Laying Everything Out Flat
I would like, modestly, to sketch a history of painting in solid colour, intended to create an illusion of volume with the aid of flat shapes that deny it. Basically, to hollow out space by creating a flat surface. The rediscovery of the work of Emanuel Proweller (1918-1981) provides us with the pretext, especially since his painting establishes a bridge in this history of flat painting, in that it transposes abstract precepts into the figurative domain. His life reads like a novel. He was born in 1918 into a Polish Jewish family in Lviv, then Austria. His youth was peppered with numerous antiSemitic events, and his country was
Guy Yanai. « Frutta Castelvetrano ». 2020. Huile sur toile / oil on canvas. 130 x 100 cm. (Court. galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris) eventually invaded by Nazi troops. He spent the war under a false identity, sometimes living alongside the Germans. He recounts this incredible period in a book published long after his death: Proweller: Un Éternel Renouveau. (1)
In the inter-war period his painting was postimpressionist. It evolved around 1946, as he kept abreast of pictorial advances. He swiftly realised that he had to go to France to study the classics in the Louvre, but also the abstract paintings of Matisse and Cézanne, which he knew only in reproduction. He arrived in Paris in March 1948 with his wife and child. Life was difficult, but he met artists at the Denise René gallery, where he took part in an exhibition. Later he exhibited at Colette Allendy’s. (2) Up until 1953 his paintings were abstract, and contained neoplatonic forms (circles, ellipses, etc.). Around 1953 he felt the need to bring life back into his paintings: “I was becoming more and more skillful. I could place circles anywhere, and I didn’t care, and my paintings began to be appreciated. I found that it wasn’t right and I went back to figuration.” (3) Nevertheless, he remained faithful to the principles established during his abstract period: flat shapes, the abolition of perspective, the stylisation of figures, random choices of colour... Until the end of his life, he depicted family scenes, friendships, imbued with great poetry. What is most astonishing is that this painter succeeded in creating an oeuvre that powerfully evokes happiness (albeit with a strong melancholy undertone). And this despite the hardships he lived through. One has the feeling that one had to live, despite everything, and that a great sense of humour helped him do so. Proweller’s work is haunted by what he called “the great happening of Auschwitz”. In 1972, while his wife was in hospital, he locked himself away and recorded some reflections on the solitude of the artist: “The future is a very, very pale pink; it is the pink of pre-dawn perhaps, but very, very remote.” (4)
OILS VERSUS ACRYLIC
When Proweller decided to take refuge in France, flat painting had been around for a number of years, but mainly in the abstract sphere. In particular, the abstraction-creation movement, led by Jean Hélion and Auguste Herbin, focused on geometric abstraction, which gave rise to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles [Salon of New Realities]. “Flat painting” was initially linked to architecture (Proweller had a diploma in this discipline) and to car bodywork. The artists who practised it painted in oils, and sometimes directly with industrial paints. Proweller also used oils. Alain Jacquet used oils too, when he made his Camouflages in 1963. That year acrylic paint was really marketed by the Li
quitex brand, and its use revolutionised forms of representation. Figuration Narrative artists used silk-screen printing (a technique that generated flat tints, particularly in the context of the Atelier Populaire in May 1968, under the impetus of Bernard Rancillac) and acrylic paint. The latter became the pictorial material of social struggles, a political paint. Easy to use, it dries much faster, and is also cheaper than oil paint. Most of the women
Etel Adnan. « Planets ». 2018. Céramique / ceramic. 37 x 30 cm. (Court. l’artiste et galerie Lelong & Co., Paris-New York)
artists (such as Kiki Kogelnik) recently gathered in the exhibition Les Amazones du Pop (Mamac, Nice, 2020) paint and painted with acrylics.
When we speak of flat shapes, we inevitably think of American formalism, of that “flatness” pointed out by the writings of Clement Greenberg; (5) we think of Abstract Expressionism and Colourfield Painting. Most American abstract paintings were painted in oils, even after the invention of acrylics: for example, those of Josef Albers... But the great dream of the Abstract Picture Plane hanging on the walls of modernist villas would be realised by the minimalism of artists like Frank Stella. The sculptures of a dissident like John McCracken bring the flat surface back to car painting, like Bernar Venet’s painted cartoons at the same time. The circle is (almost) complete.
I asked a painter friend, Stéphane Pencréac’h, to help me understand the subtleties between the two types of paint, oil and acrylic. He taught me that it isn’t really easier to make a flat with acrylic than with oil. But that acrylic is, again, easier to use in general. That it is the artists of the Figuration Libre movement, mainly Combas and Di Rosa, who pushed the possibilities of acrylic a very long way.
The advent of acrylic paint with its high covering power accelerated the development of flat painting, but it came after its emergence. And many artists, including Proweller and some of his close friends, such as Serge Poliakoff, continued to work in oils.
BACK TO THE WALL
At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the next, many artists painted in solid colours, such as the Lebanese-American Etel Adnan (b. 1925) and the American John Wesley (b. 1928). Today there are two trends. The first concerns the fine arts and new media. The Israeli Guy Yanai (b. 1977) seems to want to ‘ matisse’ a world that is now mainly viewed on the flat screen of a computer or smartphone. Joan Cornellà’s (b. 1981) images, which propagate a particularly dark humour, are better known through their distribution on social networks, though his works are exhibited at Arts Factory in Paris.
Also, the category where pictorial flatness is most active today is what is known as street art, with the creation of murals signaling the return of the flat surface to the wall. The list would be long, as flatness is consubstantial with muralism, I would say since the 1930s with the Work Projects Administration in the United States.
Todd James (b. 1969) began painting in the street and the underground, like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring previously. There is something of Tom Wesselmann’s work in his paintings, but death is always lurking around the women lying in them.
For these artists also paint pictures. In the paintings of Dutch artist Piet Parra (b. 1976), women are constantly loving and tearing each other apart under the auspices of an omnipresent four-colour process (blue, red, black and white). As for the works of Remed (b. 1978), (6) they extend a modernist heritage while giving form to an ageold wisdom.
What are the reasons for this renewed interest in solid colours? This form of representation corresponds quite well with the contemporary vision imposed by screens. And, no poor pun intended, these paintings show a world without relief, devoid of real perspective. This is, in a way, the world we have entered on a level with. And if it has changed, it is nevertheless the bearer of a certain beauty, poisonous though it may be.
1 Saint-Julien-Molin-Molette: Jean-Pierre Huguet, 2018. 2 Colette Allendy (1895-1960) was a gallery owner in post-war Paris. She exhibited concrete art, Cobra, Picabia, Lhôte, etc. 3 Interview with Jean-Louis Pradel and Jean-Marie Gibbal, Opus International n°59, May 1976. 4 Unpublished recording, transcribed and adapted by Élisabeth Brami-Proweller. 5 Notably read the articles collected in Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961. 6 Read pp. 60-63 of this issue.