Page 60 - Studio International - April 1965

kind of absolute of graphic beauty and which seems to
me more modestly the verbal statement (or written),
fairly monotonous, of an exceptional experience.
So Michaux will have pushed as far it was possible
his intention to subtract himself from 'the will', the 'death
of art'. His asserted merit to my eyes is the valiance
with which he has armed himself to blow down the
wall which separates the literary expression and the
artistic expression, to give the word to an abrupt and
direct lyricism, not caring to know the form which
faculty, academy, power or talent it springs from.
Michaux; Sorcerer's apprentice and master sorcerer,
speleologist of psychic depths.
One can compare to the spots of Michaux the violent
ink drawings which Sonderborg makes with a goose
quill, with a steel pen, with a brush or with a bamboo
and which were exposed at the Galerie Karl Flinker.
Fundamental difference, however: the world of
Michaux is interior, that of Sonderborg remains
essentially visual. But his vision is original because it
rests on speed. What projects on paper in bursts, in
shavings, in stains, it is the purely retinal contact of
our gaze with our crazed world, it is the rhythm of the
town, the vertigo of modern techniques: rhythms and
the automations of our time and of our society.
Sonderborg joins with brio the 'gestuels' who want to
substitute for a traditional static vision the dynamic
approach which marks today our human relationship of
the 20th century, and nearly the 21st, as far as things are
concerned.
More static is the abstraction of John Levee. Born in
1924 at Los Angeles, Levee made himself known quite
quickly in Paris, where he has worked for ten to fifteen
years, by his always very pictorial and balanced
adaptation of an abstract American expressionism. As
always, a great mastery marks his canvases which he
shows at the Galerie de France. But he systematizes the
new structure which showed itself in his work a year
ago and which consists of framing the thicknesses and
the informal spots which occupy the centre by the very
strict frame of many polychrome bands: like a com-
promise between Hard edge painting (the painted
frame) and abstract lyricism (the spots and colours of
the centre). Original formula may be a little artificial,
may be transitory, but it is put into practice with spirit
the calmness and the savoir faire which distinguish all
Sonderborg
Sketch 1964 the production of this painter.
Galerie Karl Flinker His elder, Abraham Rattner, who exhibits in Paris for
the first time in twenty years (Galerie Coard) also likes
his stay in Paris where he lived from 1920 to 1939 and
where he returned since 1951. 'In France' writes his old
friend Henry Miller, 'he felt at home'.
Rattner is of the Stuart Davis and Max Weber genera-
tions ; cubist and futurist, he opted soon for a very
violent expressionism. This man of a tender affability,
nearly seraphic, is also a Jewish emigré furiously
hostile to all persecutions. In his great convulsive
pieces, sombre, pale or harsh coloured, scarcely
figurative, he evokes the eternal themes of Sodom and
Gomorrah, or of crucifixion, or denounces violently the
concentrational universe and the atomic bomb . . .
He is a solid painter, an energetic colourist, a lover of
justice, full of enthusiasm ; he is at the same time a
geographical hyphen between Europe and America, an
historical landmark between the United States of the
Armoury Show and the present art.
The images of Victor Brauner, who shows landmarks
of his production of 1963 and 1964 at the Galerie