Emanuel Proweler, There Is Still Time

This painting is the affirmation of a unique being, of an unalterable desire that Emanuel Proweller (1918-1981) carried within him. It is a very ambitious, solitary project that he constructed as he went along; intuitive and based on very personal rather than theoretical demands. He came up against obstacles and proceeded through trial and error. A limitless higher principle guided his creation towards a world of the indistinct, the transcendent, combined with a constant aptitude tempered with the brass of virtue. For Proweller, “nothing is in the intelligence that hasn’t been in the sense”. For him, art wasn’t meant to improve the living environment, even in 1948: he arrived in Paris as a refugee, with wife and child, from Poland. He was guided by Abrasza Zemsz and Richard Marienstras, a stateless intellectual who introduced him to Francis Picabia. Marienstras was also the interpreter, as Proweller didn’t speak a word of French. Paris was for him the city of freedom, of the Louvre and of destitution. It was also the permanent laboratory of an art that aimed to be the active element of a new society based on high technology and the reasoned planning of greater wellbeing.The Cercle et Carré [Circle and Square] movement and then the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles [Salon of New Realities] occupied centre stage; Proweller avoided showing off brilliant and learned panoplies of formulas claimed by others; he didn’t fit into any such uniform.

He recognises counterfeit money, the kind not worth much that circulates in art circles, where weaker souls get lost. He also knew that in times of collapse and misery, there is little enthusiasm for what remains of ideology.

He found his way, trusting in an irresistible force that he felt; he obeyed a personal destiny that would escape all statistics. This assertion very quickly made him unique; he invented an abstract, spiritual painting, with a delicate gravity, “sui generis”. This abstraction bears the seeds of its finiteness, it is unorthodox.

Circles, triangles, squares, anthropomorphic forms are treated as “subjects”, offering a new approach, anecdotal and lively. He gave names to his paintings, which created strangeness, and sometimes he chose the colours he used at random.The mystery is total, abstraction is in no way a programme of modernism, anything but insignificant, rather “It emanates from an original temperament, independent, reasoning, resistant to influences and concessions, it imposes authority”, according to Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia. As early as 1949 Proweller received visits in his “atelier” from Picabia, Denise René, Vasarely, Poliakoff, Henri-Pierre Roché... This dandy bought two paintings from him.

TIME

We have all picked up a pebble that caught our eye on a beach or in a scree and kept it on a bookshelf like a very old companion; with tenderness, we save it from the oblivion of time. Proweller painted in small strokes with a small brush, he inscribed his sensitive work like the potter of bygone times left the trace of their thumb on the clay.

This desire gives the work a unique spirituality, so discreet in post-war production. Later on he would succeed in ennobling the simplest life: his wife, his daughter, friends, dogs and cats, couples in love, the peasants of the Ardèche who were fewer and fewer, agrarian gods passing away; it was the life that he loved and that he retained. He collected according to sensations, enumerated and sacralized; he “said his prayers” by painting for future generations; he reconciled, he recalled the time of lost elegies and childhood promises.

He created a totally arbitrary painting, constructed of patches of flat colour, which, thanks to the artifice of the colours and the opposition of the planes, produced a natural effect. He invented an osmotic space, a breath, a skin that radiates; an organ, a radar that captures life. Mischievously, he imposed a lesson in slowness, concentration and observation, a habitual distant view and a close-up view: a way of definitively solving the problem of perspective.

This device forces the viewer to move around, to find the exact distance to perceive the whole; they cannot look in a hurry. The painter forces the viewer to be active, to move, to want to touch, to stick their nose into strange details: the complexity of an ear,

a slender strap, etc. This tactic solicits the viewer’s gaze, and requires a positioning in space. In this way, Proweller re-educates the way of seeing, thinking and living; he shakes up conformism. He knew at an early stage what he wanted to achieve, but couldn’t assert it, and put it into practice in his art. A painting from 1949 is entitled Autoportrait ou Ellipse Symétrique [Self-Portrait or Symmetrical Ellipse]. What an anti-modern idea to think of making a self-portrait! This painting reveals the ambiguity of his thinking, without being able to clarify it further. The radicalism of the ellipses, the choice, sometimes random, of colours, the titles of the painting, all these mysterious clues lead astray more than they point; they serve as a “shelter”. He was a man fleeing the ghetto who survived all the betrayals and murders, who escaped Nazism and deportation in order to save himself and his beloved: like the robin, he never landed for more than a minute. Stars of survival, ellipsis, understatement, safeguard the essential. « Nocturne ». 1971. Huile sur toile / oil on canvas. 114 x 146 cm. (Coll. part)

Emotion is born of emptiness, of rejection; the intimate emerges: a blade of grass, a coloured nail, a vision of the skin under taut fabric, an ear like an abstract umbilicus; dissimilar scales create an anagogic truth. We see more than what is shown: it is the sign of grace.

TIME AGAIN...

Towards the end of the 1960s, Proweller’s painting flourished. The time had come, it was already almost too late, this painting wasn’t yet seen from the right distance, its falsely naive style misleads and deceives. It remained invisible to a large part of the public, incomprehensible and ideologically out of time; it was seized by the ice age of the 1970s. How could you dare to paint the family, peasants, this so prosaic universe on the verge of being forgotten? The revelation would have to wait; only good for a few enthusiasts who still retain the civilisation of “fin amor” and mix love with art. Proweller acted like General Kutuzov (1) in the face of the domination of rationalism which occupied most of the thinking heads, whereas from the Enlightenment there springs only the dialectic of progress and nothing else; Kutuzov didn’t fight, nothing forced him to do so, he strategised, he backed down and waited for his moment.Two ways of thinking that cannot meet: that of the West and that of the East. Kutuzov knew that he had the immensity of time and the immensity of space behind him. Proweller knew that he had the same trust in time, in his story, in his childhood.

1 Mikhail Kutuzov (1745-1813) was general-in-chief of the Russian army. He applied a scorched earth policy to stop the advance of Napoleonic troops.

Francis Nicomède is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. A passionate collector since the mid-1970s, he recently wrote about Walter Swennen in the artist’s catalogue Hic, Haec, Hoc (2016).

Emanuel Proweller

Né en / born in 1918 en / in Pologne

Mort en / dead in 1981 à / in Créteil

Expositions importantes / Main exhibitions:

2021 Musée Montebello, Trouville-sur-Mer ; Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris 2012 Musée de l’abbaye Sainte-Croix des Sables-d’Olonne

2007 Villa Tamaris, la Seyne-sur-Mer

1979 Musée Bonnat, Bayonne

1970 Maison des arts, Sochaux

1963 Greer Gallery, New York

« “Autoportrait” ou Ellipses symétriques ». 1948. Huile sur isorel / oil on masonite. 38 x 61 cm. (Coll. part.)