Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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Jean Daniel resigned in protest, and joined

Claude Perdriel and journalists from France-

Observateur to create Le Nouvel Observateur,

which quickly established a distinctive new

style, remaining left-wing but independent. The

paper was bold and innovative, boasting nu-

merous famous contributors, including Vilar,

Mendès France, Sartre, Godard and Sagan. In

coverage of cinema, music, theatre, literature

and society, it captured the mood of the times

and in less than a year rapidly attracted read-

ers. In May 1968, it defended the students’

cause, and it was central to campaigns for

women’s rights, sexual liberation, and the de-

fence of immigrants, among other causes. In

the 1970s, leading intellectuals Malraux, Lévi-

Strauss and Glucksmann wrote in its columns,

and cartoonists such as Claire Bretécher and

columnist Delfeil De Ton also displayed their

wit (continuing to do so in the 1990s). In 1981,

typical non-conformism was demonstrated in

extensive coverage of the prospective presiden-

tial candidacy of ribald comedian Coluche.

Ultimately, however, Le Nouvel Observateur

backed François Mitterrand.

In the early 1980s, with the Socialists in

power, the paper struggled to find its way.

Advertisers withdrew their custom as ‘punish-

ment’ for having supported the Left. On the

other hand, continued critical independence

brought a 10 per cent loss of readers. In 1984,

Perdriel increased his personal investment and

introduced changes: Franz-Olivier Giesbert

was appointed editorial director, Jacques

Julliard was entrusted with a regular political

editorial, and new journalists were taken on.

A more commercial news magazine formula

was adopted; social, economic and cultural

coverage was extended; party politics played

down—and circulation was restored.

1988 brought another shock when Giesbert

left to join Le Figaro. He was replaced by

Laurent Joffrin, under whom the weekly con-

tinued to develop and prosper, thanks to ini-

tiatives such as television supplement TéléObs.

Circulation grew steadily from 69,301 copies

in 1966, to 226,000 in 1971, 373,055 in 1980

and 436,560 in 1994. Long-standing contri-

butions from famous editorialists Jean Dan-

iel, Jacques Julliard and Françoise Giroud help

to maintain the reputation of the leading in-

tellectual weekly.

PAM MOORES

See also: comic strips/cartoonists; left-wing

press; national press in France

Nouvelle Vague

This term, translated as New Wave (originally

coined in a non-cinematic context by

Françoise Giroud in L’Express), rapidly came

to be used to refer to the young film-makers,

usually connected with Cahiers du cinema,

who revitalized film production in France in

the late 1950s and early 1960s. Chabrol,

Godard, Rivette, Rohmer and Truffaut are its

undisputed leaders.

KEITH READER

Further reading

Bens, J. (1980) OuLiPo 1960–1963, Paris:

Christian Bourgois (collection of texts).

Motte, W.F., Jr. (1986) OuLiPo: A Primer of

Potential Literature, Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press (an excellent analytical

study).

OuLiPo (1981) Atlas de littérature potentielle.

Paris: Gallimard (collection of texts).

——(1990) La Bibliothèque Oulipienne,

Paris: Seghers (collection of texts).

OuLiPo

404

painting

The historical conditions pertaining after

World War II allowed social and literary con-

texts for art practice in France radically differ-

ent from increasingly dominant American

paradigms. Memories of the Occupation,

collaborationist guilt and, later, difficulties

with decolonization in Algeria and then Viet-

nam all acted as contexts for a specific kind of

cultural production. The parallel paths traced

by Sartre, Genet and Giacometti typify the

association of art practice with the literary and

the philosophical which has characterized the

French cultural scene since the war.

This difference of approach, which from

the 1960s became entrenched through an in-

creasing insistence upon ‘theory as model’ in

art practice, has led to difficulties in assimilat-

ing French contemporary art practice into the

dominant ‘Modernist’ aesthetic canon, which

may be characterized as both apolitical and

predominantly abstract. This modernist canon

was, after the war, largely American, and to a

certain extent this justifies French fears of

‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural and economic coloni-

zation.

It should be noted that there is a certain

difficulty in discussing contemporary French

art practice under the heading ‘painting’, as

from about 1960 it becomes almost impossi-

ble to distinguish between painting, sculpture

and installation, these boundaries being first

attacked and then effaced. Any selection of

‘significant’ artists is therefore subjective; it is

dependent upon the critical paradigms used

to establish criteria for judgement and as such

is ultimately arbitrary.

Much of the art production in the immedi-

ate postwar period has the war as its referent,

if not its subject. Anti-humanist views became

plausible in a world which had demonstrated

the smallness of human life. The need to rene-

gotiate the position of mankind in relation to

the new world order, and the moral duty of

témoignage (bearing witness), encouraged an

initial return to figuration.

The association of Alberto Giacometti’s

postwar work with existentialism is unavoid-

able. The most direct links are demonstrated

by his portrait of Jean Genet, and by Genet’s

references to Jean-Paul Sartre in his text

L’Atelier de Giacometti (Giacometti’s Work-

shop), which describes the process of making

the portrait. Genet’s text insists upon the fra-

gility, isolation and desperation implicit in

Giacometti’s practice as well as its legibility in

the resultant oeuvre.

Wols is also often associated with Sartre,

who defended his late paintings as ‘inhuman’

in their refusal of all organic or geometric

forms. His evocative but non-figurative paint-

ings were considered in the light of ‘automa-

tism’. That the artist had been incarcerated

during the Occupation was seen as deepening

his alienation. The late works have also been

claimed as precursors for art informel.

Jean Fautrier (1898–1964) is perhaps best

remembered for his Otages series of 1945. He

405

had been staying at the Châtenay-Malabry

asylum for safety during the Occupation, in

the wooded grounds of which he witnessed

Nazi torture and executions. The Otages show

the mutilated remains of victims, increasingly

unrecognizable as the series progresses. They

were defended in a catalogue preface by André

Malraux for bringing this contemporary and

painful subject into the public domain, and the

paintings were widely criticized for their ex-

perimental technique and paradoxical beauty.

Boris Taslitzky (1911–), in the tradition of

témoignage, made large figurative works, and

his position as concentration camp survivor

adds authority to his powerful, allegorical

grandes-machines. Le Petit Camp à

Buchenwald from 1945, for example, depicts

prisoners loading the skeletons of their pred-

ecessors on to carts; the incinerator behind in-

dicates their destination. The whole is worked

in a traditional oil technique, startlingly vivid

in colour, and carefully arranged into the Ren-

aissance pyramid composition. The tension

between the exquisite execution, a composi-

tion usually reserved for religious or classical

subjects, and the grim workaday manner of

the prisoners, is disquieting in the extreme.

Even in the next generation, artists like

Christian Boltanski (1944–) continue to refer

to the legacy of the war. Following the more

Duchampian tradition of the found object, he

makes elaborate presentations of objects which

stand as symbolic displacements of the biog-

raphies of their owners. These take on poign-

ancy with reference to the collections of pass-

ports, clothing and personal effects, which are

the visual trace of Holocaust victims, exam-

ples of which Boltanski first saw at Auschwitz.

Nicolas de Staël worked without clear alle-

giance. Most of his work dates from the last

decade of his life, and this means that, unlike

most artists of his generation, he made paint-

ings which demonstrate a Parisian tendency of

the 1950s—to fuse the illusion of space gener-

ated through colour with an insistent flatness

of picture plane, figuration with abstraction.

Perhaps the best example of this richly textured

abstraction-with-subject is his Les Toits of 1952.

Francis Gruber (1912–48) embraced social

realism coupled with historical allegory in his

tense, brittle paintings, and the poignant, po-

liticized contemporary motifs are as shocking

as they are exquisitely crafted. His painting

Job (1944) stands as allegory for the Occupa-

tion. The socialism/realism debate which had

dominated the 1930s was reopened by Louis

Aragon, for whom Gruber’s work was exem-

plary. The dry outlines of his figures were to

resurface in the work of the younger genera-

tion, and especially that of Bernard Buffet, of

the Homme-Témoin group.

Balthus was a strong proponent of figura-

tive painting in France until 1961, when (on

Malraux’s recommendation) he became restorer

for the Villa Médicis in Rome. His La Toilette

de Cathy (1933) uses the ultra-traditionalist egg

tempura medium to present three figures in a

room. The tension of the piece derives from his

manner of presenting the figures, Cathy in par-

ticular. Her standing, full-frontal nudity is eroti-

cized by the dressing gown resting upon her

shoulders, while her gaze is abstracted, almost

mutinous. Her maid combs her hair unheeded.

And there is a male figure, fully clothed, seated,

thoughtful and tense. Balthus’s own features are

recognizable in this young romantic, for whom

the untouchability of such beauty appears diffi-

cult to bear.

Two artists more than any other have en-

gendered an ‘anxiety of influence’ among art-

makers of the postwar period. The desire for

a synthesis of their respective achievements in

the domains of colour and line may be seen as

a constant in subsequent art practice.

Henri Matisse has left his own special

legacy to French art history. It should not be

forgotten that, in a career whose impact be-

gan at the end of the nineteenth century, much

of the work which has been seminal for Mod-

ernism (the cut-outs, the Chapel at Vence) was

made in the early 1950s.

Pablo Picasso, having joined the PCF

(French Communist Party) just after the Lib-

eration in 1944, went on to paint the peace

murals in 1952 at the Chapelle de Vallauris,

and in 1949 Aragon chose his Dove for use at

the International Peace Congress. On the oc-

casion of Stalin’s death in 1953, he drew a

painting

406

heroic portrait for the front cover of Les

Lettres françaises. These activities tend to be

omitted from histories of Picasso’s practice,

as they conform neither to the dominant criti-

cal paradigm, with its refusal of political con-

tent, nor to the illusory perception of his work

as incontrovertibly positive.

Antonin Artaud fulfilled the roles of both

playwright and (towards the end of his life) art-

ist. The Occupation and the dubious Vichy re-

gime had raised questions about the status of

the ‘outsider’ in a society which had itself run

mad. Artaud made drawings, portraits and jot-

tings during his internment: these challenge the

separation of verbal and plastic expression, and

were central to the recuperation and extension

of ‘psychotic’ art in the 1950s and 1960s.

Jean Dubuffet’s practice would exemplify the

next generation’s interest in a childlike or

unsocialized art. He established the Compagnie

de l’Art Brut in 1948. Following research into

the art of paranoid schizophrenics, his painting

Rue Passagère (1961) exemplifies the resultant

practice of completely filling a composition in

order to avoid either uncertainty or agorapho-

bia. His late work challenges the traditional re-

fusal of line as constructive component in sculp-

ture. His Jardin d’hiver (1968–70) invites the

viewer literally to enter the picture plane; once

inside, a cave or safe place has its contours de-

lineated by his unerring puzzle-like line.

Working with the idea of a transcendence

of Western writing and strongly linked with

Zen in the 1950s, Jean Degottex (1918–) went

on to insist upon the value of material, using

tearing, ripping, re-covering and folding in

paintings of the 1970s.

Georges Mathieu, a key proponent of art

informel, challenged American action paint-

ing with a large-scale gestural painting which,

by reference to automatic writing, engendered

a kind of Westernized ideogrammatic sign sys-

tem. Pierre Soulages worked in large format

and mostly in black on a white ground. The

dynamism and tension of the works derives

from the texture of thick impasto, and from

the ‘seams’ between the painted surface and

its canvas support.

Simon Hantaï (1922–), initially associated

with Mathieu and ideogrammatic painting (e.g.

Sexe-Prime from 1955), made the significant

departure in 1960 in producing an all-over

painting by repeatedly folding the unstretched

canvas, and painting it ‘blind’, the pattern be-

ing revealed when the canvas was unfolded.

This technique had the effect of emphasizing

the structural elements of the canvas and its

physical history. Initially ‘organic’ in aspect

(e.g. Mariale 3 of 1960), these works have be-

come increasingly geometric in form (e.g.

Tabula of 1980). These works may be seen as

precursors to the work of the Supports/Sur-

faces group, which dominated the 1970s by

associating structuralist theory with Maoism,

and regional identity with the new unifying

scientific agenda in the arts.

Lettrisme, founded by Isodore Isou (1925–),

may be seen to inherit the ideogrammatic as-

pect of art informel, developing a visual lan-

guage whose aesthetic it was hoped could be

applied in all the arts and liberate meaning in

every domain of cultural life. For example,

Sabatier’s Robe à lire, roman hypographique

from the fourth Paris Biennale (1965) aimed to

extend the semantic possibilities of clothing. The

desire for a universal symbolic language, pri-

mal and poetic, was seen as a way of escaping

from the academicism of figuration and the se-

mantic vacuity of abstraction. Alain Satié’s ex-

perimental fusions of the figure with the roman

alphabet, such as the Entassements of 1966,

effect a refusal of semantic or narrative closure,

while retaining an extreme elegance and an

ambiguity of referent.

Situationism, a break away from Lettrisme

under Guy Debord, took a more radical view.

By asserting that the process of aestheticization

was not only to operate in cultural domains

but should be regarded as a political step, the

situationists hoped to remedy the ills of post-

industrial society. Debord’s Society of the spec-

tacle (La Société du spectacle) investigates the

passivity of the consumer, and proposes rem-

edies which are progressively more radical, and

increasingly architectural. The practices of

‘drifting’ and the analysis of ‘psychogeography’

were intended to help establish the criterion

for changes in our understanding of the urban

painting

407

landscape. Slogans such as The beach is under

the pavement’ and ‘Don’t work’ appeared

around Paris following the formation of the

journal Situationist International in 1957.

Ten years later, the group was to play a key

role in destabilizing French student politics: the

pamphlet De la misère en milieu étudiant (On

Wretchedness in the Student Domain) was

widely distributed after the Situationist takeo-

ver of the Strasbourg student body, and had

considerable impact on the articulation of

‘quality of life’ grievances, and possible anar-

chist solutions. The text recommends, for ex-

ample, the theft of books as a means of redis-

tributing intellectual wealth. Through its in-

creasing insistence, not on making art objects

with exchange values, but rather on altering

the way in which existing environmental fac-

tors are perceived, arguably a dematerialized

art practice in itself, this challenging movement

vanished from the gallery-based art scene. Stu-

dents of architecture are still grappling with

the legacy of a politicized urban landscape.

Alongside this movement, the Salon de la

Jeune Peinture, organized around a more tradi-

tional PCF agenda, was particularly active both

with respect to the American intervention in

French Vietnam (e.g. Salle rouge pour le Viet-

nam), and striking miners in northern France.

The policy of consultation and direct involve-

ment with political issues led to strong graphic

work in the style dubbed ‘socialist realism’.

Under the leadership of Pierre Buraglio, in

May 1968, the engagement of students occu-

pying the École des Beaux-Arts in the Atelier

Populaire (People’s Workshop) followed this

model, negotiating with union representatives

at the Peugeot car plant, encouraging occupy-

ing workers to paint murals, and distributing

powerful screen-printed propaganda.

Daniel Spoerri’s (1930–) work clearly dem-

onstrates that subject matter which distin-

guishes the Nouveaux Réalistes’s production

from American Pop Art, with which they are

often inaccurately assimilated. Spoerri’s char-

acteristic Tableaux Pièges (1960), in which the

remains of breakfast are glued to a tabletop,

in turn fixed to a wall, is strongly evocative of

Cubist subject matter: much Nouveau Réaliste

work contains references to the reality of the

fine, as opposed to commercial, art world.

César’s (1921–) Ricard, Compression

dirigée d’automobile (1962) is closer to main-

stream Pop subject matter, but the insistence

upon the advertised beverage (Pastis) locates

the subject firmly in the culture of the Midi.

Arman’s (1928–) accumulations invoke his-

torical realities pertaining in the present by

synecdoche: in Home Sweet Home (1960), gas

masks unveil ghosts of World War II, while in

Chopin’s Waterloo (1962) the impossibility of

sustaining bourgeois art is implied with refer-

ence to the destructive aspect of the Cubist

genre: an entire aesthetic battle is laid out on

canvas, and if there were any doubt as to the

victor, the title makes it clear that the French

should be on their guard.

Christo, though probably best known for

work executed in America, was closely associ-

ated with the Nouveaux Réalistes in the mid-

1960s. His ‘wrappings’ made literal the se-

mantic transformations involved in the re-

contextualization of found objects. By mak-

ing the objects into gifts, the artist forced the

spectator to accept the codified responsibili-

ties of the recipient, including the obligation

to repay the artist for any unsolicited pleasure

gained from such (representations. That this

process occurs at the level of semantics and

not materials allows the exchange to remain

both cultural and abstract. The increasingly

extravagant scale of Christo’s oeuvre (which

includes the wrapping of both architecture and

landscape) has led to certain difficulties. In the

case of his ‘landscapes’, environmental issues

as well as those of ‘health and safety’ have led

to litigation, while the now habitual practice

of wrapping buildings under renovation has

obscured the radical generosity of what has

become banal gesture.

Niki de Saint-Phalle’s dramatic Tirs of the

mid-1960s functioned for her as a catharsis

following separation from her husband. These

works incorporate objects associated with

painful memories, together with paintballs,

into plaster; the artist invited spectators to

shoot at the resultant white collage, causing it

to bleed colour, forming a portrait of her past.

painting