Lot n° 34
Estimation :
15000 - 18000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 19 500EUR
ARTAUD (Antonin).
TWO ORIGINAL DRAWINGS. Two original drawings, one signed, on beige paper for the cover of the magazine 84. Each one : 21 x 13 cm. Undated, [late 1946 early 1947]. The two drawings are gathered under the same frame.
The more finished of the two drawings is a composition in ink where one can see a face, concentric geometric forms giving the impression of movement. Elements such as squares and nails, which are very common in Artaud's drawings from this period, can be seen. This drawing was used for the model of the cover of the magazine 84. This magazine, directed by Marcel Bisiaux, will give a predominant place to the author of the Pèse-nerf. The drawing of Artaud will become emblematic from the first issue of the magazine and it will decorate the covers of the fourteen other issues from No. 1 (March 1947) to No. 18 (May-June 1951). The pencil drawing is a sketch of the ink drawing also offering this same idea of movement and already the same elements.
The cover model was composed by Jeanne Pécheur directly on the original drawing of Artaud. She brought on a fragment of the same paper, fixed at the bottom of the drawing with small white stickers, the list of the collaborators of the number, on two columns which frame the title 84 in big letters in blue pencil. Some notes always in blue pencil give indications of colors for the n°2 (like the 1).
Small lack of paper at the right corner of the sketch and two tiny tears. Small lack at the right corner on the ink drawing.
The paper, of poor quality, has yellowed. The ink is a bit faded.
Formidable and precious documents that have apparently never been reproduced.
Antonin Artaud said that he really learned to draw and paint during his stay in 1920 in Dr. Dardel's establishment: Le Chanet, near Neuchâtel in Switzerland. His interest in painting, drawing and engraving was evident during his first years in Paris. As early as 1920, he published various reviews of Salons and articles on painting, revealing his tastes and the conception he had of the plastic work. But it was only after his internment in Rodez, from the middle of 1945, that he really began to draw. "The drawings of Artaud have something unique and it would be ridiculous to want to make them enter in any way whatsoever in a historicity of art; just as vain would be to compare them to other drawings of poets, from William Blake to Henri Michaux. (...) This something unique is this total confusion of drawing and writing, this impossibility of disjoining them on which Antonin Artaud has always insisted: I have never written without drawing either. /Or what I draw / they are not any more themes of Art transposed of the imagination on the paper, they are not affective figures, / they are gestures, a verb, a grammar, an arithmetic, a whole Kabbalah and which shits on the other, / no drawing made on the paper is a drawing, the reintegration of a mislaid sensibility, it is a machine which has breath, / it was first a machine which at the same time has breath. / It is the research of a lost world and that no human language integrates / and of which the image on the paper is not even him that a transfer, a kind of copy / reduced. / Because the true work is in the clouds ". Thus, these drawings, and even more perhaps those of the notebooks, have the same characteristics of structure, the same skeleton as the writing since, about them, it is spoken of a grammar. They are not inert forms, laid down on paper, but lightning mechanics produced by the breath, in which the theater is always existing: "I say / that for ten years now / I have been blowing with my breath / hard / compact / opaque / unbridled / unbowed forms / in the limbo of my body that is not made / and that finds itself made / and that I find each time the 10.000 beings to criticize me, / to block the attempt of the edge of a pierced infinity / Such are in any case the drawings with which I constellate all my notebooks. Paule Thévenin : The search for a lost world In Artaud Dessins et portraits. N.R.F., 1986, pp. 45-46. The text of Artaud is extracted from Dix ans que le langage est parti (in Luna-Park n° 5, October 1979).
Meredieu (Florence de). Antonin Artaud - Portraits and gris-gris. Blusson, 1984.
Antonin Artaud - Drawings. Catalog of the exhibition. National Museum of Modern Art, 1987.
Thevenin (Paule). Derrida (Jacques). Artaud Drawings and portraits. N.R.F., 1986.
Thevenin (Paule). The Question of the drawing In Antonin Artaud, this Desperate which speaks to you. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1993.
Antonin Artaud - Works on paper. Musée national d'art moderne and Musée Cantini, 1995.
Antonin Artaud - Works on paper. Catalog of the exhibition. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
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