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  • Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964
  • Sarah Wilson
Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964. By Natalie Adamson. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. xii + 318 pp., ill. Hb £70.00.

The ‘École de Paris’ is a fraught concept, involving problems of usage that differed within the French art milieu itself and how the epithet was perceived and discussed in Europe, Britain, and America. In fact there was no ‘school’ of artists as such, and the École’s existence, death, or disappearance were constantly disputed, as this fascinating book makes clear. Of course, the term embraced sculptors from the cubist Lipchitz to figures dominant after 1945 such as Giacometti, but these are excluded from this study. Adamson discusses a post-1944 definition of ‘a recently constructed tradition with a stitched-together relation to the sublime ideal of liberty’ (p. 50), but this represses the racist pre-war heritage in which ‘École de Paris’ was a euphemism for a mainly Jewish influx of painters, from the realist Soutine to Modigliani, painter of nudes, or the abstract artist Otto Freundlich. Thus a starting point in 1944 is problematic not only regarding the ‘new’ École, but because of the depletion of the Paris art world via deportation and emigration, leaving a more franco-français concentration of artists and critics than conceivable in the heyday of Montparnasse. The complexity of École de Paris debates had a political base: the socialist inheritance of pre-war abstractionists fighting the mainly Trotskyist surrealists, the communist socialist realists, and the informel painters, whose work started as an existentialist émigré cry (Wols) yet developed into the royalist swashbucklings on canvas of a Georges Mathieu. ‘Cold’ geometric abstraction won out in the later 1950s, leading straight into ‘Op’ and kinetic art (a transition not discussed). There were the leaders — Picasso still — and a complex system of Salons extending through the year. Art magazines and daily or weekly columns proliferated ê hence the viable mêtier of the art critic, with stars who launched styles and labels: Michel Tapié with his art autre, or Pierre Restany, dependent on the École de Paris as a repoussoir from which to launch his Nouveau Réaliste movement. Of course, constellations of galleries catered for different tastes, from those lingering from the Impressionist era (Bernheim-Jeune) or the 1930s (Jeanne Bucher), to the Galerie de France, born during the Occupation, or the Galerie Maeght, which dominated the scene in the postwar years. An artist’s recognizable signature style dictated his selling power (Adamson does not address gender questions). While the debates now seem distant, their partisan energies are mirrored in this passionate microhistory: a counterpoint to the ‘cleaned-up’, simplifed, and familiar saga of the Abstract Expressionists. The anxiety about a French tradition was as evident in the Fouquet-like palette of Maurice Estève’s abstractions as in the Davidian realism of André Fougeron’s miner-martyrs, and I would argue that Adamson should have elucidated the Catholic traditionalism of painters such as Alfred Manessier. An almost impossible task is handled here with superb attention to detail; yet colour complementaries or subtle gradations disappear in the small black and white illustrations. These do major disservice to an art whose unfashionable beauty is beginning to be rediscovered: from Pierre [End Page 557] Soulages in Beaubourg and Berlin, to ‘The Tightrope Walker’, an École de Paris exhibition of 2010 held in London’s fashionable Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Sarah Wilson
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
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