Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Magiciennes Romaines, 1975-1976, Color pencil, 155 x 130 cm.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), L'enlèvement de Roberte, 1993, Résine peinte et bois, 250 x 130 x 90 cm. © Collection of Denise Klossowski.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Diana e Actaeon.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Roberte et les collégiens V (vision du Professeur Octave), 1974, Collection André Goeminne, Nazareth.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Buntstift auf Papier, 21,4 x 14,7 cm, Collection Jean-Paul Jungo, Genève, © VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2008.. |
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Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
+ 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
Paris
Galerie d'art Graphique
Level 4 200m2
Pierre Klossowski,
Tableaux Vivants
April 1-June 4, 2007
The Centre Pompidou for the first time presents an exhibition of the drawings of Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), organised in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne. The works selected by Sarah Wilson for London and Cologne are accompanied in Paris by 11 additional drawings.
A translator, philosopher and writer of erotic fiction, Pierre Klossowski — brother of the painter Balthus — began drawing only in the early 1950s, devoting himself to it entirely from 1972 onward.
Some 40 very large format drawings from 1952 to 1988, together with three sculptures, will offer an insight into the complex vision of a scholar who embarked late on an artistic career.
Born in Paris in 1905, Pierre Klossowski was brought up in an artistic and literary environment, living in Switzerland, Germany and Paris. Guided in his education by Rilke and Gide, he became friends with the poet Pierre-Jean Jouve and frequented psychoanalytic circles. In the 1930s he met Georges Bataille, joining the Contre-attaque group and the Acéphale secret society. He quickly gained a reputation for his translations and post-war book on Sade was also well received. During the Occupation, he studied theology and Scholastic philosophy as a novice in the Dominican order, experiencing a religious crisis recounted in his first fiction, La Vocation suspendue (1950). Returning to lay life, in 1947 he married Denise Marie Roberte Morin-Sinclaire, who became his "unique sign": as Roberte she would figure at the centre of his novels Roberte, ce soir, I953, La Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes, 1959 and Le Souffleur, 1960, republished as the trilogy Les Lois de l’hospitalité in 1965. It was to illustrate or rather embody the vision there described that he first began to draw, first in pencil and from 1952 in colored crayon. As a translator and exegete of the Church Fathers and the great authors of Antiquity, and as an acute reader of Sade, Nietzsche and Benjamin, he was an important influence on the intellectuals of his time — Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault — and inspired filmmakers such as Pierre Zucca, Raoul Ruiz and Alain Fleischer.
The drawings
Klossowski's "tableaux" are unmistakeably idiosyncratic. Both timeless and contemporary, these large images of diaphanous figures are characterized by a complex "blend of erotic austerity and theological debauch" (Blanchot), an endless slippage between the sacred and the profane, the real and the fictional, the personal and the mythic (Diana and Acteon, Judith and Holofernes etc.) in the dramaturgical "actualization" of universal fantasies. Bodies in suspense, gestures and attitudes arrested in movement: all vain attempts to capture the essence of human beings.
Klossowski made use of the most hackneyed formal stereotypes, turning to Pompeiian painting, mediaeval illumination, the imagery of children's books and popular posters, the distortion of Mannerism, the rhetoric of the Baroque, the artifice of Symbolism and to other "academic" styles, to evoke the most secret of fantasies. His interrogation of the enigma of the image — reflection or illusion — confers upon his drawings the gravity of a philosophical or even spiritual meditation. Yet a playful irony is an omnipresent feature of these images, both innocent and perverse, sophisticated and clumsy.
The exhibition
The deployment of these 40 drawings and of three sculptures made with sculptor Jean-Paul Réti allows one to grasp the slippage or shift that Klossowski effects between personal fiction and myth or universal narrative. A first group of pencil drawings from the 1950s shows a mirroring back-and-forth between the figure of Roberte and those of Diana, Judith, Lucretia, or indeed "la belle Versaillaise." In each case the image reveals the profound duality of the impulses of desire. At the centre of the exhibition, the large-format color crayon works of 1970-1980 depict the erotic adventures of Roberte. These are truly "visions," conceived as film scenes at a time when Klossowski, his wife and their friends were playing parts in Pierre Zucca's film Roberte. Shown alongside are the photographs that Zucca took for Klossowski's book La Monnaie vivante in I970. The exhibition closes on a second group of large format works featuring the disturbing figures of Ogier (le Baphomet), Milady and d’Artagnan, Gilles de Rais and Ganymede.
Curator: Agnès de la Beaumelle, curator in chief, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Rocking Chair, 1982.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Young Ogier in the Arms of Brother Lahire, 1972.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905- 2001) (drawing), Jean-Paul Reti (sculpture), Diane et Actéon (1990), Musée national d'art moderne (Centre Pompidou), Paris.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Roberte Attacked by the Spirits She Censored, 1976.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), Les barres parallles III (The Parallel Bars III), 1975, Colour pencils on paper. Lucie Lens, Belgium.
Pierre Klossowski (French, 1905-2001), La poursuite dans l’escalier, 1975, Courtesy Natalie Seroussi. |
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