Jean Michel Atlan (1913 - 1960)
Description
" Fashion paint is much more ravaging than grasshoppers "(Letter to friends written in 1959). A marginal French painter, Jean Michel ATLAN died suddenly at the age of 47, his pictorial career lasted 15 years. Professor of philosophy in Laval and Condorcet high school in Paris, he began to paint in the 1940s in an abstract expressionist spirit, and joined the movement CoBRa in 1946. His style asserts from 1950, informs leaving room to a plastic organization. His knotted painting, framed by blacks intense as stained glass, has an archaic appearance. Rhythmic and dense, a certain mysticism emanates from his painting. "I am not abstract or from the point of view of the climate of my works, nor from the point of view of" execution ". A form interests me only when she lives (or when I managed to make her live) and then she is no longer abstract: she is alive! Jean-Michel Atlan.
The oil on canvas presented at the sale on Saturday, November 26, 2016 at the Saint-Aubin auction house was painted 1 year before his death. Neither abstract nor figurative, its formula “my forms are alive” takes on its full meaning in the face of this masterful work. The color becomes form, the undulating ochre and beige shapes are energized by the irruption of royal blue. The black, irregular and tortured circles breathe dynamism into the whole, the composition comes to life. This Jew of Algerian origin was arrested by the Nazis in 1942, and it was by pretending to be mad that he escaped the extermination camps. Interned in the Sainte-Anne hospital until the liberation in 1944, it was in captivity that he learned to write many poems. This poetic spirit is also expressed wonderfully in this work, whose title “Salambô III” is an invitation to the fantasized and idealized Orient.
This painting was sold for € 82,600 costs included on November 26, 2016.