A
new generation of artists |
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Without
having the artistic renown of Paris, over the past two centuries,
Marseilles has been host to some of the most important painters
of modernity. Cézanne and Braque had planted their easels
in the hills of l'Estaque, while Paul Signac, Oskar Kokoshka and
Nicholas de Staël produced, each with his own sensibility,
visions of the port of Marseilles. The great Nadar opened his photography
studio here in the later years of his long life, and Lazlo Maholy-Nagy,
founder of the Bauhaus, saw in the "Tranbordeur" Bridge(
dynamited in 1943) a symbol of modern architecture. |
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Still
today, his black and white photos serve us as a reminder of the
audacious vitality of the city in the early quarter of the 20th
century. A few years later, Marseilles welcomed some of the most
eminent members of the surrealists (André Breton, Max Ernst,
Hans Bellmer, André Masson); each one proscribed, and whom
the American diplomat Varian Fry endeavours to extract from the
Nazi yoke. But these illustrious travellers must not allow us to forget a long list of local painters who sketched, often with enormous talent, scenes of Marseilles life, applying themselves as they did to bringing us details of urban life which today appear to us like so many witnesses of history. Amongst these let us mention (non-exhaustively) Lombard, Monticelli, Seyssaud, Baboulène, Autran, Ferrari, Verdilhan and Ambrogiani. |
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As for Cézar,
authentic Marseillais that he is, must we be reminded that his "Compressions"
revolutionized contemporary sculpture? However, we must beware of
speaking of a "Marseilles school", because we are dealing
primarily with individuals with very marked styles of their own,
making up a common thrust within this crucible of the Mediterranean
charged with the centuries and passion. |
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With
the turning of the 21st century the situation has hardly changed.
More than ever, Marseilles remains an artistic nursery of an incredible
richness, in which hundreds of artist's studios and spaces fixed
up by the local powers such as the "friches", old abandoned
industrial sites in which spaces are made available in measure to
different ambitions. |
What
has changed however, are the different technical means with which
these artists work (and which hardly differ with those used in Berlin
or New York).But what is most interesting is this generation's particular
view of the city. Marseilles is no longer for them an object of
aesthetic admiration, but a platform for understanding and artistically
apprehending the diversity of the world, in this way returning the
phocean city to its millennial cosmopolitism. |
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Personally,
my attendance over the past many years of various galleries and
other places for exhibitions has lead me to distinguish certain
creators, men and women, some young and some less young, all doted
with an artistic potential which only asks to be allowed to grow. Should they work in painting, sculpture or photography, they all have in common a sincere commitment and a desire exchange which I desire to promote, persuaded as I am that amongst them, at least one may end up an important artist of the beginning of this century, one of these figures who may, as we say, count in the future. I invite you without further delay to go on a discovery of these artist's backgrounds and various expressions. |
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Jacques
LUCCHESI, Journalist and art critic |