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Pierre Molinier

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pierre Molinier, Gustave Moreau, Edvard Munch, Pierre-Léon Palau, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joyce Mansour

Description

Signed manuscript by André Breton, undated [January 1956].

Flowers and legs: if nature speaks through Molinier’s works, it is in a complex language, woven with images and analogies whose thread Breton here enjoys rediscovering. He first made contact in spring 1955 with this painter who for some time already had been sending him photo albums of his work. He immediately perceived in this endeavour a ‘magic power’, one that beckoned him to the point of devoting a text to the painter in January  1956, on the occasion of a solo exhibition at the À L'Étoile scellée gallery – as though for Breton admiration inevitably had to be expressed through writing in order to find its outline and satisfy a part of the desire to possess works – a desire that also sought to be satisfied through his activity as a collector. The text would be included in Le Surréalisme et la peinture in 1965. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Signed handwritten manuscripts by André Breton. 
- 3 numbered in-4° pages of a manuscript titled and signed in ink by Breton of the final draft of his preface for Molinier’s exhibition at the galerie L'Étoile scellée. 
‘We have seen no lightning-flashes in painting since Gustave Moreau’s Sémélé, which can be considered his poetical testament, and, perhaps, Edvard Munch’s marvellous Puberty. Now that Pierre Molinier has renewed the pact with lightning, it is not surprising that when looking at his pictures the eye is required first of all to rid itself of all the habits and conventions which at the present time govern a way of seeing things that is becoming more and more blindly subjugated to fashion. [...] Heavy tapestries have to be parted before entry can be gained.
Molinier’s genius has been to assemble jewels among which the black opal predominates, and to call forth their fusion a woman who is no longer lightning-struck but lightning-wielding, presenting her as a superb beast of prey. The virtue of his art, which aims deliberately to be magical [...] is to have transgressed the law which lays down that all painted images, however evocative they may be, should despite everything remain objects of conscious illusion and should not have access to the level of active intervention in life.’ (A few ink-stain fingerprints.) [Auction catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition publiée sous la direction d'Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), « Pierre Molinier », Le Surréalisme et la peinture, III, Œuvres complètes, tome IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 647-650, notice p. 1335.

Exhibition place

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