwork — which today would probably no longer be possible.  

Genius DIY Artists 

Indeed, explains Sarah Lombardi, the property laws have changed. Formerly, the drawings, bricolages, hand knittings and notebooks, filled to the brim, belonged to hospitals or doctors, who destroyed them or at least neglected them, excepting the psychiatrists with whom Dubuffet dealt on an exploratory trip to Switzerland in 1945. Today, the patients, often encouraged in their practice, are also the legitimate beneficiaries of their work. Doctors who appreciated their patients’ talent, the intensity and originality of their expression, such as Charles Ladame at the Bel-Air asylum in Geneva, Walter Morgenthaler at Waldau near Bern (his collection included the work of Adolf Wölfli), Paul Bernard at the Saint-Jean de Dieu hospital in France, or Jacqueline Forel fascinated by Aloïse’s work, played the role of trailblazers. 

However, we must state that only half of the work presented in Paris in 1949 came from psychiatric hospital “clients,” and that Dubuffet himself came out against the association of Art Brut with “art by the insane.” Certainly, children, conditioned through their learning, such as through academic subjects or life; naive painters, who took up conventional techniques and subjects; the representatives of the popular arts, necessarily tied to traditions, have been excluded from this body with ectoplasmic borders that Dubuffet called Art Brut. Nevertheless, we are left with all those who are marginal. They are inventors and genius DIY artists grouped in the current exhibit in the “And…” category — and Pascal-Désir Maisonneuve, a mosaic artist by training who created art out of the shells from the masks collected by Breton or André Lhote; and Robert Tatin, who headed a building company before creating sculptures as refined as the Breton with the bird on the shoulder; and Fleury-Joseph Crépin, ironmonger and spiritualist, who painted 345 “marvelous pictures,” the 300th of which, dated May 7, 1945, would have marked the end of the war.

The Same Mechanisms of Creation

This reinterpretation of the 1949 exhibit testifies to the taste of a man, Jean Dubuffet, himself an artists who was definitely influenced by this “other” art he defended (the Dame de Moire de Gaston Chaissac, a statue made of carbon, is very similar to some of his sculptures). But it also testifies to a unity that adds to its value. The catalogue of the 2016 exhibit includes extracts from the pamphlet published in the 1949 catalogue, a text in which Jean Dubuffet does not mess around, and where he pays homage to the creators he was exhibiting: “All the relationships we have had (there have been many) with our friends, more or less with bells, have convinced us that the mechanisms for artistic creation in their hands are exactly the same ones that are in the hands of people thought of as normal … Our point of view on the question is … that there is no more of an art by the insane than there is an art by those who are dyspeptic or those who are suffering from knee pain.”   

To see:

«The Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet». Art Brut Collection, Lausanne, until August 28. Tuesday-Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. www.artbrut.ch

Translation: 'International Graphics,' the Art of Political Posters

This article by Olivier Rogez was originally published on RFI on March 7, 2016 in French. 

How do you protest through art? In the 1970s and ‘80s, the poster was often the preferred vector for political and social struggles. In Paris, the exhibition “International Graphics” is showing more than 170 political posters of this period until May 29 at the Library for Contemporary International Documentation (Bdic).

It was before the invention of the Internet. In order to protest, to launch a confrontation, there were posters. Graphic designers, painters and graphic artists combined art and politics in order to create a cultural product in its own right.

The political poster has seen many Golden Ages — the 1920s with the Russian Constructivists or the European Springs of the 1960s. 1970 to 1990 was a period of great planetary movements, against the Vietnam War or against apartheid. This prolific period is what the Bdic is commemorating. At that time, we saw some of the iconic figures of the 20th century emerge. 

From Che Guevara to the Peace Dove

“Of course, we think of the figure of Che Guevara or the conical Vietnamese hat,” says Valérie Tesnière, the exhibit curator. “We must not forget the peace dove. A peace dove that walks with Grapus, but that is in prison with Klaus Staeck. There is also the theme of three continents, of non-aligned countries …”

But in the 1970s, there was not just the rhetoric of the raised fist or the brandished weapon. The era is also about social struggles “and signs of citizen mobilization, peace marches,” continues Valérie Tesnière. “When I see this Grapus poster that reinterprets Picasso’s dove by adding feet to it, I am struck. Indeed, we find ourselves much more within something that speaks to us today than within the slightly simplistic rhetoric of the raised fist or brandished weapon. Sure, this rhetoric exists, but it has been running out of steam these past two decades.” 

Schools and Collectives

The international graphics exhibition sheds light on networks, schools and collectives — the Grapus group in France or Wild Plakken in the Netherlands. The graphic designers draw their inspiration from the Constructivists but also from American Pop Art. Two countries both become references and sources of inspiration, Poland of the graphic designer Henryk Tomaszewski and Cuba.

“During this era, the island is rather illiterate when Fidel Castro carries out his revolution. It’s very obvious that the poster is a means of propaganda through images, something that is not at all true for Poland. The graphic designers there are in a much more ambiguous situation. For them, the poster is also a means of having a certain freedom of expression that does not necessarily have a political message. Moreover, the Poles invested a lot in the cultural poster.”

With the tightening of the laws about public posters, activist artists slowly deserted city walls. Today, the political poster has become more of an intimate object, poster or work of art.

Translation: Gérard Fromanger, or the Forgotten Generation of Contemporary French Art

This article by Laurent Boudier was originally published on Telerama on February 22, 2016 in French.

Distanced from the traditional circles, too rebellious for pop art, the activist work of this French painter finally finds its place in a successful retrospective currently on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Just a few months ago, all you had to do was take the Eurostar to London to get the latest on Gérard Fromanger. At 76, the French artist was part of large thematic, colorful and searching exhibition, as was written by the Tate Modern to evoke a section of art that strays far from the marked pathways. “The World Goes Pop” featured a colony of international artists who are in the margins; or rather the mirror opposite of the Pop Art movement, initiated in the 1960s by the dandy king Andy Warhol and his partner in crime Roy Lichtenstein.   

A Biting and Engaged Art

The exhibit’s picture rails were each decorated with blood-red graphic slogans, encouraging you to view the off-beat work of a generation of French artists apart: the simple posters on India paper, likewise glued to the wall belonging to Gérard Fromanger, showed peaceful demonstrations against the Vietnam War (Album, le Rouge, 1968); the work of his friends — Erro, Rancillac or even Henri Cueco — evoked a much more political use of the image than the consumerist alignment of Brillo soap boxes; a rereading that The Guardian heralded through these words: “Is this Pop? Or a biting, intellectual, engaged art, in the image of interiors painted by Erro, where we see a Vietcong group descend upon a domestic bathroom.” 

A Lot More Than Pop Art

You just need to visit the terrific Gérard Fromanger retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, delicately condensed under the skillful direction of curator Michel Gauthier, to realize that the Fromanger line goes far. 

From the first screen prints of flags with bleeding colors, to the huge canvas dedicated to the activist Pierre Overney (a Maoist worker activist killed in 1972 by a Renault factory security guard), the exhibit allows us to admire much more than a “popular, ephemeral, easily forgotten, cheap, serialized, made-for-the-young, spiritual, sexy, superficial and seductive” art, to paraphrase the description of Pop Art given by Richard Hamilton, an English pioneer of the movement at Warhol’s side. 

Sentimental crowds, road scenes, portraits of active thinking comrades like Barthes, Deleuze or Foucault — Fromanger provides a colorful relationship with the world he includes himself in, the world he fights for, brushes in hand (or through the use of electrical tape), by using printed photographs that he projects on canvases of figures connected by a winding line or tattooed with tints of primary color, a little cold, purple or aqua green. This way of combining warm and cold, of spreading the signs of a modern world, offering it as a spectacle by detailing it under the scalpel of existential activism, has probably and astonishingly isolated the hardworking boxer Fromanger from the international scene a little. 

The Fromanger Curse

It’s that in his work Fromanger shows the marks of a double effort: distinguishing himself from American art by criticizing its expansionist politics; and founding his relatively familiar painting on a visual joy that is completely retinal and which, far from the sales records and prestigious collections, aligns itself with artists like Gilles Aillaud (who paints empty zoo scenes to evoke spleen), Jacques Monory (who combines cinema and photo-realism) or even Hervé Télémaque (who reinterprets in his own way collages of daily objects). Curse, or a lack of understanding of a forgotten generation? Or at least an isolated [generation] — too old for the young guard of the Actionists, Philippe Parreno and Thomas Hirschhorn — who are well-supported by their galleries — and not enough glamor, like in a Hockney, so voyageur. This group has probably lacked the help or perseverance of conservators or curators able to export, beyond its own borders, a history that has inherited an oblique gaze. A philosophy prevaricating between Courbet and Godard, between Foucault and Derrida, which removes the real, evokes identity, weaves ties everywhere between the social field and the solitary position of the artist-thinkers who are scarifying conventions, whether pigmented or not.  

Translation: This 16-year-old Artist Paints Her Dreams, and the Result Is Fascinating

This article by Amélia Labiod was originally published by The Huffington Post in French on February 5, 2016.

You can work at talent, and genius has no age. Dimitra Milan proves it. This young, 16-year-old artist expresses her dreams, ideals and memories through painting. And the result is fascinating.

Dimitra Milan, who comes from a family of artists, grew up surrounded by works of art and creativity in her parents’ Milan Art Institute in Arizona. Having gotten her high school diploma at a very young age, she took courses at home in order to be able to explore her artistic creativity without constraints. Today, the young woman cultivates this passion for painting and has her own style, both soft and hypnotic.

For her, art is a spiritual rather than intellectual activity. “I want the paintings to be like a door to a new world, a heavenly realm where there are no prey and there are no predators, just beauty, hope, adventure, confidence, and of course love. All of this I think I do on a sub-conscience, right brain level. It's not calculated or pre-determined. It sort of happens organically and naturally. I don’t want to be limited by technique or a missing skill,” she admitted during an interview with MyModernMet.

Her Instagram account is like her work — ethereal and colorful. She regularly posts photos of her paintings on it.

“I think the places I see in my head and then paint are a combination of places I have been to and also what I dream at night. I have had many dreams where I am swimming underwater and able to breath underwater.” 

“The most important advice I received is the demonstration of a work ethic. They taught me that you don’t always have to be in the mood to paint. You just paint. Every day, for eight or nine hours straight just like any other career choice. Like everything else in life, it's hard work, passion, and commitment that will make you successful.”

“It used to be like this: when I became stuck on a painting and didn’t know how to resolve it, I would quit and move on to something new. Now, I realize that, in order to become more skilled, I need to confront my comfort zones and push through the wall that's blocking me because a breakthrough is on the other side. I paint women and animals/nature together to create a dreamy atmosphere and to give you a feeling that anything is possible.”

Dimitra Milan’s work is available on her website.

Translation: Alexander Tinei, A Painting Genius in Leipzig

This article by Mélanie Gentil et Thomas Schlesser was originally published on NovaPlanet in French on January 14, 2016.

Discovering one of the most puzzling artists of the current scene. 

Long ago, it was a cotton spinning mill … But 10 years ago, Leipzig’s Spinerrei was transformed into a creative and exhibition space. The Guardian has called it “the hottest” place on the planet. The Sam Dukan Gallery hosted in this space has become unavoidable and welcomes one of the most puzzling artists of the current scene.

Alexander Tinei was born in Moldavia in 1967. He left the country he deeply loved — because he wanted “to give a chance to his painting” — to go to Budapest in 2000. There he developed figurative work, which features mostly portraits and youth. The beauty of the models (which includes his idols Nick Cave and Louise Bourgeois) is both seductive and bizarre. His palette is cold and pale, rather in the black tones for some time and now on in the pastels. Blue has also played a major role in his compositions, tracing networks of lines evoking, in an uncertain way, veins and tattoos on the marble skin of his models.

He has yet to be featured in very big international museums. Similarly to Michael Borremans, whom we met in 2014, Tinei is surely — we are betting on it — one of the painters who will go down in the history books. Upon his arrival in Budapest, Alexander Tinei was already 33 years old. His work was not selling. It had been too influenced by Soviet culture. Discovering Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, two eminent players — one German and the other Belgian — of contemporary painting, he noticed the gap that separated him from them. “My paintings were mostly inspired by the Fauves. They sent you back to a period that had ended nearly a century ago.” Rather than being discouraged, he decided to start from zero. “Since I did not come from an artistic family, I did not have my parents’ support. They did not imagine being able to make a career as a painter. I had to get by on my own. My mother would not stop telling me to get a real job. She still does … despite my success.”  

Alexander Tinei’s trajectory in certain ways resembles that of the romantic image of the 19th century artist, who is ready to abandon everything except his vocation. So, without pity, Alexander tells of the privations that marked his journey. Before being noticed by some amateurs, Tinei was well-acquainted with poverty, and even hunger. He cheated it by eating toothpaste (without this being a diet, either), thought about suicide in order to finally return to God. And it was He who, according to what he concedes, always saved him in extremis. He sincerely declares, “I am not religious.” Nevertheless, every morning, without fail, he picks up his guitar and bursts into pious songs before going to his studio in order to muster up the courage to work.  

After some very difficult years, Alexander Tinei managed to carve an important place for himself. Like most of the painters of his generation, his iconographic references are equally prevalent in newspapers, on the Internet, in art history or in personal archives. He explains, “Starting from these images, I make montages that I then touch up in Photoshop. The compositions are approximately transferred to a white canvas with charcoal before I work on them for several weeks. Certain works are put aside, sometimes even for an entire year; others are destroyed. It happens that I stop painting for a month or two: At that time, I visit exhibits, I read, I make collages, drawings, but I do not touch a brush. Then I get back to it, as much out of pleasure as out of duty.” 

The works on view at the Sam Dukan Gallery in Leipzig’s Spinerrei show formal and thematic changes that have happened over these last few years. Collectors especially like the paintings where pale silhouettes are contrasted against a dark background. But Tiney has abandoned this aesthetic now, “I am not afraid of white anymore,” he says, amused. The canvasses have gotten lighter: the violence subtly peeks out here or there. The aloof figures with arms hemmed in blue — which made him famous — and which used to be peaceful, fleeting and idle, today seem more threatening. One of the major pieces in the exhibit, in its monumental dimensions, depicts a lynching scene overlooking the flight of aggressive birds.  

In the next two years, Tinei wants to take his research in the direction of political overtones resonating with current upheavals and brutalities. And to conclude, “Too bad if that’s not what’s expected of me. I hope to have made this change look like nothing. In the image of that priest who proposed removing a piano from the church where he preached and met only with the protestations of his parishioners. Day after day, and inch by inch, he moved the instrument without their knowing it. Finally, after a year, the piano had disappeared. And so no one found anything to say again…” 

METONIA, Alexander Tinei & Johan Tahon

Galerie Dukan, Spinnereistraße 7, Halle 18.I, 04179 Leipzig - Germany 

Wednesday - Friday : 1 p.m. - 6 p.m.

Saturday 11a.m. - 6 p.m.

From January 16 to March 30, 2016

Translation: Fleur Pellerin Wants to Put Contemporary Art in Your Building

This article by Quentin Périnel was originally published in French in Le Figaro on December 16, 2015.

More than 1,000 works of art per year will be integrated into the construction of a building over the whole of French territory. Thirteen developers are joining this process in order to encourage contemporary creativity.

Bringing together artists and construction so that a building becomes a work of art, whether it’s a commercial or residential building — this is the ambition of the new program “One Building, One Work of Art” inaugurated with great pomp at the Ministry of Culture this Tuesday. In total, thirteen great actors in the real estate sector (including BNP Paribas Real Estate, Eiffage Immobilier and also Vinci Immobilier) have signed a specific charter. These companies are committing to commissioning or buying a work of art from an artist for all real estate projects to be built or renovated. 

“In our professions, we are not concerned with art a priori. However, when the minister spoke of this project, we were taken,” explained with enthusiasm Alexandra François-Cuxac, president of the FPI (Fédération des promoteurs immobiliers [Federation of Real Estate Developers]), before the different developers each signed the famous charter. “This rapprochement between art and construction is symbolic. We must no longer employ Manichean thinking: putting in opposition the new and the old, the owner and the renter … This project is both visionary and fascinating,” she added.

A Measure that Is Being Launched Over the Entire Territory

“By mobilizing its regional and central directors, my ministry will support this measure intended to be launched throughout the entire territory,” explained Minister Fleur Pellerin, citing the architect Walter Groupius, who as early as 1919 was already inviting his contemporaries to consider art an integral part of architecture … That was nearly 100 years ago. What exactly is behind the “One Building, One Work of Art” project, apart from the desire to provide the most people with the opportunity to live and/or work in contact with a work of art?

Minister Fleur Pellerin’s yearlong policy of supporting contemporary art is at its homestretch, and there are more than 1,000 works that will be created or bought each year and exhibited all over French territory. They are projects that should provoke a dialogue, inspire a sensitivity, as well as promote contemporary creativity — a creativity that is “our future heritage,” according to the words used by the ministry’s press release.

“Today, contemporary art carries undisputed weight. It’s the fight for creativity that I hold dear, at a time when contemporary artists see their pieces ransacked in public,” concluded Fleur Pellerin. Now it remains to be seen how the French people will take this innovative project.

Translation: Peace for Paris: Jean Jullien Tells QG How His Drawing Was Born

This article by Gonzague Dupleix was originally published on GQ France on November 16, 2015 in French.

An Eiffel Tower in the Peace and Love logo. This drawing with a clear message, immediately posted on social media, became the symbol for the outrage of Internet users after the attacks of November 13 in Paris. Its creator speaks with GQ.

Friday evening, an unprecedented wave of attacks hit the city of Paris. Jean Jullien, a 32-year-old French artist who attended Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and the author of illustrations for many prestigious publications, took a brush and drew the first idea that came to his mind before posting the sketch. “Peace for Paris” immediately became everyone’s symbol for showing solidarity with a murdered nation. 

What were you doing at the moment you found out about the attacks?

I had just come back from vacation.

At what time did you say to yourself that you must bear witness, participate, express yourself?

Everything happened very quickly. Those close to me were communicating through writing. I wanted to respond too, in the only way I knew how, by drawing.

How did you conceive of associating the symbols (as timeless as they are old-fashioned) of Peace and Love and the Eiffel Tower?

It’s the first thing I drew on a piece of paper in my notebook, on my knees, as I was listening to the news and understanding the scale of the horror. It’s not an illustrator’s drawing with personal ends in mind, it’s the drawing of an individual trying to show his solidarity with the victims of the horror. The social media are now part of our mores. Expressing oneself online, instantaneously, it’s a positive thing in this kind of case. It allows us to not remain silent and to show that we are there.

Did you have any other ideas?

No, this is all that came to mind.

Are you able to understand why among image professionals, the drawer is the one we especially pay attention to?

I think there is something immediate and universal about the image. Contrary to language and languages, which can create a barrier, we can read an image without needing more information or knowing anything. It’s a powerful vector of communication in that sense.

Do words have a symbolic significance for you too?

Of course, but for others. I express myself through drawing more naturally. 

Had you already faced the idea of reacting to atrocities?

Yes, unfortunately, in January during the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. But I am faced with it everyday during the massacres that happen all over the world, not only in France.

Was Charlie a revealing case?

I don’t know. In France yes, but as I was saying, massacres happen everyday in the name of the same “causes.”

How can a drawer overcome the absurdity of the pencil as weapon relationship?

I don’t think a lot about it. It’s an honest gesture. I just want to show my united and touched thought process. Now this image belongs to all those who want to communicate a message of peace and solidarity. 

Before that day, was your work inspired by ideals, humanism, politics?

Yes, like everyone else, I have opinions. My work is not to strike down people through my images. I like speaking of people. My work is always based on observation, and I try to create visual commentaries through humor. I am not a politician, my work is to communicate positive things, to make people smile, and I hope, to also make them think from time to time.