Clovis Trouille - An Angel of Bad Taste

Il est vrai que je n'ai jamais travaillé en vue d'obtenir un grand prix à une biennale de Venise quelconque, mais bien plutôt pour mériter 10 ans de prison. (Clovis Trouille)

Clovis Trouille, Religieuse italienne fumant la cigarette, 1944

Camille Clovis Trouille (1889-1975) was born in La Fère, in the Picardie region of France. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts of Amiens from 1905 to 1910. With a name worthy of a pseudonym (to have "la trouille" means to be afraid in French), Trouille paddled upstream in a river of Christian morality, military patriotism and bourgeois ostentation with lightness, irony and obstinacy. His erotic and gaudy work delivered a slap in the face to both religion and war (Trouille considered war to be an "infamy", one which had permanently traumatised him). He was drafted on 2 August, 1914. The First World War made him an anarchist and his painting followed suit.

Clovis Trouille, Remembrance, c. 1930

One of his first paintings, Remembrance (above), features two dead soldiers, one German the other French. In their hands they hold two white rabbits and two wooden crosses. On the battlefield a white-haired cardinal cloaked in red with a robe and garter belt bestows his blessing upon a military commander. A nude woman, her body contorted, wears a red, white and blue garter and leaves a trail of military medals behind her.

Clovis Trouille, La profanation, la belle torchie, c. 1945

Remembrance was discovered in 1930 by Dali and Aragon at the Salon des peintres et écrivains révolutionnaires. Trouille also was much appreciated by André Breton, who considered him "the grand master of anything goes", and offered to exhibit his works in his gallery. Trouille refused for fear of being permanently under a label, and it was not until 1962 that he had his first solo exhibition. It was followed the next year with a solo show at the Raymond Cordier gallery in Paris, which was forbidden to anyone aged under age 18 and over 70. In La voyeuse, the dark room is forbidden for anyone under fifty:

Clovis Trouille, La voyeuse, 1960

Was Trouille a surrealist? "Anarchist, surrealist - I don't know. I paint what I love, I paint feminine beauty. For me everything is erotic. It is the most wonderful feeling" explained Trouille. A nonconformist, he peeled away the layers and revealed the defects of the right-wing western society of the time. For example, Bikini (below) depicts a French colony. In the distance in the middle of a field of wheat there is a French soldier leading a group of spahis soldiers.

Clovis Trouille, Bikini, 1930s

On the side of the road a priest with his head in his hands contemplates a skull and crossbones. Barely hidden behind a few stalks of wheat three white women sunbathe in bikinis. The hypocrisy of their mission to "civilize" is thereby unmasked. The Romance of a Spahi (1881) was Pierre Loti's second novel, dealing with a Spahi (French colonial soldiers famous for their romantic uniforms), stationed in sub-Sahara Senegal. The novel was daring for its time as it depicts a love affair between a black woman and white man.

Clovis Trouille, Dialogue au Carmel, 1944

In The Red Poet (below) we see a guillotine before the "prison for nonconformist poets" and a poet with a black cape like the anarchists of the early twentieth century. Hiding behind an urinal, he prepares to attack the executioner. The red poet is André Breton. In the foreground, a phallus-shaped monument is erected in honor of de Sade, topped by a bust of Pope Pius XII.

Clovis Trouille, The Red Poet, 1949

My favorite Trouille painting, The Confession, reminds me at Rivarol's brilliant observation: Il y a des péchés si flatteurs que, si je les confessais, j'en commettrais un autre d'orgueil (There are sins so flattering that, if I confessed them, I would commit another one of pride):

Clovis Trouille, The Confession, n.d.

Towards the end of his life, Clovis Trouille experienced a certain success with his painting Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta! (below) which gave its title to the famous comedy musical that had sex as the main topic. Created in Broadway in 1969 by Kenneth Tynan, it starred Samuel Beckett as one of its librettists and John Lennon among its musicians. In Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta! (The French phrase "oh quel cul t'as" translates roughly as "oh what a lovely backside you have"), "the ass  forms a perfect circle designed to suggest the conquest of the moon", Trouille explained.

Clovis Trouille, Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta!, c. 1960

Some of Trouille's pieces are reminiscent of English Pop Art. In Souvenir without Suite (below) a female face straight out of a 1950s ad campaign stares out at the spectators revealing three very yellow bananas. In the background three nuns with covered faces piously read the bible.

Clovis Trouille, Souvenir without Suite, c. 1960

In The Kiss of the Confessor a couple languishingly embraces inside the cathedral of Amiens. She with lipstick red as blood, mascara and a beauty mark at the corner of her mouth. He with shoulder length hair, red lips, a look of love in his eyes as he leans over her, his hand on her breast. Their bodies intertwine below the stained-glass gazes of kings. A nun and a priest stand out against a somber background.

Clovis Trouille, The Kiss of the Confessor, n.d.

Trouille always wanted to stay independent. He never wanted to depend on galleries. Almost all of his life, he worked as a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins in Paris. He only painted in his spare time. His work consists of only a hundred paintings which he reworked, sometimes for years. Trouille would probably be surprised to see that his paintings are currently trading between 250.000 and 300.000 Euros.

 

Clovis Trouille, My Funeral, 1940

Fascinated or amused by his own mortality Trouille painted a triptych of paintings entitled: My Funeral, (above), My Burial, (1945) and My Grave (below). My Funeral displays a magnificent carriage passing through the streets of Paris followed by a parade of bishops, soldiers and dogs.

Clovis Trouille, My Grave, 1947

In My Grave ghostly women lurk around the cemetery wearing bats as loin cloths, on the gravestone we can read "Here lies the artist who lost his life while earning it". At the top of the vault the face of Jesus Christ appears. Clovis Trouille laughed to the very end. He died on 24 September 1975 in Paris. You can see more of Trouille's work here.

Pierre Roy - Danger on the Stairs

Pierre Roy, Danger on the Stairs, 1927

Pierre Roy (1880-1950) was born in Nantes, France, to a cultured middle-class family, related to that of Jules Verne. He was deeply impressed as a child by Verne's stories, which were told to him by the writer's brother. His repressed ambition was to become a sailor. Instead, his secondary studies finished, he entered an architect's office. From this period, he retained a taste for precise draughtsmanship and materials like stone, wood, rope, and metal. 

 Pierre Roy, A Naturalist's Study, 1928

In 1910, Roy entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and enrolled at the École des Arts Décoratifs and the Académie Julian a short time later. He participated - unsuccessfully - in the Salon des Indépendants in 1907 and 1908. Around 1910, he came into contact with the Fauves and the circle of intellectuals who supported them, notably André Salmon and Max Jacob. In 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire noticed Roy's work at the Salon des Indépendants and asked him to pay him a visit. The two instantly understood, each other and this encounter introduced Roy to the circle of artists gravitating around the poet. During this period, Roy met Alberto Savinio and, through him, Alberto's elder brother, Giorgio de Chirico. Roy and De Chirico exhibited their works together at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants establishing a rapport of mutual esteem that continued into the 1920s.

Pierre Roy, The Shoe, c. 1930

In 1914, Roy abandoned painting almost entirely and began to work on a collection of counting songs illustrated by a series of woodcuts. He was forced to interrupt this work, which was backed by his friend Apollinaire, when he was conscripted to serve in the First World War. Entitled Cent comptines, it was not completed and published until 1926. Following the war, in 1919, Roy began to paint his first object combinations, inspired by his personal interpretation of De Chirico's metaphysical compositions.

Pierre Roy, Le chou-fleur, 1931

In the mid-1920s, Roy joined the Surrealist movement and participated in La Peinture Surréaliste exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre Loeb in November 1925, which showcased works by Giorgio De Chirico, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró and Picasso. The event marked Roy's first true success, underscored by the critic André Salmon in the article he published in Revue de France.

 Pierre Roy, Boris Anrep in his Studio,1949

During the 1930s, Roy visited the United States every year, where he had exhibitions at the Brummer Galery in 1930 and 1933, at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Roy also worked as a stage designer for the Ballets Suédois of Rolf de Maré, and as an illustrator he produced a series of lithographs for The Child of the High Sea of Jules Supervielle (1946). On his way to an exhibition in Bergamo, where he was showing some of his work, Roy died in Milan on September 26th, 1950.

Gisèle Freund

 Gisèle Freund, Self portrait, early 1930s

Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) was born in Berlin into a wealthy Jewish family. Clara, her mother, came from a family of industrialists. Julius Freund, Gisèle's father, ran the family business; he was also an art collector. From an early age, Julius took her to art museums, and at home she met talented painters. 

 Max Slevogt, Portrait of Julius Freund, 1925

She studied sociology and art history at the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main under Karl Mannheim, Max Horkheimer, and Norbert Elias. During this period Freund joined the communist student organization at the university. In 1933, when when the National Socialists came to power, the family emigrated to France. Freund smuggled out photographs she had taken of Hitler's political victims. 

 Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin à la Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1937

Freund entered at the Sorbonne, receiving her PhD in 1936. In the mid-1930s, Freund played chess with Walter Benjamin at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Also the Bibliothèque Nationale connected them. Benjamin did research there for his now famous Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), Freund wrote her dissertation on early French photography, La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle, a metrialistic account of the origins of photography (published in the 1970s in French and German under the title Photographie et société).

Gisèle Freund, Rue de la Pluie, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1935

In 1936 Freund photographed the effects of the Depression in England for the Life magazine. Freund's dissertation was first published in book form by Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955). Freund visited her bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, first time in 1935. With Monnier's help, Freund was able to enter the literary circles. She also started to spent an increasing amount of time in the apartment of Adrienne and Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company Bookstore. 

 Gisèle Freund, Norbert Elias, Paris, 1935

Before the outbreak of the war, Freund made hundreds of portraits of artists and writers. Her subjects included among others her former teacher Norbert Elias (above), Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, T.S. Eliot, André Gide, James Joyce, André Malraux, Romain Rolland, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valéry and G.B. Shaw ("Above all, don't cut off my beard!", Shaw told her). 

 Gisèle Freund, George Bernard Shaw, Londres, 1939

In 1939 Freund had a private exhibition, entitled Ecrivains célèbres, at the Galerie Adrienne in Paris and the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery in London. After the German Invasion of France, Freund went into hinding in a village in the province of Lot, Southern France. In 1942 she fled to Argentina with the help Victoria Ocampo, who had founded in 1931 the magazine Sur, the most important literary magazine of its time in Latin America.

 Gisèle Freund, The last islands before Cape Horn, Patagonia, 1943

Later Freund moved on to Mexico. For years she traveled up and down through the countries of Latin America. During this period she photographed Eva Perón and also became acquainted with the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. To Mexico Freund was invited by the poet and writer Alfonso Reys, originally to give a lecture on French literature. Eventually her stay took two years. In 1950 Life published her critical photoreportage on Eva Peron, which drew the attention of the FBI and four years later she was blacklisted. 

 Gisèle Freund, Le lever d'Evita Peron, Buenos Aires, 1950

In 1944-45 Freund was a photojournalist for the France Libre propaganda services. From 1947 to 1954 she worked for Magnum Photos. Magnum was founded by the legendary Robert Capa. "If you want to make money, give up your job as a reporter," Capa said to Gisèle Freund. "It will earn you a good living, but you'll never get rich."  

Gisèle Freund, Simone de Beauvoir, 1948

In the 1970s, Freund traveled in Japan, the Near East, and the United States. Following the election of François Mitterand to the presidency in 1981, Freund became Mitterrand's official photographer. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Georges-Pompidou) in 1991. Gisèle Freund died in Paris on March 31, 2000. You can see more photos of her here in my Flickr set.