Page 69 - Studio International - April 1968

Facing page Denise René
with Le Parc in Venice 1966

Left Vasarely
Sende 1967
80 x 80 in.

mother of Yves Klein). This was the first time that new abstract his living from commercial art, Baertling worked in a Swedish bank,
works were shown in post-war Paris. It helped launch the movement. Poliakoff played the balalaika in a night club, while Jacobsen and
These pictures were practically unsaleable at the time. I was Mortensen combed the flea markets for African masks which they
accused of provocation, of being ridiculous and childish. Any un- sold in Denmark. We met in the gallery every Saturday, each bring-
known dauber showing up at a gallery with an abstract would be ing his latest canvases and listening to the others' criticism. It was all
sent on to me with a note of recommendation. Now and again a very friendly. Together we gradually made headway with critics
Swiss doctor or a Venezuelan industrialist would buy a picture. Yet and collectors. I began to sell in Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia.
prices weren't high. In 1950 a Vasarely fetched 40 dollars, a Sophie Then in 1950 the tachist bomb exploded, the flood tide which in
Taeuber-Arp 140 dollars, and in 1952 a Poliakoff, 60 dollars. They two years swept the market. There was lyric abstraction, Action
just would not sell. But the rent had to be paid as well as printers' Painting, Abstract Expressionism and Convulsive Art; there were the
bills for catalogues and retainers to the artists. They were black years. nuagistes and the Matter school. A whole number of artists, under
Yet it was during this period that many artists, attracted by the cover of the abstract umbrella, were to be found sneaking back to
special nature of my gallery, joined us. First Arp, our greatest. Then realism, their vague lines representing flaking walls, decomposed
Mortensen and Jacobsen in 1947, followed by Poliakoff and others. flowers, patches of earth, or 'waste rotting by twilight', as Michel
Vasarely developed ideas he had been working on years before in Seuphor put it. Thus, in contrast with the rigorous geometric
Budapest. The gallery played a role in the evolution of each one. abstract art supported by my gallery, another style of so-called
The contacts with each other gave a number of the artists an austerity abstract art arose, taking precedence in the public eye over my
and purity which was virtually individual to them. They formed a constructivist painters. It was wholly successful. 'The fact that so
group, each one realizing that this unity gave him strength, while in many people seem to enjoy it', wrote Michel Seuphor at the time,
isolation he would have gone under. We had common enemies and `tempts one to believe that our contemporaries like living in sewers
a common cause to fight for, rather like refugees in a hostile world. and have suddenly become addicted to all that is least worthy, if not
We had no Rolls-Royces and no neo-gothic castles. Vasarely earned to the most unworthy.' The same types of repulsive painting were to