It was Paris at the end of the 1950s, and Jean-Claude Silbermann knew where the surrealists gathered every night of 5 to 6 pm, waited on the outskirts of Le Musset, a coffee between the Royal of Palais and the Louvre, to André Breton, the writer and poet who directed the fluctuating and anarchic group, emerged with approximately 15 or his acolitos.
“I let’s know how to do anything. I had just written any pond,” said Silbermann, now 90 years old. “It was ridiculous, but I went directly to him and said:” You are André Breton. I am Jean-Claude Silbermann. I am surreal. “At that time, and now, Silbermann thought or surrealism as a mood, a way of being in the world, and deep down is the revolt. Breton told the young man to join night meetings when I wanted.
Born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western outskirts of Paris, Silbermann cut the ties with his family when he was a teenager, leaving his home to prove poetry instead of joining his father’s successful hat business. “I loved poetry since I was a little boy. At 18, I read ‘Alcools’, by Guillaume Apollinaire. I opened the book, and when I closed it, the world had changed,” he told me, his French galler in -After, and the critic and the Critivaeianianianianianianianianianianianianianianianianian school nationalium school nationalium school nationalium school national school Storm in The Marais, where some of the artist’s ingramatic works hung on a wall.
From the leafy suburbs of Paris, the young Silbermann traveled to Oslo and then Copenhagen, where he made Caketop, worked in cargo ships and, sometimes, read Palmas to win a Magero. “It was a scam, but pay my cigarettes, my room and my food,” he said. “It was a very pleasant life.”
In Paris, a few years later with a wife and son, he agreed to his father’s pressure to work in family trade, but was miserable with his bourgeois lifestyle. “I won 15 kilos in three months,” he said. “Fifteen kilos of anxiety. Fifteen kilos or anguish.” His fateful meeting with Breton brought him back to poetry and, later, painting, which are still critical in life.
In 2024 days, Silbermann to Sator, whose grandmother Simone Khan was Breton’s first wife. He was an active member of the surrealists and opened his own gallery after World War II, to defend the artists of the movement. And from May 8 to 11, in Independent, the Art Fair in Manhattan, only about 100 years after Breton wrote his first “Surrealism Manifesto”, Sator shows Silbermann’s colorful works full of images similar to those similar to those in a similar way.
The past fall, Silbermann’s canvases, which are mounted on wood and cut in several forms with a mountain range, were shown in the successful “surrealism” exhibition of Pompidou, one of the many world exhibitions to celebrate the centenary of the movement. The show prevented chronology for a maze of spiral issues (dreams, chimera, political monsters, night, eros and more, which traced surreal trends to ancient Greece.
“Listening, I was very happy that it was the only surreal alive in the exhibition. All others were dead,” Silbermann told us in the gallery when he was asked what it was like to be part of a transcendental historical retrospective. “Maybe not for a long time, but still, I was the only one alive, and that was very fun.”
He insists that surrealism, “an attitude towards the world, not a seal that you put in a passport,” he said, is not over. The museum, the past, can only teach you a lot: it is “a great grave, we have to do something else. I, but young people will interpret the surrealism of new ways,” he said humbly. “I am the last surrealist, but not the only living surreal.”
Sator said he will show “young works”, with almost all the paintings made from 2021 to 2024. Only “Vous Partz Déja?” (“Are you leaving?”) Is it before. That 2009 work shows a bright yellow bird, its feathers splashed with light, grabbing two dark and dark purple skulls as it progresses. The golden foliage sprouts from the feathers on his head.
“I like intellectual provocation,” said Silbermann. “I never know what I’m going to do when I start working. This is not extraordinarily original. But stop working when I don’t understand it, when it escapes me. That’s when I tell Myelf what is, a soup of a Saudden, I don’t.” “” He has problems with the titles, but he is happy with “Are you already going?”, What he realized after it was finished must be a portrait of yourself and his wife, Marijo.
When I asked who the bird is, he laughed and did not answer. He and Marijo now live on the island of Port-Cros and Sannois, a suburb of Paris.
Sigmund Freud’s unconscious theory has been important for Silbermann, as it was for many of his classmates. Hello, it also talks about ideas such as intuitive knowledge about reason, about the importance of the unknown, or being entangled in your life and art, and having the deep desire, as well as courage, to pursue art. “There are better things to do with your life,” he said or his artistic practice, “but I could do anything else. It was not an choice. He had to be an artist. Surrealism is courage, fantasy, liberation, revolt.”
In some works, the figures move through fantastic scenes, locked in ambiguous courtship, becoming one with animals or landscapes, as in “l’etente et le moment du fruit orange” (“The wait and the moment of the orange fruit”, l’Ttente ettente “l’Ttente bl’tte shield”, 2021-2022).
Other pieces can be read as painful and transcendent psychological internships. “L’Attente et le moment of the nuit” (“The Wait and the moment Release: The Monsters Take Up Only The Lower Half of the Image, which is serenal, with two men floating in weight.
These works of art seem slight from afar, but closely have a quiet luminosity and even when dark, a combinatorial feeling and ironic titles that also defined the early work of Silbermann. In 1965, he created the centerpiece for the 11th International Exhibition of Surrealism. Titled “Le consommateur” (“The consumer”), the giant sculpture was a figure made of what he called an “unpleasant pink mattress” with a siren for his head, an open fridge for his back and a washing machine on his intestine, in which the phones.
Silbermann said he is a politician in his life as a citizen, but not in his art. The stories that tell of his life is witnessing the violence and agitation of the twentieth century, and yet they carry humor, astonishment, fashion, optimism. He told about the German German Dadaist Hans Arp, who evaded mandatory military service in World War I completing his documents with the right details, but then added them all in a vague column or nonsense: “A recipe for imbecility.”
For Silbermann, this was not only the opportunity or destiny, but the game against life and death. “It’s beautiful,” he said. He told about the relative of a friend in the French resistance of World War II that escaped from the Gestapo. At the end of the war, Silbermann, who is Jewish, and his extended family hid in a house in the hills while his father served in resistance. The German soldiers arrived and burned the house to the ground, giving the group only 10 minutes to escape. Silbermann described the fire as a transfer, Sator told me.
In 1960, along with many other French intellectuals, Silbermann signed the “Manifesto of the 121”, an open letter that opposes the Algerian war, in which he refused to serve. Tightened and disoriented by the conflict, Silbermann was almost driven to suicide, he said. He was sick for three years and could not write poetry for longer. At a friend’s suggestion, he was before painting. Duration our interview, he smiled and said that he arrived more easily than poetry, citing an old jazz standard: “It means nothing if it doesn’t have that swing.”
Then he adapted the prayer, perhaps covered the relationship between art and life: “If you don’t have this, you have nothing.”
