The Center Pompidou, in Paris, devotes a retrospective to the famous French figurative painter.
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At 76, Gérard Garouste benefits from a retrospective at the Center Pompidou (the first had taken place in 1988), with almost one hundred and forty paintings, installations and some sculptures. Even if she is most figurative, for many her painting will appear as Hebrew. Besides, it is.
Not at first however: the exhibition commissioner, Cécile Debray, having had the happy idea of carrying out a hung – very successful – chronological, we see that her first inspirations derive from Greek myths. Which will not be much easier for some. We have the memory of a student who, very good in spelling, but no one in mythology, described the subject of a painting by Nicolas Poussin as Eurydice playing the lyre to his partner Orphée…
A good part of the history of art requires a good knowledge of the Bible, the apocryphal gospels, the life of the saints, but also of the metamorphoses of Ovid and other great classic texts: Gérard Garouste adds the Talmud. He himself learned Hebrew and converted to Judaism in 2014.
His father died too early to attend the ceremony, who would probably not have delighted him: Convinced anti -Semitic and Pétainist, he had taken advantage of the laws of Vichy on the status of the Jews for spoiling the Lévitan establishments of their property . He was not, moreover, not an ideal father, if we judge by the Caved table, painted in 2007, the representative beating his son on the ground … Gérard Garouste spoke of this difficult childhood in an astonishing book published in 2009, the ‘Intranquille. Self-portrait of a son, a painter, a madman (with Judith Perrignon, the iconoclast), where he especially describes the mental disorders that she may have caused at home, sometimes binding him to stay at the ‘Hospital.
taste for myths
Other moments of his childhood, in an uncle and a Burgundian aunt, were more serene, but just as important in the formation of his taste for myths: “I grew up in Burgundy, country of legends, of fairy tales. It has always fascinated me, “he said.
But his father quickly ships it to a severe college in Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines) specialized for difficult students, the Montcel school, where he became friends with other duncres, Patrick Modiano , Michel Sardou and especially Jean-Michel Ribes.
He shares with the latter the love of the theater, manifests from the entrance to the exhibition which evokes the foundation, in 1966, by the two accomplices of the Compagnie du Pallium, then the realization of several sets for pieces May Jean-Michel Ribes features in other places. He also happens to design costumes and go on stage. At the same time, he studied at the National School of Fine Arts.
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