The Gaulish and the feudal as lieux de memoire in post-war French abstraction.

If gestural abstract painting was an artistic practice that turned away from figuration and legible meanings, there was nevertheless a struggle over its interpretation and orientation in post-war Paris. This struggle is exemplified by two exhibitions that took place in the 1950s: Perennite de l'art gaulois, at the Musee pedagogique in 1955, which was organized by the art critic Charles Estienne in association with the surrealist group; and Les Ceremonies commemoratives de la deuxieme condamnation de Siger de Brabant, at the Galerie Kleber in 1957, which was organized by the abstract painters Georges Mathieu and Simon Hantati. Each exhibition was oriented against the classical foundations of modern French culture and the French nation-state, and each was identified with a site of memory in French culture. This article undertakes to identify and comprehend the significance of these cultural choices, in relation to the political and cultural options of the 1950s.

Keywords: abstract art, Andre Breton, Charles Estienne, France, Georges Mathieu, surrealism, Michel Tapie

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Although the development of a gestural abstract art after 1945 is usually attributed to American painters alone, there was a lesser-known but synchronous development in Paris after the Liberation, which was variously described as 'lyrical abstraction', 'informel' or 'tachisme'. While it was generally agreed that this was an art of the sign rather than an art primarily concerned with form, there was a struggle over the meaning and direction of this gestural abstraction, which was particularly fraught in the 1950s. (1) Although there were more than two sides to this conflict, I wish to focus here on two exhibitions that exemplify two different positions on the broader cultural significance of contemporary gestural abstraction: Perennite de l'art gaulois, organized in good part by the critic Charles Estienne (in association with the surrealist poet and theoretician Andre Breton, and with specialists in Gaulish art), at the Musee pedagogique in Paris in 1955; and Les Ceremonies commemoratives de la deuxieme condamnation de Siger de Brabant, organized by the artists Georges Mathieu and Simon Hantai at the Galerie Kleber, again in Paris, in 1957. (2)

Estienne was a critic who, in the 1950s, attempted to seek a rapprochement between the surrealist movement and contemporary abstraction; Mathieu is a gestural abstract painter who, with the critic Michel Tapie, developed a theory of gestural abstraction whose conceptual bases were very different from those established by Estienne and Breton. For Perennite de l'art gaulois was a comparative exhibition in which Gaulish coins from the period before the Roman invasion were displayed alongside contemporary abstract and surrealist paintings, in an effort to demonstrate a continuity of aesthetic concerns that, in this sense, was ahistorical in character, but which attempted to make visible what Estienne, in his eponymous essay for the catalogue, called a 'line of heresy', a counter-tendency to the centrality of classical thought to European culture (Perennite, 1955: 85). Mathieu and Hantai's exhibition was not an art exhibition exactly, but rather a series of events and changing displays that took place over a period of three weeks, which celebrated the Catholic Inquisition's second condemnation for heresy, in 1277, of the teachings of the Aristotelian scholar Siger de Brabant at the University of Paris, whereby the church attempted to halt the revival of classical thought in the Middle Ages. Though not directly concerned with painting, this exhibition, organized by two abstract artists, identifies a site of memory with a set of values which their own paintings attempt to realize. (3)

Thus two historical moments are referenced in these exhibitions, which act to consolidate different notions of contemporary abstract painting, and which attempt to orient them to different notions of culture. Each, in fact, is oriented against the classical foundations of the French nation-state; imaginary identifications with different moments in 'French' cultural history are deployed to make meaningful a relatively unprecedented development in the history of art, whose interpretation and significance are not yet fixed.

It can be argued that each of these events represents a defeat or catastrophe, as much as an alternative to the values of the Fourth Republic. An interest in Gaulish coins was stimulated by the writings of Andre Malraux and Lancelot Lengyel on this subject in the 1950s, to be sure, but it can also be understood as an ahistorical turn to the distant past in light of contemporary disappointments, in particular the defeat of the revolutionary option that had been central to the surrealist avant-garde project from the 1920s onwards. The surrealist movement had from its inception proposed a counter-tradition to the classical foundations of French culture that was generally romantic or symbolist in nature: one, in other words, that was historical and even modern. In the 1950s, Breton proposed an atavistic leap to a time before the Revolution and before the French nation, when the Gauls were developing aesthetic values that were, according to Malraux and Breton, remarkably modern in appearance, before their defeat by Caesar. (4)