Dado’s paintings – The 1950s
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Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photo: Saša Reljić.
Right: Baby, 1957, oil on canvas, 66 × 50 cm. Antoine de Galbert collection, Paris. Photo: Pascal Szidon.
Right: Audition, 1954, oil on canvas, 81,5 × 55 cm.
Right: Bikini, circa 1954, oil on canvas, 65 × 58 cm, inv. br. 274.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photo: Saša Reljić.
Right: The Pharmacy, 1958, oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. Langen Foundation. Photo: Pascal Szidon.
Right: Untitled, 1958, gouache on paper, 65 × 50 cm.
Collection abbaye d’Auberive. Photo: Michel Graniou.
Right: Courcelles-les-Gisors, Oise, 1958, oil on canvas, 161 × 128 cm.
Right: Thomas More, 1958-1959, oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Photo: Jacques Bétant.
Right: School, 1958-1959, oil on canvas, 300 × 200 cm.
AM 1989-280 Photo: © Béatrice Hatala – Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP.
Right: Sorcerer, 1959, oil on canvas, 195,1 × 130 cm.
Presented at the “Antagonisms” exhibition of Julien Alvard and François Mathey at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in January 1960 ¹, The Sorcerer, dated 1959, is a painting from Dado’s mineral period. It depicts an androgynous figure with a stoney body, seated on a stool, wearing a realistic pair of shoes, flanked by two cats, one of which has a face which is almost human. Dado painted this picture in his first real studio, a disused cinema in Courcelles-lès-Gisors in the French county of Vexin, which he had moved into in 1958 thanks to Daniel Cordier, his first dealer. Steeped in the light of the Vexin, the artist’s new adopted region, The Sorcerer is a medium-format mineral “portrait”, like The Architect (1959, 162.5 × 130 cm, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne) or Character with Bats (1960, 146 × 114 cm, Treger/Saint Silvestre Collection, Portugal). Protagonist, cats, vegetation, floor and wall all merge indiscriminately. The confusion of the kingdoms is evident, while the boundaries between plant, animal and mineral blur to the point of vertigo, forming a whole characteristic of Dado’s style from the Cordier period, the most recognisable of all.
In the works of this “mineral” period, the wall is a key motif. Here we can clearly see bits of wall, in which the bricks seem to crumble. This organic wall, in decomposition, is partially covered with flat areas of sky blue, and in its upper part a character seems to want to intrude (or extract himself?). In 1969, Dado underlined his fascination for the walls of the Vexin to Germain Viatte and Marcel Billot during his interview for the catalogue of the retrospective at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain (January 1970): “These famous walls of the Vexin inspired me, like my home of Montenegro at the very beginning, which is at the origin of a certain inspiration. There is this sort of mixture of elements...”².
The walls of the Vexin reactivate in Dado the memory of the mountainous landscapes of “his dear Montenegro” and a fascination for the texture of the stone that goes back to childhood – much later, Dado will confide that he would observe the wall for hours on end: this construction “;made of large square stones, rather than cement” ³ of the family house in Cetinje, which constituted “a barrier that separated [his] world from the rest of the world” ⁴. It is therefore easy to understand why Jean Dubuffet’s work, and particularly his Texturologies, which the artist discovered at the Daniel Cordier Gallery in 1959 ⁵, spoke so much to Dado.
But what makes The Sorcerer specific is another influence, that of the magic realism of the American painter Ivan Albright (1897-1983), whom Dado discovered early on in Montenegro, from the middle of the 1940s, in Life magazine ⁶ and through Albert Lewin’s film, The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1945): “I saw the film of Dorian Gray and soon that I was that tall. [...] Ivan Albright, he was really the painter who fascinated me the most.” ⁷ In The Sorcerer, the cat on the left of the stoney character inevitably evokes the statuette of the Egyptian cat with supposed magical powers before which the hero of Lewin’s film expresses the wish that his portrait would age in its place, and which appears precisely on the left, in the same position, posed on a pedestal table, in the portrait of aged Dorian Gray painted by Albright.
One might wonder who the sorcerer is in Dado’s painting: is it the seated figure or the cat with the piercing gaze, who transformed this human being into a creature with a stoney body?
Exhibited
« Antagonismes », Musée des arts décoratifs, Palais du Louvre-Pavillon de Marsan, Paris, February-March 1960; catalogue, p. 53, illustrated
« Dado. Collection Daniel Cordier », Galerie Chave, Vence, July-October 2004; catalogue, p. 12. Text by Philippe Dagen.
Literature
Alain Bosquet, Dado. Un univers sans repos, Paris, Éditions de la Différence, 1991, p. 113 and p. 309.
1. This exhibition “marked the first recognition by a French museum of lyrical abstraction, abstract expressionism and informal art as an international trend. It shows the French art scene by giving an important place to foreign artists living in Paris” (“Chronology, 1944-1972” in Jean-Paul Ameline (ed.), Paris et nulle part ailleurs. 24 foreign artists in Paris, Exh. Cat., Paris, 2022, p. 197). See also: “La peinture d’avant-garde va présenter ses ‘antagonismes’”, Le Monde, 29 January 1960.
2. Dado, Interview with Germain Viatte and Marcel Billot on the occasion of the retrospective at the CNAC in January 1970, 1969, reprinted in Peindre debout, ed. by Amarante Szidon, foreword by Anne Tronche, Strasbourg, 2016, p. 65.
3. Dado, Interview with Michel Braticevic, in Peindre debout, op. cit. p. 156.
4. Ibid.
5. Referring to his arrival in Paris in 1956 and his discovery of contemporary art, Dado stated, “Dubuffet, of course, was the only painter that mattered to me [...] there was nothing else on the Parisian scene” (Dado, Interview with Germain Viatte and Marcel Billot, art. cit., p. 56).
6. Probably by the article “Ten Years of American Art”, Life, November 25, 1946, in which Woman, a masterpiece from the MoMA collections, is reproduced.
7. Dado, interview with Hans Ruedi Giger, Herouval, September 1997, unpublished video archive by Pascal Szidon. The Swiss artist is showing Dado the homage he paid to him in his monograph published by Taschen in 1997, in which he describes him as “the Jerome Bosch of the 20th century”, and in which he evokes the possible influence of Ivan Albright and his Portrait of Dorian Gray, which Dado immediately confirms by telling him how accurate this intuition is. Another testimony of Dado’s admiration for Albright, as he recalls his first visit to MoMA in 1962 to Christian Derouet: “At the New York museum, there was an American who I liked a lot, Albright, a guy from Chicago, who had quite a few paintings at the 1956 Venice Biennale. Because in 1956, there was a Biennale in Venice, where Albright’s paintings were exhibited. And when I saw them in real life, in the original, I liked them a little less. It was a bit dry and thin as a touch. I was a little bit disappointed. But in the art books, I liked his characters a lot. There was even a film, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, where Albright made a painting with a face...” (Dado, Conversation with Christian Derouet, 1988, to be published at Atelier contemporain in 2023 (ed. by Amarante Szidon, postface by Christian Derouet).
