Page 53 - Studio International - July 1965

1 the violence and the sincerity of feelings which animate equally gigantic. The Pignon is a sea, tumultuous,
Maurice Esteve
Young g,r/ w11h pilcher 1942 him and who, in any case, is the one who is most frothing, all green where forms of divers are swallowed
100 x 81 cm. talked about, the Spaniard, Arroyo. up. The Soulages is a vast black beach which hardly
Galerie Louis Carre
2 This is an exhibition which replaces or at least opens up and these openings take a singular value,
Edouard Pignon epitomizes all the others: the Salon de Mai. I would create a vertigo, and the little light which filters through
The Divers
Salon de Mai not dare to say that its audience is international, but at is sufficient to dazzle.
3 least its importance goes beyond the frame of Paris and The confrontation carries on from room to room with
Pablo Picasso
Twelve paintings in one or of France. This Salon furthermore has taken to the some of the best survivors of Cezannism and of the
one painting 1n 1welve
Salon de Mai habit of travelling and was very eulogistically received post-impressionism whereas the surrealist gallery
in Japan last year. It is the best selection of lively unfolds its imagery more often morbid than poetic.
tendencies to be presented in Paris. The old ones often prove to show more youth of spirit
The foreign artists, be they residents of France or than their juniors and Max Ernst astonishes, once more,
beyond, are invited for the greater part as is the habit of with constructions of a primitive simplicity and poly­
the tcole de Paris. Of the American selection which was chromy.
presented last year, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and The lesson, if one must deduct one, of this year's
Jasper Johns were reinvited this year, which was a mark Salon is the good level in strength, quality and in
of flattering interest. Alas, the demands of their Parisian diversity of the abstract rooms.
agent brought about the retraction of their work. The geometrical abstracts can let themselves 'be',
Still, all the aesthetics are represented, comprising continue the trail began more than twenty years ago
also the newest ones since the best participants of the and enter into the history of art as the ancestors of
Salon of the Young Painting have been, for the first 'Op' art. The other abstracts continue to search and
time, admitted. With a courage, an energy and also a renew themselves-Vieira da Silva opens mysterious
disarming naivety, they attempted putting in their and marvellous perspectives. Messagier shades his
works all that they think new and revolutionary: the sensations of landscapes in changing the stripes with
drawn cartoons and Walt Disney, the junk-art and the which he sweeps the surface. Marfaing and
graffiti. The result is a virulent but not very homogeneous Mihailovitch make the light play in effects of 'contre­
mixture which is mainly valid by its intentions. Because jour'. Dmitrienko humanises single forms to the point
the Mai Salon remains a salon of painting where the that one does not know anymore if one must see in it a
pictorial qualities are put in the foreground. This is to void or a face. Busse piles up blocks into a disquieting
say that there are dangerous neighbourhoods for the Tower of Babel. Bitran cloaks still lifes without name.
newcomers. So, while the contemporary expressionism born of
To be hung next to Picasso, for instance, is a fearful the Cobra movement ennobles itself with Corneille
honour. Especially as Picasso, who reserves this favour and Appel, by eliminating the anecdotic note, the
to the Salon de Mai, has sent this year an extraordinary non-figurative painting enriches itself and gives its
assortment of twelve canvases where he unfolds the clue by admitting what it owes to the visible world.
spontaneity, the fantasy and this sense of the real which Unless it is our way of looking at painting which has
fascinates the 'new wave,' to such an extent that the changed and become more penetrating.
critic could ask himself: Is not Picasso the ancestor of Let us take the case of Esteve, abusedly taxed by
Pop art? abstraction since more than 15 years ago. Indeed, his
3 On either side framing him is a Pig non and a Soulages, actual surfaces, when the forms and all the colours

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