Page 52 - Studio International - July 1965

The Salon de Mai, forum of modern art

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2 Paris Commentary by Georges Boudaille
In the month of May 1965, Paris regains an artIstIc
activity worthy of a reputation that has always come to
the fore. Since three years ago, we had not seen so
many exhibitions have their openings simultaneously,
and amid the hundred weekly invitations I have seldom
counted so many names, famous, known, or in the way
of becoming so.
What stamps this Parisian season is, in the face of the
multiplication of 'pop art' or similar manifestations, the
entry in the arena, either of their own accord, or through
the wil I of their dealer, of some of the best painters of the
School of Paris.
I have chosen, to my eyes, some of the most significant
exhibitions. I could have chosen others. My 'sampling'
would like to be complete, if not objective. Thus,
Schneider who was, with Hartung and Soulages,
amongst the promoters of abstract art in France as
early as 1 945, is thrown to the lions with two successive
exhibitions: one with canvases of 1926-1947, the
other of recent canvases. Here we follow step by step
the birth of abstraction and its blossoming. With the
twenty-four paintings of Esteve hung by Louis Carre,
it is a similar course yet an entirely different one. The
confrontation of these two exhibitions shows well how
wrong are those who pretend to reduce abstraction to a
monolithic aesthetic. Unless it is only an argument ...
Because, where Schneider's painting is lyrical, springing
out of an interior feeling, so much of Esteve's is
nourished by the contemplation of nature.
With Lapoujade we touch one of the burning problems
of modern art: how to arrive at a realism without
renouncing the plastic conquests of the 20th century.
Lapoujade approached that question in his work and
in his writings since 1950. The solution which he has
adopted is not unique in its manner any more, but it
remains not only first in date, but one of the most subtle.
To complete the cycle, but without wanting to say
that it appertains to an inevitable chain, I have chosen
amongst the young neo-realists who are hung at the
moment the one who seems to me the most valid by

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