French mediumistic draughtsman, born in 1910 in Montfort-en-Chalosse (Landes), died in 1989 in Bordeaux.
Life
The son of sharecroppers in the Landes, Raphaël Lonné left school early and became a postman in his native village. Based in Bordeaux from 1937, he worked in turn as a tram conductor, caretaker-chauffeur and porter at the children’s hospital. After the war he took up a postman’s job again in a small town in his home region.
In 1950, during an impromptu spiritualist séance at friends’ house, he made his first drawing. No other séance followed, but Lonné carried on alone, at night, convinced that his hand was guided by spirits. In 1963 Jean Dubuffet discovered his work through Dr Gaston Ferdière, a psychiatrist close to the Surrealists. For a long time Lonné refused to sell his drawings.
The work
His first drawings combine writing with human or animal figures; over time they became increasingly abstract. Lonné described a process that began almost mechanically, with arabesques that he elaborated without any preconceived idea. Silhouettes, faces, animals and landscapes thus emerge from a disciplined, meticulous line, in graphite, Indian ink, ballpoint, watercolour or felt-tip, most often on small formats.
The gallery showed a Sans titre of 1964 (ink wash on paper, 20.5 x 30 cm) in its exhibition “Art Brut” (10 June to 23 July 2022).
Exhibitions and collections
- “Art spirite, médiumnique, visionnaire”, Halle Saint-Pierre, Paris, 1999-2000
- “Inner Worlds Outside”, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2006
- “Art brut. Dans l’intimité d’une collection”, Grand Palais, Paris, 2025
- Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou (Bruno Decharme donation, 2021); American Folk Art Museum, New York