Preface and Acknowledgements

Wilson, Sarah

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Preface and Acknowledgements

Sarah Wilson

The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations

alerio Adami inscribed these words by Seneca on the cover of the album-catalogue Derrière le miroir, which he created with Jacques Derrida in 1975...

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Sarah Wilson

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20755

Preface and Acknowledgements

Res severa verum gaudium1A difficult thing is a true joy (Seneca)

Valerio Adami inscribed these words by Seneca on the cover of the album-catalogue Derrière le miroir, which he created with Jacques Derrida in 1975. This book is the fruit of much joy; it was challenging and has evolved over more than a decade. My copy of Lyotard’s L’Assassinat de la peinture par l’expérience, Monory was bought in 1985, when I visited his exhibition ‘Les Immatériaux’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In June 1994, I had the privilege of hosting Jacques Derrida at the Courtauld Institute in London for his lecture at the conference ‘Memory: The Question of Archives, which led to his celebrated publication Archive Fever of 1996. My own work involving Derrida, inspired by Jean Genet’s improbable trip to London, began around this time, including a first encounter with the two versions of Glas, important subsequently for understanding Derrida’s collaborations with Adami and with Gérard Titus-Carmel.2Derrida’s collaboration with Titus-Carmel, his Pompidou show and catalogue, The Pocket-size Tinglit Coffin, illustré de ‘Cartouches’ de Jacques Derrida, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978, was originally destined for inclusion in Chapter 6. In 1996, at the opening of Laurent Gervereau’s exhibition ‘Les Sixties en France et l’Angleterre’, I met Jacques Monory and began to explore the link between French political artists of the older generation and their followers of the Pop era.3In 1996, I published ‘Rembrandt, Genet, Derrida’, in Joanna Woodall, ed., Critical Introductions to Art: Portraiture, Manchester University Press; ‘Filles d’Albion: Greer, la Sexualité, le Sexe et les ‘Sixties’, Les Sixties en France et l’Angleterre, Paris, Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine, and ‘Réalismes sous le drapeau rouge’, Face à l’histoire, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. The exhibition ‘Face à l’histoire’, at the Pompidou the same year, juxtaposed this 1960s European generation with their American counterparts. Monory welcomed me and my students on several occasions to his remarkable blue and white studio in Cachan (with Ida the dog). There he showed us his films and his two superb boîtes-en-valises; there I discovered his catalogue of the Mural Cuba Collectiva which had far-reaching consequences.4See Justin McGuirk, ‘La Fuite: Cinema, Fantasy and Memory in the Work of Jacques Monory’, and Dina Scoppetone, ‘The Salon de Mai in Cuba and the Mural Colectiva, 1967’, both MA theses, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (hereafter, MA), 1998. With Duncan McCorquodale’s support, the ‘Revisions’ series was conceived with Black Dog Publishing, and the translators associated with that series — Jeanne Bouniort, Rachel Bowlby, Sophie Mayoux and Dafydd Roberts — provoked many illuminating discussions. In ‘Revisions’, Lyotard’s complex and desire-driven texts on Monory were presented bilingually, and I was honoured to meet Lyotard and to clarify some points in telephone conversations with him, unaware that his last illness was far advanced.5See my ‘Editor’s Introduction’ and ‘Postmodern Romantics/Romantiques postmodernes’, in Jean-François Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting—Monory, ed. Sarah Wilson, London, Black Dog Publishing, 1998, pp. 12–17, 21–81. Our second volume in the ‘Revisions’ series focused on Gérard Fromanger with texts by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, his friends. I well remember Gérard’s amusement at our first meeting with a bevy of filles du Courtauld in his studio near the Place de la Bastille in Paris. A second Black Dog volume appeared in 1999, with Adrian Rifkin’s splendid introduction; book launches took place in London and the Librairie-Galerie La Hune, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The friendship with Gérard has continued and has generated not only research work but wonderful shared moments in Paris, at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near Toulon, and in Havana, Cuba.6See my preface, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, Photogenic Painting, ed. Sarah Wilson, London, Black Dog Publishing, 1999, pp. 13–19; see also Joanna Large, ‘All Roads lead to Peking: Joris Ivens and Gérard Fromanger in China, 1974’, MA, 2001, and Edward Franckel, ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gérard Fromanger: Politics and Reproduction in the Ballet “Hymnen”, Amiens, 1970’, MA, 2007. Gérard has spoken with charisma and passion to Courtauld students and to my students at the Sorbonne, and has visited London more than once, talking at Tate Modern on his relationship with Jean-Luc Godard for the commemorative May 1968 anniversary celebrations in 2008.

In 1999 I was invited by Patrick Le Nouëne to Angers for the exhibition ‘Monory/Ex-Crime’.7See my ‘Du pâle criminel: X-crime’, in Monory/Ex-Crime, Musée d’Angers, 1999, pp. 6–9, 28–9. Daniel Abadie’s major Erró retrospective at the Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume in Paris that year involved another extraordinarily rich encounter, this time with a non-French artist, and a story ranging from Iceland to New York, work with Carolee Schneemann and with painters from Thailand. Erró’s present to me of the precious catalogues Forty-Seven Years (Galleria Arturo Schwarz, 1967 — hilarious parodies of Soviet Socialist Realism) and the ‘little red book’ of his Mao series, 1974, set off important chains of thought.8See my ‘Erró, l’extase matérielle’, in Erró: images du siècle, Paris, Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume, 1999, pp. 38–56. The comic-strip misogyny of his exhibition ‘Les Amazones en Proverbe’ at the Galerie Louis Carré in 2004 was exasperating but engaging.9See my ‘Les Amazones en proverbe’, in Erró, Paris, Galerie Louis Carré (bilingual), 2004, pp. 5–11. Erró’s first London show, at the Mayor Gallery in 2008, also launched a definitive study of his life and work in English.10Danielle Kvaran, Erró Chronology: His Life and Art, Reykjavik Arts Museum and Edda, 2007. In 2002, as the principal curator of ‘Paris Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968’, I was able to reveal to a London public (and subsequently that of the Guggenheim in Bilbao) the work of revolutionary artists such as Jean-Jacques Lebel and the Narrative Figuration generation — Fromanger’s newly rediscovered red Bubble sculpture (with its Jeff Koons-like shine), Rancillac’s enamel bleu-blanc-rouge portrait of the assaulted student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Monory’s mirrored and bullet-shattered Murder, Erró’s Background of Jackson Pollock, Henri Cueco’s Barricade, Vietnam 68 (as fresh as on the day it was shown in the Vietnam protest show of 1969) and, sensationally, in the Royal Academy rotunda, the unknown Live and Let Die: The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp, the group work by Eduardo Arroyo, Antonio Recalcati and Gilles Aillaud which has since acquired much celebrity.11See Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968, London, Royal Academy of Arts; Guggenheim Bilbao; Paris, Libraire Hachette; Cologne, Du Mont Verlag, 2002, pp. 330–43. It did the job of representing Duchamp’s Fountain, Nude Descending a Staircase and The Large Glass for our show — works not created in Paris (an essential criterion) — but crucial presences, whatever the roughed-up state of their progenitor. My thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the short period of leave that gave me time for this major project. Antonio Recalcati’s retrospective was another wonderful occasion at the Villa Tamaris; Camille Aillaud has received me to talk about her late husband, whose work I have also appreciated in exhibitions at the Galerie de France and the Musée de la Chasse, Paris. While I had been introduced to Bernard Rancillac by my friend Serge Fauchereau, the author of his monograph, my own work with Rancillac, his library and his archives came to fruition for his touring retrospective of 2003.12See my ‘Cocktail Rancillac/Rancillac Cocktail’, Bernard Rancillac, Paris, Editions Somogy, 2003, pp. 8–49; see also Joanna Boulos, ‘Bernard Rancillac: les années politiques’, MA, 2000; Joan Lowther, ‘The Warhol Effect in France, 1963–1971’, MA, 2001. In Rancillac’s acerbic and polemical account of the 1970s, Le Regard idéologique (2000), I was astonished to discover the chapter on Boris Taslitzky, the Socialist Realist artist and Buchenwald survivor — a dear friend and mentor; we three lunched together decades after Rancillac’s studio visit to Taslitzky in the 1970s.13Bernard Rancillac, Le Regard idéologique, Paris, Éditions Mariette Guéna and Somogy, 2000. At this time, my friendship with Ruth Francken was becoming deeper; I went to see her exhibition in Hanover, when she was no longer able to travel, and was inspired for my own ‘Song of Ruth’ by her story, long after Lyotard’s writings on this artist, which were crucial for his later work such as Heidegger et ‘les juifs’ of 1988.14Sarah Wilson, ‘The Song of Ruth’, in Ruth Francken, Hanover, Sprengel Museum (bilingual), 2004; see also Naomi Skelton, ‘Ruth Francken: La coupure et la cohérence’, MA, 2002; Katie Brandon, ‘The Death of the Author and the Rebirth of the Book: The livres d’artiste of Ruth Francken, Jacques Monory and Annette Messager’, MA, 2003. Francken’s ‘Mirrorical Return’ portraits of Lyotard and of Monory link her to the Narrative Figuration movement; my students remember her warm welcome in the rue Lepic, her adjoining studio in the spaces at the back of the Moulin Rouge and the strength of her work; her reputation will grow posthumously. The Leverhulme Foundation, which has been important at crucial stages of my life, granting me time at the Pompidou Centre at the beginning of my career, and in France in 1996–7, gave me another grant for research in Paris in 2004–5. I thank them for their continuing confidence in this project. It was following a meeting at the Musée de la Vie Romantique with Mme Madeleine Malraux and the distinguished curator of the Musée de la Ville de Paris, the late M. André Berne-Joffroy (we were all Fautrier lovers), that he told me of the link between the painter Leonardo Cremonini and Louis Althusser. This led to my discovery of Lucio Fanti, still painting in La Ruche — to a whole new bevy of visits with students, Fanti’s visit to London, my text on his ‘post-Soviet paintings’ published in Russian and perhaps the most surprising chapter in this book.15Sarah Wilson, ‘Fantasmagorii Fanti’, Sobranie (Moscow) 3, 2004, pp. 22–5, special number on ‘The Megapolis and its Visual Image in Past and Present’. Leonardo Cremonini, Roberto Alvarez-Rios and Fabio Rieti all received me in Paris at that time, Rieti lending me the catalogue which demonstrated the exchanges between European Figurative artists with those in Moscow: many thanks to all for their patience.

In 2006, at the invitation of Anne Dary, the curator of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dole, I joined the veteran critic Alain Jouffroy and the expert Jean-Luc Chalumeau to write in her catalogue La Figuration narrative dans les collections publiques (1964–1977).16Sarah Wilson, ‘Narrative Figuration: théorie, politique, passions’, in Jean-Luc Chalumeau, Anne Dary and Isabelle Klinka-Ballesteros, La Nouvelle figuration dans les collections publiques, (1964–1977), Paris, Éditions Somogy, 2005, pp. 33–9. Dole (in the Jura mountains, near Besançon) is the place where many extraordinary large-scale paintings of the 1970s now have a permanent home — prior to their re-emergence, one trusts, on the international scene — notably the Malassis group’s Le Grand Méchoui, discussed in my conclusion. This huge work was displayed for the opening in a barn adjoining the museum; the artist Henri Cueco gave a memorable peripatetic talk, explaining its astonishing, aggressive iconography. Alas, the opportunity to show the work in toto for the ‘Narrative Figuration’ retrospective in 2008 was not seized at the Grand Palais, where it had ruled for a few hours only in 1972. Cueco and his wife Marinette (a superb artist whose work anticipates Andy Goldsworthy’s) have also been warm and generous hosts and participated, as did Fanti, in my round-table discussions at the École Normale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2007.17Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Cueco par Cueco; Itzhak Goldberg, Marinette Cueco, Paris, Cercle d’Art, 1995 and 1998. It was the Dole museum that hosted Lucien Fleury’s retrospective in 2007, thus affording me the opportunity to meet Fleury’s daughter Mathilde and to write about the history of the Malassis — including their great public Raft of the Medusa commission for Grenoble, visible for many years before consignment to an ‘asbestos cemetery’ and recent destruction. The chance to show the Malassis’s work in my conclusion will stimulate greater interest, I hope.18Sarah Wilson, ‘Politique et vanitas: Lucien Fleury et les Malassis’, Lucien Fleury 1928–2005, Dole, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2007, pp. 10–43.

I have been a guest of Robert Bonaccorsi at the Villa Tamaris, La Seyne-sur-Mer, for several of the figurative exhibitions and retrospectives that he has staged with great commitment. I must also thank Serge Lemoine for inviting me to teach at Paris-IV Sorbonne during the academic years 2002–4 and Henry-Claude Cousseau for his invitation to run a fifth-year seminar at the École des Beaux-Arts in 2007, thus offering me valuable extra research and interviewing time in Paris. Didier Schulmann is a special friend who, with his colleagues at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou, now runs the modern and contemporary art history library par excellence; his colleague Jean-Paul Ameline invited me to write for ‘Face à l’histoire’ and curated the ‘Figuration Narrative’ retrospective at the Grand Palais, in 2008. Olivier Corpet welcomed me to the magnificent Abbaye de l’Ardenne, the home of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC). Pierre-Philippe Ruedin and recently Evelyne Taslitzky, have also been the most generous hosts, facilitating many stays in Paris. Peace and Provençal beauty has framed my work periodically thanks to the hospitality of Kamila Regent and Pierre Jaccaud at the ‘Chambre de séjour avec vue’, Saignon-en-Luberon. In Russia, Olga Zinoviev received me at Moscow University surrounded by her husband’s paintings. She confirmed the friendship between Althusser and philosopher Alexandr Zinoviev, sparked in 1974.

Sander Gilman has sustained me throughout this enterprise and with Michael Corris offered indispensable support and pragmatic advice at a crucial stage. My colleagues in the Modern Department at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Mignon Nixon and Julian Stallabrass, have read and evaluated student research work in this area. The Courtauld Research Committee not only contributed to the financing of the Black Dog bilingual volumes on Monory and Fromanger but have also been more than generous in supporting research work in Paris in the summers of 2006 and 2007 (with the Central Research Fund), with a final grant for visual material in 2009; thanks to the committee for their patience and faith as well as generosity. Karin Kyburz has been a sympathetic reader, efficient in procuring images; Elizaveta Butakova gave assistance in the final stages, prior to Katharine Ridler’s excellent copy-editing, and Jane A. Horton’s indexing. Throughout this period Adrien Sina has provided conceptual support, ideas, criticism and much more; his creative input is now visible in the exciting design of this book; so many thanks.

Together with the artists named above I must also thank AES (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Syvatsky), Eduardo Arroyo, Erik Bulatov, Guido Cegnani, Hans Haacke, Denis Masi, André Morain, Malcolm Morley, Jacques Pavlovsky, James Rosenquist, Richard Selby and artists’ associates and families, many of whom have helped with images and fee waivers: Marie-Antoine and Roberte Alvarez-Rios, Sarah Bancroft, Jerome Bourdieu, Natasha Bulatov, Elisa Farran, Lucie Fougeron, Emmanuelle Damaye, Marguerite Derrida, Christine and Jacques Dupin, Anna Kamp, Ivan Karp, Denise Klossowski, Christine and David Lapoujade, Dolores Lyotard, Florence Miailhe, Paule Monory, Christine and Jacques Dupin, Anouk Papiamandis, Nathalie Rancillac, Isabelle Rollin-Royer, Evelyne Taslitzky, Sylvie Zucca.

I am finally able to offer tribute to Gillian Malpass of Yale University Press for her belief in my work. Thanks also once more to Germain Viatte whose initial invitation to work at the Pompidou Centre has had inestimable consequences in my life, leading to so many friendships, such intellectual richness.

L’aventure continue.

1 A difficult thing is a true joy (Seneca) »

2 Derrida’s collaboration with Titus-Carmel, his Pompidou show and catalogue, The Pocket-size Tinglit Coffin, illustré de ‘Cartouches’ de Jacques Derrida, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978, was originally destined for inclusion in Chapter 6. »

3 In 1996, I published ‘Rembrandt, Genet, Derrida’, in Joanna Woodall, ed., Critical Introductions to Art: Portraiture, Manchester University Press; ‘Filles d’Albion: Greer, la Sexualité, le Sexe et les ‘Sixties’, Les Sixties en France et l’Angleterre, Paris, Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine, and ‘Réalismes sous le drapeau rouge’, Face à l’histoire, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. »

4 See Justin McGuirk, ‘La Fuite: Cinema, Fantasy and Memory in the Work of Jacques Monory’, and Dina Scoppetone, ‘The Salon de Mai in Cuba and the Mural Colectiva, 1967’, both MA theses, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (hereafter, MA), 1998. »

5 See my ‘Editor’s Introduction’ and ‘Postmodern Romantics/Romantiques postmodernes’, in Jean-François Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting—Monory, ed. Sarah Wilson, London, Black Dog Publishing, 1998, pp. 12–17, 21–81. »

6 See my preface, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, Photogenic Painting, ed. Sarah Wilson, London, Black Dog Publishing, 1999, pp. 13–19; see also Joanna Large, ‘All Roads lead to Peking: Joris Ivens and Gérard Fromanger in China, 1974’, MA, 2001, and Edward Franckel, ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gérard Fromanger: Politics and Reproduction in the Ballet “Hymnen”, Amiens, 1970’, MA, 2007. »

7 See my ‘Du pâle criminel: X-crime’, in Monory/Ex-Crime, Musée d’Angers, 1999, pp. 6–9, 28–9. »

8 See my ‘Erró, l’extase matérielle’, in Erró: images du siècle, Paris, Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume, 1999, pp. 38–56. »

9 See my ‘Les Amazones en proverbe’, in Erró, Paris, Galerie Louis Carré (bilingual), 2004, pp. 5–11. »

10 Danielle Kvaran, Erró Chronology: His Life and Art, Reykjavik Arts Museum and Edda, 2007. »

11 See Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968, London, Royal Academy of Arts; Guggenheim Bilbao; Paris, Libraire Hachette; Cologne, Du Mont Verlag, 2002, pp. 330–43. »

12 See my ‘Cocktail Rancillac/Rancillac Cocktail’, Bernard Rancillac, Paris, Editions Somogy, 2003, pp. 8–49; see also Joanna Boulos, ‘Bernard Rancillac: les années politiques’, MA, 2000; Joan Lowther, ‘The Warhol Effect in France, 1963–1971’, MA, 2001. »

13 Bernard Rancillac, Le Regard idéologique, Paris, Éditions Mariette Guéna and Somogy, 2000. »

14 Sarah Wilson, ‘The Song of Ruth’, in Ruth Francken, Hanover, Sprengel Museum (bilingual), 2004; see also Naomi Skelton, ‘Ruth Francken: La coupure et la cohérence’, MA, 2002; Katie Brandon, ‘The Death of the Author and the Rebirth of the Book: The livres d’artiste of Ruth Francken, Jacques Monory and Annette Messager’, MA, 2003. »

15 Sarah Wilson, ‘Fantasmagorii Fanti’, Sobranie (Moscow) 3, 2004, pp. 22–5, special number on ‘The Megapolis and its Visual Image in Past and Present’. »

16 Sarah Wilson, ‘Narrative Figuration: théorie, politique, passions’, in Jean-Luc Chalumeau, Anne Dary and Isabelle Klinka-Ballesteros, La Nouvelle figuration dans les collections publiques, (1964–1977), Paris, Éditions Somogy, 2005, pp. 33–9. »

17 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Cueco par Cueco; Itzhak Goldberg, Marinette Cueco, Paris, Cercle d’Art, 1995 and 1998. »

18 Sarah Wilson, ‘Politique et vanitas: Lucien Fleury et les Malassis’, Lucien Fleury 1928–2005, Dole, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2007, pp. 10–43. »

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