French writer, printer and artist, born on 28 July 1917 in Saint-Maurice-d’Ételan, died on 13 April 2006 in Stigny (Yonne).
Life
After secondary school in Le Havre and Savoie, Pierre Bettencourt attended Paul Valéry’s course in poetics at the Collège de France from 1936 to 1938. In 1941 he acquired a hand press and printed, in the family house then occupied by the Germans, his own texts and unpublished works by Henri Michaux (Tu vas être père), Antonin Artaud (Le Théâtre de Séraphin), Francis Ponge (Le Galet) and Jean Dubuffet (Plukifekler). He signed his erotic writings with the pseudonym Jean Sadinet.
A great traveller, he journeyed through Africa in 1946 and 1947, Oceania and India in 1951 and 1952, then the Americas, Egypt and Asia. He met Jean Dubuffet in 1947. In June 1962 he married the writer and artist Monique Apple; the following year they settled in Stigny, where he worked until his death.
The work
In August 1953, invited by Dubuffet to the south of France to hunt butterflies, he composed small portraits with butterfly wings. At that moment, he said, his life was to rush off in an entirely new direction. In the autumn, for want of butterflies, he gathered flints and bark in the woods and glued them onto plywood to form faces and scenes. So began the series of 388 high reliefs, completed in 1991: on painted grounds, slate, coffee beans, eggshells, stones or pine cones trace figures in which Eros and Thanatos rub shoulders. Le Divin Marquis (1954), no. 6 of this series, made of particularly raw materials, is a historic work.
Daniel Cordier exhibited and collected him in the 1950s and 1960s. Long kept away from the market, his visual work is matched by a substantial literary output.
Exhibitions and collections
- Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris
- The Hold of the Senses, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, 2022 (with Le Divin Marquis, 1954, and Le Mystère du temps, 1970, high relief, 124 x 175 cm)
- Favourites: Art Brut, Naive Art, Art Singulier, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 2024
- Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou: La Voie lactée, 1964, assemblage of various materials and paint on plywood, 275 x 154 x 15 cm (Daniel Cordier donation, 1989)
- Other public collections: Centre national des arts plastiques; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Musée de Grenoble; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes; MAMC+ Saint-Étienne; MAMCS Strasbourg; Abbaye d’Auberive; Cérès Franco collection, Montolieu; MAC’s Grand-Hornu (Belgium)