Narrative Figuration #2 - By Jean-Luc Chalumeau
Narrative Figuration in New York
Fifty-seven years after its appearance in Paris, Narrative Figuration is being presented in New York by the Richard Taittinger Gallery, mainly as a historical movement, which is good news. Indeed, it was in 1964 that an exhibition that has become legendary was organised at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris: Mythologies quotidiennes (Daily Mythologies). This group exhibition immediately became part of the Paris-New York debate. Let's summarise 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, as they had long been with American abstract expressionism, which had triumphed since the 1950s. A painting by the Icelandic artist Errò soon summarised a feeling 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 complete 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 consumed. Painting no longer had to tell stories; the time was for abstention from all narration. Pop artists were certainly not abstract, but they merely represented objects from industrial society, without commenting on them: they too did not tell stories. However, what brought the artists of Narrative Figuration together 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, Musée National d'art moderne-Centre Pompidou), painted in 1974 by Gérard Fromanger after 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 uncovered the gigantic imposture hidden behind the phraseology of the "cultural revolution" of the Great Helmsman and had denounced it with exclusively plastic means. Secondly, the Italian Valerio Adami had created in 1972 Lenin's Vest (oil on canvas, 239 x 367 cm, Centre Pompidou), a painting with a precise and elliptical drawing, predominantly red in colour, which insisted on a typically petty-bourgeois item of clothing: the vest. The homage to the father of the October Revolution was thus ironically critical! Thirdly, the Spanish 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 woman's 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 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 go back 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 around the world. At this precise moment, Hervé Télémaque arrived in Paris, having come from Haiti via New York, where he himself had rejected the influence 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 the Haitian Télémaque participated, but his canvases had nothing to do with "Latin art," which Rancillac immediately noticed: the two young men sympathised and rallied around them artists and critics who, like them, refused to conform to fashion and practised, 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 first, a friend of Rauschenberg, defended a "new history painting" whose appearance he saw in Paris; the second would soon give his name to Narrative Figuration and theorise 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 we were completely mistaken. Sonnabend found us likeable, 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 I collected in 2004): "At the time, I don't think the idea of 'resisting' pop art was 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 in line 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 break widening further with the explosion of 1968. Very active in the context of the Jeune Peinture salon, 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 created each night the famous silkscreen posters pasted on the walls of the Latin Quarter in the early morning. But these directly political works were only temporary: in 1968, young artists were notably reading Herbert Marcuse: "The more immediately political a work is," he had written, "the more it loses its power of decentring and the radicality, 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 formed a real 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 meet up became rare. The exhibition at the Richard Taittinger Gallery is therefore exceptional, and it is consequently important to place each of the nine artists gathered today, some of whom have unfortunately passed away.