Gherasim LUCA (Bucharest, 1913 - Paris, 1994)
Madeleine, undated, autograph manuscript, images cut from magazines with autograph poem, ms 860
Of Romanian origin, Gherasim Luca established close ties with French artistic circles in the early 1930s, most notably with the Surrealist group, before settling permanently in France in 1953.
Described by Gilles Deleuze as "the greatest poet of the French language", Luca developed a work of "limit-hero", to use the title of one of his works (1953), where the deconstruction of language is based on the refusal of political, identity or ethical categories and the recourse, twenty-five years before Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to the notion of anti-Œdipe. His atypical path, where the creative process is inseparable from his personal life, naturally led him to transpose his poetic experiments into the visual arts. In particular, from 1945 onwards, Luca began a series of collages - in which this autograph manuscript is included - made from photographs of various illustrations or, more importantly, reproductions of paintings, cut into squares of equal dimensions. Luca then glued these squares side by side to form a new, original and surprising image, following a process deeply inspired by the Surrealists. He gave these works the name "cubomania", a way of recalling the founding role of the square shape but also probably a way of mocking the heirs of cubism. Beyond the influence of the Surrealists and Marcel Duchamp's scandalous L.H.O.Q. (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1919), Luca's "cubomanias" feature a personal dialogue with the most famous works of art of the past, from Leonardo da Vinci to the van Eyck brothers, Caravaggio and Ingres. This manuscript joins one of them acquired in 2019, Madonna of the Bourmestre Meyer (after Holbein).
Madeleine, Sans date, manuscrit autographe, images découpées dans des magazines avec poème autographe, ms 860
