Jacques Monory. Écrits, entretiens, récits. Part Four: The Elements of Style Evolution and the Inspiration Sources from the Past

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Jacques Monory 
Écrits, entretiens, récits 
[Writings, Interviews, Stories]

Editions Beux-Arts de Paris, 2014

Part Four: The Elements of Style Evolution and the Inspiration Sources from the Past

(Review by Francesco Mazzaferro)

[Original version: June-September 2019 - New version: April 2019]

Fig. 5) The typed interview of Monory by Wolfgang Becker, in German and French, contained in the original files of the exhibition at the New Gallery in Aachen, 1972, purchased from an antiquarian

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An iconographic code, many compositional techniques, a variety of styles?

We have seen that Monory combines iconographic codes which are specific to him with a wide freedom on compositional techniques. Can it therefore be said that there is a single “Monory style” in the course of 40 years and more of his painting, or has his style also evolved over time? The answer is not unequivocal.

We already mentioned the period preceding 1964, i.e. the phase before the year in which Monory tightens ties with the other authors of the artists of the Figuration Narrative. During those years, Monory combines interests in the surreal and the informal, pursuing the then prevailing art style in France of Lyrical abstraction: from that period almost nothing has remained (of 199 paintings, which he recorded between 1952 and 1964, only 21 have come to us [83]). It is Monory himself to tells us, however, that some aspects of his style manifested themselves already before 1964. It is a speech-interview of 2004, entitled "The arts before history", in which Monory discusses with the philosopher and scholar of aesthetics Marie-Hélène Popelard (1950,-). 

The question is: "Why did you choose monochrome painting? And why did you prefer the blue for such a long time?" "I have a natural, instinctive tendency to monochrome. I realized it later on. When I was in the art school, I went to the countryside with an easel, it was a strange time ... - instead of painting the sky in blue, the nature in green, I painted something yellowish, a little monochrome. The first personal, and a little more elaborate, works were also of that type. But I have not discovered the monochrome blue immediately: I used pink, violet. Gradually I have set myself: blue was accurate, corresponded to the development of my thought, which could translate like this: reality is a dream that I am passionate about, but which maybe does not exist. Blue is the ideal colour to evoke dreams and for many other reasons. You can play with blue: from the darkest – i.e. black - to white, and each time it is nice in itself, but if you try to do it with red, it is dreadful. Yellow is too clear: you cannot lighten it. With violet, sometimes it works." [84]

After 1964, Monory's activity as a painter spans over forty years. In a recent video that accompanies the exhibition at the Leclerc Foundation, he said: "My drug is painting in blue." [85] Yet in 1981 - talking with the art critic Jean-Luc Chalumeau - he tries to combine continuity with progressive changes of style. On style, he writes: "Style can be a fortress, but also a prison. For my part, I would like to direct my style to my way of being, and make sure my paintings keep representing exactly myself, while seasons are passing." [86] "I have never had an aesthetic project. My current work is the logical sequence of the one that preceded it. It is true that, with each exhibition (since I have the chance to exhibit), I am trying to say something that is not identical to what I said in the previous one. Repetition is death. I wish I never repeat myself, but it is also true that I am still the same and that, in a certain way, I indeed repeat always. But if you really need to repeat, I do it with another image." [87]

The evolutionary elements of style

Following the writings chronologically, it becomes apparent that - in parallel - three changes took place in the style of the painter during the forty years and more of his painting career, from 1964 to today.

First, after a strictly monochrome (blue or other colours) period, a parenthesis opens in 1977, characterized by a combination of the three primary colours (blue, red, yellow). It is inspired by the cinematic technique of Technicolor (and in fact “Technicolor” is the name of the series with which this new period is opened). It must be said that this ten-year excursus, characterised by the parallel use of three monochrome tonalities, seems to end with the series Gardening 1988.

The use of multiple colours has however nothing to do with a recovery of a naturalist vein: "Technicolor was an ironic and sour criticism of the world of Hollywood and its profound stupidity, which states: 'Be rich and make money, be a celebrity, etc ...' I did it in colour, not monochrome: the three primary colours were put on the canvas as if I had projected coloured rays. (...) So, I used colour to pass a message: I am speaking of the passion of living in difficulty." [88]

Also during the decade in which monochrome tonalities becomes less constant, colours are put one at the side of the other, but not really combined with each other, and Monory never seems attempted by real polychrome painting. In the following years, Monory will return to the predominance of blue, to which he contrasts sometimes black or green (the latter, for example, in the series Colour).

Secondly, after a period characterized by the narration of (mostly bloody) events, Monory allows himself to turn to the representation of natural elements, such as the sky, in its astronomical sense, with the representation of planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae, etc .. But the link with reality is not lost. "I wanted to do something - declared in 1997 - to free myself from this fascinating world that I do not like at all, and I found that the sky was a subject that could be very nice to me. On my skies, every astronomer could, in most cases, really recognize the constellation, the galaxy, the main stars. They were painted on the basis of documents that had been processed with sophisticated equipment. We can never observer these things; you have to re-image them; it is the image of a reality that seems extraordinary to us. Because I am a realist painter, I paint always real things, even when I paint stars called with codes, and captured by a telescope." [89]

Third, after an initial phase, during which almost a sort of regret manifests itself for having embarked on a career as a painter (rather than that of a film director or photographer), he seems to gain more satisfaction and pleasure for what he calls the 'pictorial element'. Yet, the difficulties and limitations of painting remain evident.

"Now I work very long at a picture." He says it in 1998. He adds: "It may last one month. The painting becomes more pictorial, almost by definition; moreover, I perhaps now have more important pictorial concerns than I had before." [90] He explains on the same occasion: "It seems to me that what I produce now is a combination of plastic games which I did not realize before, perhaps combined with a darker feeling of the world. Time is less and less. I have to go to the essential." [91]

"In the past – he confesses to the art critic Henri-François Debailleux, a journalist of the French daily Liberation, in 1996 - I have often said I could not care less of painting and I only focused on the message it conveys. And then, slowly, I changed view and today I think that, what you have to say, when you paint, is ultimately transmitted by painting itself. I arrived at that conclusion not because of despair, but in the form of non-hope. In fact, earlier I thought that painting could change the world and that I could participate in that change. Now, I believe that painting reflects the world, but it cannot change anything in terms of politics. Instead, painting can deepen the individual who produces it, maybe change him and thereby change the world (...)." [92]

The last series of paintings are more designed by the impetuous inventiveness of the moment that by an organised process of creative planning. It is 1998, at the beginning of a new century: "Earlier, when I began a painting, I could say that I knew how it would be. I performed my painting. Now, in the series Enigma and Epilogue, the paintings are not like I have started them. And I am not sure I know exactly what they mean. I could not explain anymore everything which is in the picture, like I could do in my previous paintings, in which there was a certain logic." [93] "I continue to use the same technique; I simply do not know exactly what the themes mean, and indeed I choose them with increasing difficulty. (...) When one looks at the great painters, or at those which one consider great, at the end of their life the subject disappears in most cases. You no longer see what Monet represents. Rembrandt seems a patch of dark, becomes pure painting. The whole life is needed to achieve this result." [94]

The relationship with painting is still characterized by a certain distance: in a filmed interview in 2004 with the art critic Philippe Piguet [95], whose text is in the collection of writings, he is asked whether painting is not a lure to mislead the viewer. The answer is: "Painting is indeed a lie. I am perfectly aware that I am a liar, a manufacturer of lies, but my lies want to say something that is true. I use images that are baits, but to capture a thought that sees something true in it. Whatever is true, all of us own it: simply, we forget about it." Piguet then asks: "So, Jacques, why do you paint?" "I would say that I do it - responds Monory between the serious and the facetious – because I do not want to die. Socially, I was stuck, not knowing anything else. Unable to be interested and interesting. In short, I had to take action to find something I did know, which I was fine with and that I could do almost completely alone, without having to ask anyone for help." [96]

Monory and art history

Several times, the French painter suggests that his inspiration is not the history of art, but rather cinema. He reiterates in 1982: "I was much more deeply influenced by Citizen Kane that by Veronese. I learned so much more from films." [97] In 1997 he says he remembers that the first painting he saw was the Pilgrimage to Cythera by Antoine Watteau (1717), at the Louvre. And he commented on the occasion: "There is a big difference between Orson Wells and Watteau. And since you cannot run away from your time, it is pretty Wells that I followed." [98]

Yet, there are four painters he mentions repeatedly in his writings and paintings: Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, Edouard Manet, and Andy Warhol.

Albrecht Dürer

Reference was already made to Dürer for Monory’s polypthich “Death Valley”, which has been discussed in an earlier post (see Part 3, figure 51). Melancholy is another citation, which opens the series Toxic (Toxique). It actually is a double citation, as Sarah Wilson writes [99], which will also see in it a reminder of the Portrait of Emile Zola, produced by Edouard Manet in 1868.

At any rate, it is still Monory to comment in the catalogue of the exhibition Mirrors at the Maeght Gallery in 2008, with a reference to the German Renaissance artist: "I have used several times the Melancholy of Dürer, and I alluded to it. It is one of the works of art that most impressed me. I even produced a painting that has the same title in the series of poisonous paintings. Toxic N. 1, Melancholy, 1982." [100]

Édouard Manet

Monory’s citations of the work of Manet are manifold. Reference has already been made to the Bar at the Folies-Bergère in 1881-1882 (see Part 3 figure 80), as a source of inspiration for paintings with more narrative levels. The Luncheon on the Grass of 1862-1863 inspires instead, in scenic terms, Jungle velvet No. 10/1, and its variation (in fact, its negative image) Jungle velvet N 10/2.

Manet’s work was refused in 1863 as too modern. Also the transpositions by Monory intend to pass a strong message, drawing nature as an artificial location, a nature which is "cruel and full of carnage." [101] In fact, the series Jungle velvet is a metaphor for the Vietnam War, whose photos in the European and American press of those years depict the guerrillas in the jungle.

In a 1994 interview, Monory reveals that Manet's Olympia is one of the paintings he likes most, and the only one that he holds in his workshop and is not his own. [102] And in 1996, he adds: "After I saw the Olympia again and again, I understood why it did scandal: it is a profoundly realistic painting, i.e. that girl really stares like a dopy cow [Translator's Note: Regard de veau. It really means the void staring of an ox. It is also said of those who are so much in love that they have completely lost their mind]. But that look is also very exciting; it goes very far and much beyond any understanding. And I basically like cows [oxen]." [103] In 2008, he complements his considerations on the Olympia: "People of that time, according to what remains of contemporary criticism for this picture, were really shocked about it, because it spoke to them with respect about ‘being animal flesh’. I think it is still quite shocking. 'Why does she not make any tumbles with her thighs?' She is there, like a calf, and this is extremely moving. And her eyes are empty. And her so soft body, which she shows so boldly, that animal stare, are one of the rarest things that there is in the history of art." [104] The Dreamtiger of 1975 renews the comparison between feminine sexuality and the animal world, with the usual iconographic reference to tigers. 

Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich is for Monory what we might call a 'cult painter'. On him, he wrote a short text (2 pages) published in 1974 in the magazine Chorus. A simple quote of the beginning of this text seems to give the impression that the vision of Friedrich’s paintings has a hallucinogenic effect on Monory: "Caspar David Friedrich. The time will come for another delirium. This will be the end of any fragile reconstruction of reality, the reality of the end of their empires, reflecting the end of other empires where to find a new magic purple trick and be exposed naked and plumed will make you the hero of the evening. The hooves of museums, the displacers of commas will be obsolete." [105]

To the German romantic painter – who experiments pictures in different shades of one colour - Monory devotes an entire cycle, entitled "Homage to Caspar David Friedrich" between 1975 and 1976, exhibited for the first time at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg in 1977, the city where Friedrich died. The German gallery hosts a particularly rich collection of Friedrich and has also organised regular exhibitions of artists who were inspired by him. Curiously, while the German painter produced an art not linked to any historical events of his time, but to the 'tragedy of the landscape', Monory radicalizes his romanticism and declines it in many directions. So the first painting of the series is dedicated to the memory of Auschwitz, while the second and third ones are sea landscapes (in the second picture of the cycle, the sea landscape is disturbed by a barbed wire, drawn from some pictures Monory took in some beaches in California), the fourth is a scene of a plane crash, the fifth a scene of personal despair, and the sixth is a direct revival of a subject in a painting by Friedrich, i.e the icy sea.

Edward Hopper

"When I was young, I was very interested in Hopper, who narrated stories that touched me particularly. It was not a narration like comics, but an introverted narrative. A man sitting in a chair is not a story, but if you look more accurately, it is a real source of stories!" [106] Thus, the picture number 7 in the series dedicated to New York in the seventies is entitled 'Tribute to Edward Hopper' and is clearly inspired by the 'House on the railway' of the same painter.

More than thirty years later, Monory returns to the same theme, with a complex variation, described in his input for the exhibition Mirrors at the Maeght Gallery. "I first painted a canvas of the size one meter by one meter, one half with a face and one half with a kind of exotic and dark dancer in several colours. A visitor wanted to buy it, but in blue. ... In general, I am sending to the devil those who make certain demands. But in this case, I do not know why, I made again the table in monochrome blue. Finally, I ended up keeping both. I told the potential buyer that I do not longer have my table. I put one above the other the two tables with women, and I added on the left a table of 2 meters by 2 meters, which I had just finished painting and represented a house in the neighbourhood, a very beautiful and strange one, that made me think of the table by Edward Hopper on the house on the railroad. Hopper is simple, as an observer of American life, but also displays depth where things have an inner life. It is a painter whom I absolutely love. The set of three panels becomes one table: Tribute to Edward Hopper. It was unexpected. I did not know what would have happened." [107]

Andy Warhol

On Warhol (and on American pop art in general) Monory always speaks with great admiration, as the inspirer of his artistic revolution of 1964 and his entry into the Figuration narrative. I have an "invisible, hidden relationship with Warhol, whom is the contemporary artist I most love." [108]

Of Warhol "I love the way of hiding, the mask that he has put to himself. And then, what I find terrific of him is that he looks like a futile person, all surface, while he obviously has much more depth than those who claim to have foundations and thickness. Warhol seems to deal only with well-connected people, celebrities, or detergent cans: this might be repulsive, but it is not at all. By doing this, he talks. He speaks of death and passing. He does not say just as directly as I say (...), no: officially he only proclaims: 'I am a guy who is very famous, and is only interested in celebrity. And I tell you: shit.' In fact, it is an illusion, and there is something else completely different behind. That's what I like about him." [109]

At the same time, he does not hesitate to point out the differences: "When I really started to work – he remembers in 1996 - I saw reproductions of works by Rauschenberg, Wahrhol and others. I found confirmation in the pop art that you could look at and paint everything you liked, and all that surrounds us, and to include in art a real cigarette butt, an ashtray, and anything else. It was dada, but in the context of everyday life. Starting from there, I also made what I liked most: a revolver." [110]

At the same time, he explains his differences with American pop art. He speaks to the German critic Werner Becker, about advertising and its impact on the visual arts: "In any case, I want to continue to use advertising, but I do not want to be a victim: I want to change it, I will not be absorbed by it. From this point of view, the pop art artists whom I have met did not satisfy me. At the first moment, they were wonderful because they believed they had gained power over the system, but at the very end the system proved to be much stronger than them, and incorporated them. (...), Warhol (...) would have these paintings of young men and women that I painted in a completely different way. He would have taken over the system and would have become part of it. I agree that this is a strong point, but I do not have this attitude. I take the themes [of advertising] and put them in a situation that shows that we are talking about murder and hell." [111]

When Monory murders Monet

Three painters of the Figuration narrative, Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati, realized for the second exhibition of the group, in 1965, a collective polyptych in eight parts, called "Vivre et laisser mourir ou la Fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp" (Live and let die, or the tragic end of Marcel Duchamp). Metaphorically, they wanted to kill the father of conceptual art, in a relationship of love and hate for the artist who had been of great importance for the pop art. The three painters kidnap, torture, and kill Duchamp, but then they carry his coffin for the funeral official. The work marked an emotional break in the group of the Figuration narrative, between those who considered the work an act of high treason, and others who saw it instead as a necessary distancing.

For Monory, the painter to be metaphorically killed is instead Claude Monet, the symbol of the 'painting-painting', or the painting that has the ultimate objective to reproduce nature in a lyrical mood. He realized therefore, in 1977, a work entitled "Monet is dead" in which he fires a shot against a briefcase containing all professional tools of the painter. "Painting-painting has always disgusted me and Impressionists are so far away. I made a painting, Monet is dead, a preamble to a [Editor's note: Technicolor] absolutely artificial series, and far away from the colour of the fields. Is it an objective observation? Perhaps a nostalgia, a certain tenderness towards the painter who is ‘the purest painter’. And yet he evaporates, in a desire for a full merger with his water lilies. He aspires to ecstasy. That's what I love about him, thanks to his delirium of lights, his thirst for happiness. Even this appearance of being beyond the world: you will see what you will see, but I want to see for myself." [112]

NOTES

[83] Parret, Herman – Introduction in: Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, Monory, 2013, Leuven University Press, quotation at page 31.

[84] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. Edited by Pascale Le Thorel. Introduction by Jean-Christophe Bailly. Beaux-Arts de Paris editions. Ministry of Culture and Communication, Paris, 2014, 383 pages. Quotation at page 169

[85] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2B2mg1qiIY (observed on June 23, 2015)

[86] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 68

[87] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 66

[88] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 131

[89] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.131-132

[90] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.138

[91] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.144

[92] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.123

[93] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.137

[94] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.134

[95] http://philpiguet.over-blog.com/

[96] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.184

[97] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 97

[98] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 128

[99] Lyotard, Jean-François, L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory – The Assassination of Experience by Painting, Monory, Introduction by Herman Parret, postface by Sarah Wilson, Translation by Rachel Bowlby, Jeanne Bouniort and Peter W. Milne, Leuven University Press, 2013, pp. 288. Quotation at page 200

[100] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 194

[101] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 130

[102] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p. 117

[103] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.124

[104] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.191

[105] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.346

[106] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.178

[107] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (quoted), p.206-208

[108] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (citato), p.193

[109] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (citato), p.157

[110] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (citato), p.124

[111] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (citato), p.36

[112] Monory, Jacques – Écrits, entretiens, recits. (citato), p.62