New figuration

The Nouvelle Figuration is an artistic movement which make the transition between the hegemonic abstraction the years 1950 and one figuration known as narrative which is born in 1965 to celebrate the glorious Thirty. Since 1958, the installation of a presidential regime invites a certain number of painters abstracted to translate felt to them vis-a-vis a threatening topicality. They are freed from the neutrality of the sign by the passage from meaning with meant.

On this date, the cold war caused to oppose a domination of the abstract art to the west vis-a-vis a figuration décriée in the east while in Paris, “events” related to a war of independence of Algeria are regularly censured on the cultural level of information although they are offered to the critical glance of the artist like innocent subjects of topicality.

Concerning a massacre dated October 17th, 1961, a negationnism of state supports the current of New Realistic which finds refuge near Marcel Duchamp in New York following a declaration of Arman: “in October 61, it did not occur anything to Paris”.

Inevitably the topic of the riots treated by Robert Lapoujade with the gallery Domec in 1962 or that of the demonstrations by François Jousselin with the Massol gallery the same year, could not that to irritate the censure at the point to see condemning to enthusiast silence the whole of the group of an equal impertinence.

A critical spirit covers with insolence the most serious subjects: dangers of the nuclear power, effects of the psychoanalysis on alienation, man sending in space, the painless childbirth, the attack between rival factions, motor vehicle traffic arrived at saturation, etc…

The names of Maryan, Pouget, Lindström, John Christoforou, Grindberg, Hugh Weiss, Agayo, Pellotier are to be retained like the authors of a new dissidence presented to the public of 1958 to 1962 by the galleries Breteau, Ariel, Charpentier, Bank-Left; Jeanne To rough-hew, Shoeller, Durand, etc…

A merchant of tables, Matthias Fels seizes the occasion to show in his gallery of the Haussmann boulevard, the sure values of the figuration of antan frays of some rare defectors of the abstraction during two exposures, one in 1961 and the other the following year.

However any possible confusion is drawn aside by the author of the foreword, Jean-Louis Ferrier, professor at the Practical School of the High Studies in Social sciences. The new structures of the account at the origin of the new novel or the new wave, provide him a title which takes proclamation value: new Figuration.

The press seizes at once this formula to qualify the emergence of reality among increasingly many defectors of the abstraction.

Always in 1962: the crisis of Cuba has as a consequence a decline in the dimension of the abstract art.

Concern gains the medium of New Realities vis-a-vis a gangrene of the figuration. In 1964 the caciques ones of the abstract art express with strength their indignation at a surging session of the living room joined together as a general meeting. They invite the members of association to the respect of the statutes in accordance with the tradition of art for Article.

The Prime Minister, alerted by his brother, delegates André Malraux for a return to the order.

Prohibition to differently think the war of Algeria than in terms “of events”, to use the term of “massacre” to qualify the day of October 17th, 1961 will be raised only in 1999, the time necessary to only preserve New Figuration, the title adapted to a new generation of artists to the glance turned towards the United States.

The character subversive of the New Figuration is eliminated as soon as a private mansion is offered to the artists by the baron Rothschild, a combined banking rich person of the capacity, to install an office of social security there.

A census of all the artists present on the market of art is naturally organized for this purpose while a foundation for big demonstrations is born in the living rooms of the vast residence.

In 1964, Gerald Gassiot-Talabot organizes with the Arc, the first exposure official of' contemporary art which puts an end to sixty years modern art.

Between the two, a missing link exists: new Figuration represented with the Museum of Modern art of the town of Paris, of Lausanne, Mons, Stockholm, Pittsbourgh, etc… The NARRATIVE FIGURATION is a figurative painting which is the French equivalent of the Pop American Art with a political commitment inherited the New Figuration.

The French Figuration continues about 1965 around the interest for the mediatized image and of its smooth treatment of surface in flat tints, serving an iconography worried by the social one or the anecdote.

Two exposure-continuation with the events of Algeria sign the presence and the cohesion of the movement in the contemporary art: Daily mythologies; Arc 1964 and Figuration Narration 1965, Hollow gallery.

Name “Figuration narrative” exploits the particularly critical contribution of the New figuration and tends to reconcile the abstract art and reality. This orientation questions the topicality to make the chronicle of the hours and the days, the citizen to celebrate the behaviors of the townsman. Vis-a-vis the traditional problem of the representation of time by the image, this pleasing narrative current of the solutions which take account of the specific contributions of the cinema and the cartoon and which lead in particular to a poetic dimension voluntarily absent from pop-art.

They carry their interest to the scenes of the daily life and mythologies (political, social, morals) which result from this; their sources are the cartoon, the cinema, photography, the images of the every day; they carry out figurative paintings, voluntarily cold and distanciées, which seek continuously to maintain in awakening our critical report/ratio with the images of reality.

Indeed, these artists find themselves marked to be cinematographic, advertizing, to use the codes of the cartoon or to yield to the anecdote, however none of these artists is solved systematically to use the mechanical techniques of the reproduction; they persist in all working with the hand. They are not resigned to let painting desert the ground from the images. But even if they obey the same technical requirements as the hyperrealists, this generation of European artists produced quantity of works which although of photographic inspiration present philosophical prolongations, political, moral or sentimental.

Artists of this movement of " Figuration narrative" , like known as previously, make a direct use of the photograph and/or cinema. They recycle images a little as the pop artists Cependant Pop art solidifies the image whereas they use the image in a continuity, in a narration. Moreover it is necessary to pay attention to distinguishing the cartoon well from Pop art in the direction where the cartoon “tells a history” and the pop artists who “solidify a fragment of the history” thus do not tell history.

The broken up image, the neutralized image, the transformed image, the image deviated in a new direction that had not envisaged the first authors. Subjectively or politically, the narrative figuration never loses the idea that it is necessary to come from the direction whereas many artists do not believe that necessary and are not interested in the direction.

An exemplary work of this movement is a work of three accomplices bound by the friendship more than by a common course artistic who are Aillaud, Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati: they decided to carry out a common work concerned with “lyric extravagance, of romantic paroxysm” as underlined it Gerald Gassiot-Talabot in the text of the presentation of the narrative Figuration in the contemporary art. This work, called “To live or let die” or “the fine tragedy of Marcel Duchamp”, is a series of eight eminently narrative fabrics, immediately become celebrates, installed today with the Museum Reina Sofia of Madrid, Aillaud, Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati aimed less the person of Marcel Duchamp (still living at the time) that culture like nobility of a movement. They affirm then, with the Young Painting of which they had in addition become stimulating essential, that Marcel Duchamp is only one pawn of the middle-class culture and even its most effective defendant because it incarnates it in a masked way. The goal of these tables is to destroy the icon which became the author of “Naked descending the staircase”. Stream will reconsider the intentions of the trio by saying that the set aim did not consist in making beautiful or ugly tables, but to act directly with images. In the fabrics, Duchamp would have programmed its setting with death, and the authors of the series, representing like dead losses small shadies, added an additional ambiguity. It used several narrative methods: the writing-proclamation which accompanies work, the continuation of tables, the confrontation of copies (the Naked one, Fountain and Large Glass are represented), as well as images invented by them. With the eighth and last sequence, after Duchamp was dispossessed of its clothing, its works and its body, one attends a setting with the tomb, pop artists and realistic Nouveaux carrying the coffin. The polemic is extended to an attack against pop art in its versions American and French, indicated like auxiliaries of the middle-class company anaesthetizing the culture, as well as Duchamp him even. One easily imagines the emotion caused by this series, which was enough strong to summarize with it only the narrative Figuration in the majority of the memories. Consequently, if one regards art as a mountain and modernity like his top, it is necessary to know to go down again by short cuts. Thus after the monochromic ones, paintings with the shit of artist, ejaculations pollockiennes, return to the fiction and the representation. The narrative Figuration is like a French bud of Pop Article.

Painters of the New figuration

Galleries specialized on the narrative figuration

Gallery Herve Lourdel * Gallery Thierry El Salvador

Principal French museums exposing the Narrative figuration

Musée of modern art of the town of Paris
Musée of beautiful arts of Pares
Musée of modern art and contemporary of the town of Nice
Villa Tamaris pasha, Seyne on sea

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