French draughtsman and writer, born on 1 July 1924 in Boulogne-Billancourt, died in 2015.
Life
Born into a working-class family, Fred Deux took evening classes at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers and trained as an electrician. In 1943-1944 he joined a group of FTP partisans, then the Doubs maquis; after the Liberation he served with the Moroccan goums.
From 1947 to 1949 he worked in Marseille at the Clary bookshop, where he discovered Surrealist literature and became involved with Les Cahiers du Sud. In 1948 a Paul Klee catalogue sparked his first “stains” on paper. Having settled in Paris in 1951, he met Cécile Reims, who became his partner, as well as André Breton and Hans Bellmer. Jean Cassou wrote a text on his drawings. He exhibited in 1952 at the Galerie À l’Étoile scellée, then alone in 1953 at the bookshop-gallery Le Fanal (“La Fenêtre des yeux”), before distancing himself from the Surrealist group in 1954.
In 1958, under the pseudonym Jean Douassot and with the support of Maurice Nadeau, he published La Gana, an autobiographical novel. The couple settled in the Ain, at Corcelles then Lacoux, and in 1971 founded a contemporary art centre; in 1985 they settled in La Châtre, in the Indre. From 1975 Cécile Reims engraved Fred Deux’s drawings.
The work
The first stains (bicycle paint, inks, prints on fabric) were followed by black or coloured Indian ink heightened with watercolour, then graphite on pearlescent Japan paper and coloured pencils. Fred Deux also made some forty “unique books” combining drawings and handwritten texts. The series of “coloured sperms”, in the early 1970s, combines graphite and cellulose paint: La Membrane (1972), L’Inexistence (1973), L’Élan (1974).
As a writer he published, among others, Sens inverse (1960), La Perruque (1969), Lettres à mon double (1983) and Terre mère (1999), as well as a spoken autobiography, À vif (1994).
“The years are counted in drawings.” (Fred Deux, Le Don, 2007)
Exhibitions and collections
- “Fred Deux, L’alter ego”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 10 April to 14 June 2004, some eighty drawings from the artist’s donation to the Musée national d’art moderne
- “Fred Deux. Le For intérieur”, Musée Jenisch, Vevey, 20 February to 25 May 2015
- Collections: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou; Musée Jenisch, Vevey; Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, Issoudun
- The Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles represented Fred Deux exclusively from 1999 until his death in 2015. During the exhibition “Drawing, the Unknown” (2025), Jean-Jacques Plaisance presented De l’autre le cristal, a unique book by Fred Deux from André Breton’s collection. La fin n’est pas la fin (1974) was included in “The Subversion of Images” (2025)