Canadian Surrealist artist, born on 27 August 1922 in Quebec City, died in August 2010 in Paris.
Life
Jean Benoît met Alfred Pellan in 1940 and became his pupil; he helped him make theatre costumes and remained in correspondence with him. At the École des beaux-arts in Montreal he met the painter Mimi Parent. In 1948 he signed the manifesto Prisme d’yeux, married Mimi Parent and moved with her to Paris. From 1949 he took ethnology courses at the Musée de l’Homme, and he was to make many journeys to New Guinea and the Pacific islands.
His meeting with André Breton in 1959 was decisive: he joined the Surrealist group and shared its activities until it dissolved. In December 1959, at the time of the EROS exhibition, he gave his performance Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade at Joyce Mansour’s home: dressed in a mechanical costume which Mimi Parent stripped from him layer by layer, he ended by branding the word SADE on himself with a red-hot iron. Breton praised his work on several occasions, notably in Le Surréalisme et la peinture.
The work
Neither a sculptor nor a painter in the strict sense, Jean Benoît created objects and costumes that condense his vision of the world. In 1996 the Galerie 1900-2000 gave him his first solo exhibition, accompanied by a book by Annie Le Brun.
In 2024 the gallery showed the costume for the Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade, unseen since 1959, as well as L’Or du temps (1994, mixed media on panel, 200 x 150 cm), a tribute to André Breton and the poets connected with Surrealism, made after the Breton exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1991 and shown only once before, at the gallery in 2001. The work bears the inscription: “Qui vive, Qu’il vive, Qu’il survive, Qu’il revive ! Signé : Le fer à conviction”.
Exhibitions and collections
- Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, 1996 (first solo exhibition)
- National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa: tribute to Seurat, 1948, oil on canvas, 175.5 x 127 cm
- The Hold of the Senses, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, 11 February to 19 March 2022
- At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 6 September to 19 October 2024, as part of Paris surréaliste
- The Subversion of Images, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 24 January to 8 March 2025