Artists & Works |
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| Pierre Alechinsky Belgian (b. 1927) UNTITLED from HOMAGE TO PICASSO (c.1973) Lithograph 29. 625" x 22.25" |
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A Belgian painter, draughtsman, printmaker and film maker, Alechinsky
was a founder of the CoBrA movement, and known for employing an
Oriental manner of painting, in which paper is spread on the floor
and ink is applied from above, thus allowing greater freedom of
movement and expressive power. In addition to formal studies at
École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et
des Arts Décoratifs (1944-48), he studied calligraphy in
Japan in the fifties. Clearly, the innovations of Alechinsky and
other CoBrA artists in the later forties and early fifties paralleled
and influenced the work of the ABSTRACT-EXPRESSIONISTS,
notably Jackson Pollock. From the sixties onward, Alechinsky became more and more interested
in collaborating with other artists. Publications appeared with
poetic texts by various authors, which he illustrated with mythical
animals. His work was exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 1960 and
again in 1972. It has also been exhibited at Documenta III in Kassel,
the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1978) and the Guggenheim Museum in
New York (1987). A major Alechinsky survey exhibition was presented
in 1998 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and toured internationally.
. Source for biographical information: Grove Dictionary of Art, MacMillan, 2000. |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS |
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Rachel Campbell-Johnston, “Revolution in the Nursery,”
London Times, 3/5/03 |
| John Russell, “Painting
with Fanciful Strokes,” New York Times, 3/8/87 "...Alechinsky in this country is both known and not so known. In 1976 he won the prestigious Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh, and in the following year he had a very large exhibition at the Museum of Art in the Carnegie Institute. In 1980 he had a print retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For 25 years, he was represented by the Lefebre Gallery in New York. (His present show is dedicated to the memory of the late John Lefebre, a dealer as remarkable for deep feeling as for probity.) He has written books of his own, illustrated books by others, won many a prize and many a commission. (Visitors to the Ministry of Culture in Paris often find themselves in a reception room in which the walls, the ceiling and the rug are all the work of Alechinsky.) But he is not a pushy artist, any more than John Lefebre was a pushy dealer. Discretion is one of the master qualities of his work, as of his life, and although many younger painters worry all the time about marketing strategies, I doubt that he has ever heard of them. Married to the same delicious wife since 1949, he is the despair of the gossip columnist. The Alechinskys live primarily in Bougival, not far from Paris, and treat their handsome apartment on the East River in Manhattan as a perch that they can go to, or not, as the fancy takes them. Most of the time he stays home and works, minding his own business, except that one day a week during the school year, since 1983, he has served as professor of painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He loves his students, but frets about their future. ''They don't read. They never go to the Louvre. What on earth will become of them?''... ... It is relevant to the reflective quality of this, and most of Alechinsky's other works, that he does not work standing up in front of an easel in the fencer's posture that we associate with the traditional painter in oils. He works on a low table, and sometimes on the floor, walking round and round the image in a way that has something to do with his being left-handed. 'My natural dynamic is from left to right,' he said the other day, 'even in reading. That's why I am always happy to go and work in a print workshop, where the mirror does the adjustments for me.' So much of his work is conversational in tone - a matter of stories told with relish and wit, and never allowed to go on too long - that he was delighted to find in a French dictionary that the words for ''depict'' and ''describe'' are yoked together like twins. It is a mystery to him, but a joyful one, that people read his pictures to the end. ''It's amazing,'' he said. 'A picture is a fixed rectangle, and it doesn't talk, and yet in an age of noise and movement it can still hold people's attention.' ..." |
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Roberta Smith, “Pierre Alechinsky at the Guggenheim,"
New York Times, 3/6/87
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