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