Jean de Maisonseul

Jean de Maisonseul (1912-1999) is a Urbaniste and painter French born in Algérie.

Biography

Jean Pandrigue de Maisonseul is born with Algiers the August 3rd 1912. At the time of the conquest of Algeria its back grandfather, naval officer originating in the Vivarais, had unloaded with Sidi Ferruch on July 4th, 1830, his/her grandfather was also sailor, admiral then ordering wearing of Algiers, his/her father lawyer. Jean de Maisonseul starts to draw in 1922. As from 1928 it follows courses of painting to the “Academy-Art” of Alfredo Figueras, painter Catalan taken refuge political in Algiers, friend of Picasso. It binds to it with the of Algiers painter Louis Benisti. From 1929 to 1934 he works as draftsman at Pierre-Andre Emery, Swiss architect installed in Algiers in 1928 after having been a collaborator close relation of Le Corbusier in Paris. Maisonseul follows in parallel from 1930 to 1933 of the courses of architecture to the School of the Art schools of Algiers.

In 1931 Maisonseul côtoie Le Corbusier which remains regularly in Algeria of 1931 to 1936, making him visit the Casbah of Algiers. “We measured the steps of the staircases, the benches of masonry, dimensions of the openings and the niches, the heights under ceiling and those of the supports of the parapets of the terraces. These measurements turned around the constants (...) which I twenty years with the publication of the Modulor ”, will remember found later (Jean de Maisonseul, “In the search of a regulating layout”, in Poïesis , n° 3, Toulouse, 1995, p.105). In 1931 Maisonseul also binds with Albert Camus, met thanks to its school-fellow Max-pol. Fouchet, who gives him with reading his first still new works.

In 1936 a purse makes it possible Maisonseul to obtain a diploma of town planning at the Institute of Town planning of the University of Paris. Of return in Algeria in 1939 he is draftsman at the Office of the Regional plan of Algiers soon become Town planning service of the Department of Algiers, which he directs from 1947 to 1956. He is simultaneously general secretary of the Institute of town planning of the Université of Algiers. Taking part in the fast development of the town of Algiers, it takes a big part in the classification of the monuments and historic sites of Algeria.

Approaching the philosopher Andre Mandouze, Maisonseul meets from 1946 of many intellectuals and of Algiers artists. It binds particularly with the poet Jean Sénac, takes part in the reviews “Sun” then “Terraces” that it animates, and starts to expose its drawings and its paintings to the bookstore of Edmond Charlot. It makes knowledge, into 1947 of Baya, collected by aunt de Mireille Farges which it will marry in 1956, and takes part of 1952 to 1954 in the efforts of the “Friends of the Arab Theater” who try to tie an intercultural dialog. After the earthquake of Orléansville (today Chlef), of September 9th, 1954, Maisonseul is in charge of the town-planning for the rebuilding of the city.

In 1956 Maisonseul and its “Friends of the Arab Theater”, who created a committee for peace, approach Camus come to Algiers on January 22nd to pronounce its “Call to a civil truce in Algeria” of which, thanks to the efforts of Maisonseul and of Omar Ouzegane, the nationalist persons in charge of the zone of Algiers accept the idea but what rejects the French leaders, such Guy Mollet which, the evening even of the “day of tomatos” (February 6th, 1956), in vain receives Maisonseul and the of Algiers “Liberals”. On denunciation and after Maisonseul searching is quickly abused by the capacity, shown of attack to the state security, imprisoned on May 26th with the Barberousse prison. ” It will be necessary of very required to also stop me”, written in Le Monde Camus which defends it at once vigorously, until its provisional release on June 12th (Albert Camus, “Tests”, Bibliothèque of the Pleiad, pp. 1003-1008).

Named preserving in November 1962 of the Museum of the Art schools of Algiers to the title of the co-operation, at the request of the Algerian ministry of State education, Jean de Maisonseul carries out the long negotiations which lead in 1970 to the restitution of some 300 works of the Museum deposited to the Louvre the day before Independence - “although as of the beginning André Malraux, then Ministre for the Culture, recognized that these works belonged to Algeria”, will specify it. As of July 1963 Jean de Maisonseul ensures the reopening of the Museum, by introducing there works of the young Algerian painters, Aksouh and Benanteur, Guermaz, Issiakhem and Khadda, Martinez and Choukri Mesli. It organizes a retrospective of the gouaches of Baya which it encourages to take again its work, stopped after its marriage since nearly ten years. “They are friends, of Maisonseul, very large friends, who pushed me”, Baya in 1994 entrusts: “when I took again my first brush, my first paper, it was Mireille and Jean de Maisonseul which had offered them to me”. Jean de Maisonseul will preface thereafter the new exposures of Baya. In 1963 in Algiers, the following year in Paris and again in Algiers, Maisonseul takes part simultaneously in the middle of his/her friends painters in the first collective exposures which follow Independence and will remain until its disappearance attentive with the developments of their works.

From 1964 Maisonseul exposes regularly to Algiers. It is named in 1970 director of the Institute of town planning of the University of Algiers, posts that it occupies until 1975. After death in Algiers of Jean Sénac on August 30th, 1973 he devotes himself to his memory by the creation of “Sénac funds” at the National library of Algiers and the Files of the town of Marseilles. With its retirement in 1975 it leaves Algeria to settle with Cuers, close to Toulon (Var), is devoted to its painting and multiplies the exposures to it, in particular with Sens in 1982, at Edmond Charlot with Pézenas in 1984, in the Algerian Arts center in Paris and the Picasso Museum of Antibes in 1988, and with Toulon. He dies in Cuers the June 3rd 1999.

Pictorial work

Through the decades the painting of Jean de Maisonseul approaches many topics according to approaches varied, since the evocation of the “Prisoners”, “revolted” or “shouting”, of the Mendiants, Aveugles and Shepherds (1955-1961), of the landscapes of Tipaza and the Chenoua or the the Sahel (1965-1966), until its Philosophes of the Années 1990, close “to the Greek old men Cynique S”. One of the most constant veins and most original of its work is related to its attention renewed with the universe of the stones.

“Mineral” painting, observes from the start Camus ( Jean de Maisonseul , Galerie Lucie Weil, 1958). In the introduction which he writes in August 1987 for texts going back to 1947 and 1948, published a few months after its death ( the Four Winds , Editions Domens, Pézenas, 1999) Maisonseul tell itself how he discovers in 1949 “the reading of the signs registered on the stones” which he collects in the splits, with the foot of cliffs and the falls of Chenoua. “There are two ways of looking at them to try to see them”, writes it: with the manner of a sculpture, “by raising them in space”, or of a painting, “while following the signs registered on their face”. It is in this reading that it engages. “It is especially with the sign language that I was interested, discovering that they gathered by family of forms, according to reports/ratios, agreements, articulations and analogies which constitute a “style”. Thus, I found rollers Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Chinese, negro, Aztec… and also most beautiful Kandinsky or Klee which I could not have recognized fifty years ago by rejecting them into what I called “the forms of the future” because they had not been named yet”.

“I put to learn the reading from the signs registered on the stones, drawing them and them painting, work which I still continue”, summarize it. To this step works are attached indeed that Maisonseul presents well later under the titles Formations then Nomination of the stones in Algiers in 1972 and 1973, Pierres of the Sun , yellows and black, in Sens in 1983, Pierres of the Night , black and blue or rougeoyantes, in 1984 at Edmond Charlot in Pézenas, Fountain-of-Vaucluse, Pierre and Eau with the Museum Picasso d' Antibes in 1988, Déserts/Brisures, Objets of space and Ecorces Night in 1980 and 1992 in Toulon. These series of drawings to typographical inks and paintings, to the largest extent realized by Maisonseul after its departure of Algiers and its installation with Cuers in 1976, push with further its search at the edge of essence. These works extend, refine the same glance on distinct topics and parents who follow one another and answer themselves. Jean de Maisonseul thus meets in way the Château of the Marquis de Sade (1974) with Lacoste in the Luberon, of which it rebuild the silhouette, depending, of” rises” in “perspective plans”, terraces, arcades, windows and turns of their ruins.

It is the opposite castle of the Cliff and the Gouffre (1979) that revealed a few years later the series of the Affleurement of water to the Fountain-of-Vaucluse. The spectacle of the déconstruction to the length of time that of same constructions of the stone succeeds, the revealing of its first architectures. “For which knows the tragedy, it is not of other reality which the appearance of the made forms and defeats by the life”, will note Maisonseul (“Louis Bénisti”, Espace Interrogation, Toulon, 1993). On its monochromic drawings and paintings water is made fluid stone, the rock densified water. The universe of the stone seems at Maisonseul to contain all the forms, until those of the human body ( Roche and water , 1978). In the way of this mineralization, the sky even is made transparent rock in suspension ( Brumes of the morning , 1979), the tree castle of alive stone ( Arbre of night , 1982; Bark night , 1990-1991).

In connection with these works Jean de Maisonseul summarizes in 1992 and 1994 (“For Mémoire”, Espace Interrogation, Toulon, 1992; “In the search of a regulating layout”, in “Poïesis” n° 3, Toulouse, 1995) stages of its step. It redefines in painting the use of the “regulating layout”, familiar with its architectural practice, which according to Le Corbusier “confers on work the eurythmy” and brings “the beneficial perception of the order”. The principle, writing Jean de Maisonseul, “consists in connecting by lines the points given by the modules on the four sides of the surface of the support, thus opening several ranges whose stepping of the branches proposes multiple points of possible passage, points structuring the representation which one proposes. (...) A point gives us the way.” In a first drawing Jean de Maisonseul outlines with the length of these joints the tensions which will carry the movements of the glance, driving with “a construction which becomes bark, sculpture, architecture”. A second drawing infiltrates there by clearly-obscure “the shades, lights, half-lights”. Into the third the colors introduce “the radiation of the light, its modulations”. In a last moment the painter continues his research on plywood of large sizes “by smears and glacis of color extended on coatings of high paste”.

In its ordered stages, the step of Jean de Maisonseul, single in the contemporary art, appears rigorously considered and all at the same time released from very forced. “The extent in the time of the work of the various drawings and the passage to the oil-base paint lead to modifications, alternatives, imaginations according to the hour and the mood of the painter and the possible plastic proposals”, specifies it. The preparatory drawing is only “protective net”, paintings beyond “are delivered to random large juices, light-obscure monochromic coloured”, entrusts Maisonseul of its Pierres of Night . The calculation of the screen, means and not receipt, does not imprison the step of the painter, rather ensures the conditions of a creative discovery to him.

This discovery appears at simultaneously plastic and poetic Maisonseul. In the solemn rebuilding of space a universe very of silence shows through. With deepest of the geological duration Maisonseul inserts in the stopped moment of the purest presence, “to level the palpable conscience of infinite”, written Michele Domerc Vidal prefacing the “Stones of the Night” (the High District, Pézenas, 1984). In the space of its works “physics and metaphysics” are articulated and communicated, observes Lorand Gaspar (“I entered the painting of Jean de Maisonseul by the stones”, Musée Picasso, Antibes, and French Arts center of Algiers, 1988-1989). Stephan Gruet insists similarly on dimension “metaphysician” of her work. “It is the impression of “original” which immediately is essential in front of these tables (...), the highest esthetics still returns to metaphysics the most naked” analysis Jean-Claude Villain (“the rooting of original”, in “Loess” n° 24, Saint-Martin-of-Cormières, April 1986, p. 24)). “Each time, Jean de Maisonseul fixes a Visitation”, wrote Jean Sénac in 1968 (“Jean de Maisonseul”, French Arts center, of Algiers, 1968): “It is not with impunity that the painter lived with Camus the genesis of the “Weddings”. It is not a question to stop time but to escape by one moment, a sign, immobilized in their sharp, at our unacceptable mortal time”, or, in its later works, to try to join, beyond this mortal time, the perpetual moment of the world.

Judgment

“This technique does not enchant really itself. It is subjected essentially to the pressing African nature which him gives its rocks, its clays, its grounds dry, its petrified volumes and its thicknesses of wet shade, but also its pure light whirling around the white and square stones. Although Maisonseul knew to make place with the man and the plant, it did not yield to picturesque, it raised the tinsels of High orientalism (...) in the middle of a nature where the stone and the sky reign on the men, it drew from it (...) an at the same time mineral and air painting which testifies, in a finally original way, for the truth of the country which is common for us. ”

Albert Camus, catalogs exposure of Jean de Maisonseul to the gallery Lucie Weil, Paris, 1958.

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