Author: admin

Czech writer, poet, playwright and visual artist, born on 28 May 1931, died on 27 October 2017.

Life

Milan Nápravník belonged to the Czech Surrealist sphere. His life was divided between Czechoslovakia and Germany, and his work spans several fields: poetry, theory, the visual arts and photography. It is the breadth of this work that makes it original, long overlooked by specialists.

In recent years Czech scholarship has turned its attention to his work: in 2019 the Pštrossova 23 gallery in Prague presented the exhibition “Dno obrazu” (14 June to 13 September), and in October 2021 Masaryk University in Brno devoted an international conference to him in Kutná Hora, accompanied by an exhibition of his visual works at the Galerie Středočeského kraje.

The gallery showed his work in the exhibition “Surrealist Prelude” (7 June to 6 July 2024).

French painter and photographer, born on 13 April 1900 in Agen, died on 3 March 1976 in Bordeaux.

Life

Pierre Molinier trained with his father and the sculptor Pierre Augustin de Fumadelles. He began by painting landscapes and took up photography at the age of eighteen. After his military service (1921-1922) he went to Paris to copy the masters, then settled in Bordeaux, where he spent most of his life. His first solo exhibition took place in 1931 at the Galerie A. Grézy in Bordeaux.

In 1955 he wrote to André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Breton welcomed him into the Surrealist group: in 1956 the Galerie À l’Étoile scellée gave him an exhibition in Paris, and he took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1959-1960. In 1969 Jean-Jacques Pauvert published L’Art magique de Molinier, with a foreword by Breton. As his health declined, he took his own life in his Bordeaux flat on 3 March 1976.

The work

Paintings, photographs and photomontages make up an erotic and transgressive body of work, deliberately provocative. From 1965 Molinier staged himself in his studio-boudoir in Bordeaux: using a remote shutter release and photomontage, he made cross-dressed self-portraits, gathered notably in the series of Cent photographies érotiques (1965-1976).

The gallery showed an original photographic print, Hanel Sechs ! (18.5 x 14.5 cm), in the exhibition “The Hold of the Senses. Erotic Variations” (11 February to 19 March 2022). Molinier was also included in the exhibition “The Subversion of Images” (24 January to 8 March 2025).

Exhibitions and collections

• Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1979-1980; “Scènes de la séduction”, Rencontres d’Arles, 1998
• “Molinier rose saumon”, FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, 2023
• Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou; Centre national des arts plastiques; Musée des Beaux-Arts and CAPC, Bordeaux; Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi

Painter and film costume designer, Antoine Malliarakis, known as Mayo, born on 15 February 1905 in Port Said (Egypt), died on 1 October 1990 in Seine-Port (Seine-et-Marne).

Life

The son of a Greek engineer on the Suez Canal and a French mother, Mayo went to school in Ismailia, then with the Jesuits in Alexandria. He kept a Greek passport all his life, but his culture was French. Having come to Paris in the early 1920s to study architecture, he entered the Beaux-Arts and turned to painting. In Montparnasse he mixed with Man Ray, Robert Desnos, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Foujita and Kiki de Montparnasse.

In 1927 René Crevel introduced him to André Breton, but Mayo declined to join the Surrealist group. He contributed to the review Le Grand Jeu of his friend Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, stayed in Berlin in 1928 and in 1929 exhibited with Giorgio de Chirico at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins. During his stays in Egypt he took part in the Cairo group Art et Liberté, founded in 1938 by Georges Henein, and illustrated texts by Edmond Jabès among others.

On Jacques Prévert’s recommendation he designed the costumes for Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. He then worked for some twenty years for film and theatre, before returning entirely to painting in the early 1960s. In 1966 he settled in Rome, on via Margutta. Suffering from an eye disease, he returned to France in the 1980s. He was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1986.

The work

Without attaching himself to any group, Mayo developed a personal style between realism, Surrealism and poetry. His first Parisian canvases show massive figures, often drawn from his circle; several works of the 1930s bear the mark of the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. He learned printmaking at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. In Rome he painted the ancient ruins of his “Roman period” and metamorphoses inspired by Ovid.

The gallery showed his work in the exhibition “Surrealist Prelude” (7 June to 6 July 2024).

Exhibitions and collections

• “Mayo, retour d’Italie”, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, 1986
• “Surrealism Beyond Borders”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021), and Tate Modern, London (2022)
• Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Mathaf, Doha; Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut

French painter, draughtsman and printmaker, born on 4 January 1896 in Balagny-sur-Thérain (Oise), died on 28 October 1987 in Paris.

Life

André Masson trained in Brussels from 1907 to 1912, at the Académie royale des beaux-arts and the École des arts décoratifs, then in 1912 entered the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, in the studio of Paul Baudoüin. A volunteer in 1915, he was seriously wounded in the chest in 1917 at the Chemin des Dames and discharged in 1918.

In the early 1920s his studio at 45 rue Blomet became a meeting place for painters and writers. In the autumn of 1922 he met the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. He joined the Surrealist group in 1924, the year of the Manifeste, then broke with it in 1929. He lived in Spain from 1934 to the end of 1936 and, with Georges Bataille, conceived the review Acéphale, which he illustrated.

On 31 March 1941 he sailed from Marseille for the United States; he lived for four years in Connecticut, near Lake Waramaug, before returning to France in 1945. In 1947 he settled at Le Tholonet, near Aix-en-Provence. In 1965 André Malraux entrusted him with the ceiling of the Théâtre de l’Odéon.

The work

Masson made his first automatic drawings in the winter of 1923, even before automatic writing had been theorised, and became the leading practitioner of the method among the Surrealists. From 1927 to 1929 he developed his sand paintings, which carried automatism into painting. His works of the late 1920s and the 1930s deal with violence, eroticism and the metamorphosis of bodies, through biomorphic forms close to abstraction.

“The authentic artist must find for himself the movement towards myth.” (André Masson, “Peindre est une gageure”, Les Cahiers du Sud, 1941)

The gallery showed his gouache Rue Saint-Denis (c. 1955, 32 x 50 cm, certificate from the Comité Masson) in the exhibition “Surrealist Prelude” (7 June to 6 July 2024).

Exhibitions and collections

• Retrospectives in Basel (1950) and New York (1976)
• “André Masson. Il n’y a pas de monde achevé”, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 29 March to 2 September 2024

French painter and actor, born on 10 October 1898 in Paris, died on 22 March 1970 in Paris.

Life

A friend of Robert Desnos and Louis Aragon, Georges Malkine belonged to the first Surrealist group. In the 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme, André Breton names him among those who have “performed acts of absolute Surrealism”: he is the only painter on the list. He designed the letterhead of La Révolution surréaliste and published texts in the review in 1924 and 1925. In 1927 his canvases were shown at the Galerie surréaliste.

He stopped painting in 1933. Between 1933 and 1939 he appeared in some twenty films, alongside Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, among others. After the war he married Sonia Malkine and moved with her to the United States in 1948, first to Brooklyn, then to Woodstock (New York State), where he began painting again. He lived there for some twenty years.

In 1966 the Galerie Mona Lisa in Paris devoted a retrospective to him, and he received the prize of the William and Norma Copley Foundation. His novel À bord du violon de mer, written and illustrated by him in 1950, was published in 1977, after his death. Patrick Waldberg devoted a book to him in 1970.

The work

Malkine painted some 500 works, mostly in the 1920s, the early 1930s and the 1960s. His canvases of 1926, such as L’Orage and La Nuit d’amour, are among the most reproduced of Surrealism; the latter has been seen as a prefiguration of Lyrical Abstraction.

From 1966 he undertook the series of “Demeures” (Dwellings): metaphorical portraits of great creators, depicted as buildings that express their character or their work. The gallery lent one of them to the Centre Pompidou, Demeure de Lewis Carroll (1966, oil on canvas board, 60 x 73 cm), shown in the Alice room of the exhibition “Surréalisme” (2024-2025), before it entered a private Parisian collection.

Exhibitions and collections

• Galerie surréaliste, Paris, 1927
• Retrospective, Galerie Mona Lisa, Paris, 1966
• “Surréalisme”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024-2025 (loan from the gallery)
• Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Georges Malkine papers