拍品專文
Painted in 1949, La Grande Gueule Rouge illustrates Michaux's preoccupation with the hidden spirituality of beings as opposed to their outward appearances.
For Michaux the visible world was merely a delusion. Like the Theosophist teacher Rudolph Steiner, he believed that the real self revealed itself as a nimbus-like aura, which surrounded the body and through its vibration determined whether a person was perceived as either attractive or repulsive. In order to translate this vision into a pictorial language, the artist developed a method of painting that owed its origin to the automatic writing of the Surrealists and the nightmare imagery of Max Ernst. The gestural dynamism of his technique allowed the unconscious to be expressed without the fetters of rational thought.
What Michaux uncovered ranged in mood from a raw ugliness to a dream-like haze. As in La Grande Gueule Rouge, his pictures often took the form of strange hybrid creatures, part human, part insect, part billowing phantom from hell. These he painted with a sinister palette of red and black, which only increased the dark enigmatic quality of the work.
La Grande Gueule Rouge was acquired directly from Michaux by the renowned French critic Michel Tapié. Champion of artists such as Jean Fautrier, Dubuffet and Wols, Tapié documented the cultural climate of post-war France in his seminal book Un Art Autre, which gave the name to the "Informel" style.
For Michaux the visible world was merely a delusion. Like the Theosophist teacher Rudolph Steiner, he believed that the real self revealed itself as a nimbus-like aura, which surrounded the body and through its vibration determined whether a person was perceived as either attractive or repulsive. In order to translate this vision into a pictorial language, the artist developed a method of painting that owed its origin to the automatic writing of the Surrealists and the nightmare imagery of Max Ernst. The gestural dynamism of his technique allowed the unconscious to be expressed without the fetters of rational thought.
What Michaux uncovered ranged in mood from a raw ugliness to a dream-like haze. As in La Grande Gueule Rouge, his pictures often took the form of strange hybrid creatures, part human, part insect, part billowing phantom from hell. These he painted with a sinister palette of red and black, which only increased the dark enigmatic quality of the work.
La Grande Gueule Rouge was acquired directly from Michaux by the renowned French critic Michel Tapié. Champion of artists such as Jean Fautrier, Dubuffet and Wols, Tapié documented the cultural climate of post-war France in his seminal book Un Art Autre, which gave the name to the "Informel" style.