ARTICLES

Born in Cairo and educated in Paris, Marion de Champ (1914–2013) exhibited and worked between France and Egypt from the 1930s to the 1950s. Drawing on artworks, exhibition catalogues, and French- and Arabic-language press archives, including several previously unpublished documents, this article reconstructs the places, networks, and forms through which her work gained recognition. Contemporary critics followed the evolution of her painting, from the representation of subjects toward a freer construction of forms and colors. Yet this visibility did not secure her a lasting place in art history. Through her career, the article examines the mechanisms by which the works and trajectories of women artists are preserved, transmitted, or gradually erased. It thus invites us to reconsider trans-Mediterranean modernisms through the exchanges between Paris, Alexandria, and Cairo.

Marie-Renée Chevallier-Kervern (1902-1987), after her artistic beginnings in Amiens and Paris, settled in 1936 in Brest, where her husband was appointed City Architect, and became actively involved in the Société des Amies des Arts. A friend of Marguerite Sérusier, Max Jacob, Jean Deyrolle and Charles Estienne, she remained, after the Liberation, in the devastated city. At a distance from the Parisian art scene, she developed in a highly independent and original manner, contributing to the history of post-war abstraction with an immense body of work made up of oils, gouaches, pen-and-ink and charcoal drawings, engraved slates, as well as pasted and torn papers and sewn fabrics. The period 1955-1961 is crucial in this respect: it was then that she painted her most representative canvases and began to produce her collages and her sewn fabrics, contributing to the artistic language of her time in dialogue with Bissière and Manessier, but also Le Moal, Tal Coat, Tapiès, Burri. In this article, we attempt to shed light on the relationship between the means of expression to which the artist resorted at this time and her travels in Italy, Germany and Spain.

The article analyzes the intellectual encounter between the writer Colette and the eighteenth-century painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The author explored the painter’s fate through a little-known short narrative combining irony and fantasy, entitled “Les pages oubliées de Mme Vigée Lebrun,” in 1917. The study of the text and its sensual illustrations, when it was published in the magazine La vie parisienne, intended for a male readership, offers a glimpse of another facet of the eighteenth-century artist, then the most famous of women artists, through the lively and acerbic style of the modern writer.

This text retraces the richness of an encounter with the art historian Martina Pachmanová around the forgotten work of Milada Marešová, recounted as the revelation of a secret. Through an urban memory made up of walks through Paris, archives and constant returns to history, I explore the way Milada Marešová’s paintings revealed another image of early twentieth-century Paris — an image that echoed what I myself was feeling in the present, as a single mother and migrant in this city. I wrote this text to tell the story of an artist whose narrative perspective remains essential today, both in the way she looks at marginalised lives and in the place she occupies within an art history still profoundly marked by the erasure of women’s voices.

I first encountered Bona’s work a long time ago while reading André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s Bona l’amour et la peinture, so it was through the famous writer, whom she married in 1950, that I discovered Bona’s work. And then I forgot that work, which had nevertheless immediately moved me, no doubt because I came across no news concerning it until this film featuring her drawings: L’escargot de Vénus, made by Walerian Borowczyk in 1975 and recently programmed by the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel on its online platform. Even though encountering a work is a singular experience, it seems to me that the years that have passed are not insignificant, beginning with Bona’s name, sometimes given simply as Bona, or as Bona Tibertelli de Pisis, Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues, or Bona de Mandiargues, depending on the periods of her life, the acts of creation, and the voices that speak of her. It therefore seems to me that Bona’s identity and singularity are illuminated (sometimes obscured) by a constellation of artists. Bona’s work thus exists within the Surrealist fold; its dreamlike and erotic motifs are readily apparent, as is the variety of its forms: drawing, painting, textile collage, poetry, narrative, autobiography, translation, elegant appearances, as well as a taste for collaboration. Bona notably illustrated writings by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, posed for Man Ray, and made portraits of André Breton and Unica Zürn. At a time when international art scenes are once again bringing the works of Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Valentine Penrose, Toyen, Leonor Fini, and Frida Kahlo to the fore, it seems important to me to look at Bona’s work. Yet to look, in my view, is to interact with the work, to dream from it, which is why Bona Bona Bona is intended as a playful invocation with a hagiographic dimension, like a cast shadow inspired, among other things, by the Portrait of Unica Zürnand L’escargot de Vénus.

Set of four texts on the modern painter Diane Esmond and the dialogue established with her by her granddaughter, the contemporary artist Adrianna Wallis. Arte Radio podcast link: https://www.arteradio.com/son/il-restera-la-gravite. Exhibition from 5 May to 16 June, Il restera la gravité - Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard.

In June 1936, Erik Olson and Stellan Mörner, founding members of the Swedish Halmstad Group (Halmstadgruppen), exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London, alongside the leading figures of European surrealism. This organised and collectively publicised participation has never been the subject of a dedicated scholarly article in English. This article reconstructs the diplomatic and artistic networks through which Olson and Mörner came to exhibit in London. It examines their works to characterise the group's distinctive contribution to surrealist practice. Finally, it argues that Swedish surrealism is best understood not as a derivative outpost following the Parisian movement, but as artists pursuing distinct individual practices that contributed to the development of the movement. This development was shaped by exchanges between artists, and substantially reworked through Nordic landscape, social composition, and inherited culture. It further situates a scholarly neglect of the history of Scandinavian surrealism within the limits of recent 'global surrealism' initiatives, and identifies the archival resources: the Roland Penrose Archive, the Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen correspondence archive, and the Mjellby Konstmuseum holdings that future research can engage with.

Keywords: 

Halmstad Group; Erik Olson; Stellan Mörner; International Surrealist Exhibition 1936; Nordic surrealism; Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen; surrealism historiography; transnational modernism