The Art of Hope | Villepin | Hong Kong | November 2020

Home , Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, School of Paris, The City (Léger)

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Shaped by Dominique and Arthur de Villepin’s passion for art, Villepin is a gallery created by collectors for collectors. Inspired by the founders’ own collections and profound knowledge of the Asian art market, Villepin offers a new gallery concept based on the art of collecting.

Through their experience building close friendships with artists, the father-son duo wish to share their expertise with fellow collectors by curating artworks that they themselves would love to collect, ultimately nurturing a unique model of collecting based on long-term relationships with artists and their estates or foundations. THE ART OF HOPE NEW SCHOOL OF PARIS 23 November 2020 - 23 April 2021

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONGArt KONG Dealer Pierre | NOVEMBER Loeb with Artists Zao 2020 Wou-Ki, - APRILMaria Elena 2021 Vieira Da Silva, Germain, Georges Mathieu, Jean Paul Riopelle, Circa 1950. Photograph Courtesy Of Bridgeman Images. In the first decades of the 20th century, Paris emerged as the global center of art. Between the 1900s and 1940s, the City of Light enjoyed leadership in the artistic world, gathering such celebrated artists as Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Amedeo Modigliani under the “School of Paris” designation.

Subsequent to the Second World War, the “New School of Paris” brought together a distinguished group of painters intent on creating new hopes in a new world. It was a school for the exiles and adopted Parisians, a milieu of chosen rather than given identities. Zao Wou-Ki came from China, Jean-Paul Riopelle from Canada, Hans Hartung from Germany, Nicolas de Staël from Russia, Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages from the north and south of France respectively.

For each and every one of them, painting was a passion and even livelihood. They were members of a generation which experienced the horror of war, and whose lives and world views have been turned upside down by the outbreak of violence. Every painter exhibited here was at once a witness and a victim, each in their own way. All faced deprivation and humiliation, which metamorphosed into a desire to live, act, and paint, plunging them into finding trust and faith in humanity. Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël even enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to fight for their adopted country and the principles of liberty embodied in their eyes.

Today, in a world beset with crises, division, and trauma, we could maybe draw a lesson from these artists who clung to art as a means of survival, thereby guiding us towards the future with new energy and renewed confidence.

Perhaps, what is so touching about these artists is that they offer an archeology of hope – the indepen- dence of art at a time of political or economic surrender, and the freedom of art to constantly reinvent tradition and history.

Embracing Villepin’s philosophy of bringing you closer to the artists and the world they were living in, we wish to make you travel back to Paris in the ’50s. For this reason, we have collaborated with the renowned Pierre Paulin designer, who’s famous design pieces furnished the French presidential residence as part of the Mobilier National selection, during the same era.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 JEAN DUBUFFET (1901 - 1985)

“Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.”

- Jean Dubuffet

Jean Philippe Arthur Vincent Dubuffet was a prolific painter and sculptor, the enfant terrible of the New School of Paris, and the darling of the Parisian avant-garde circle. A firebrand rebel against traditional aesthetics, he embraced commonplace subjects in everyday life in his authentic and humanistic approach, vehemently believing that the mundane life of mortals contained more art and poetry than did ivory towers. In repudiation of traditional painting methods, he mixed such crude materials as dust, mud, sand, tar, cement, and plaster with oil paint, concocting a paste wherewith he could create physical marks on his deliberately anti-personal and anti-psychological compositions. He was a founding father of the Outsider Art (Art Brut) movement – a term coined by himself for art produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms and free of intellectual concerns – and his collection thereof was referred to as “a museum without walls”.

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) J’accours, 1964 Mixed media (vinyl/canvas) 194.4 x 129.5 cm

J’accours (I run), screams the canvas, i.e. I appear out into fantasy, into a ghostly parallel universe ”. The skin of the canvas and I run towards you, the spectator. A becomes a skeleton, the vertebrate form is the picture, figure without a figure, this being speaks to us, and yet patiently teaching us the distinction between object it is only schematism, twists, spirals, and “uncertain, and sign, being and existence, as well as movement and fleeting, and ambiguous representations”.We need life, while inviting us to constantly recharge our bat- the projection of our gaze to see two legs, two arms, a teries. In a sense accomplishing the multiple quests of trunk, and a mysterious head. Sure we have seen some- the New School of Paris, at the primitive marriage of one, and yet we look again to realize that there is no form, gesture, and speed, Jean Dubuffet – who wrote one there. In the words of Jean Dubuffet, it is “a plunge a biography at the double – extended an invite to us.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 HANS HARTUNG (1904 - 1989)

Hans Hartung’s dynamic and experimental practice evokes a powerful sense of self expression. His singular visual language established him as a leader in the field of 20th century abstraction and has had a profound influence over subsequent generations of artists.

The celebrated French-German painter Hans Heinrich Ernst Hartung was in many ways a prophet eons ahead of his time. Captivated by the capriciousness of light and space, he was one of the first painters who from the outset approached art exclusively in abstract terms, experimenting with abstraction at the tender age of 17. He began creating gestural paintings some 20 years before Jackson Pollock, although it was not until the 1950s that his works finally received recognition. Nigh on monochromatic and characterized by rhythmic brushstrokes, his postwar creations eradicated figurative elements while embodying calligraphic qualities. Unlike earlier abstractionists who attempted to control the painting process, he opted for complete freedom and spontaneity, applying paint with such items as spray guns, garden rakes, and even olive branches. Renowned for his dynamic and innovative approach to abstraction, he sought to translate the inexpressible onto canvas, inspiring generations of lyrical abstractionists across the Atlantic.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Hans Hartung (1904-1989) T1956-23, 1956 Oil on canvas 180 x 115 cm

Provenance Galerie de France, Paris

Exhibition London, Fischer Fine Art, Hans Hartung, A Vision into Abstraction 1923-64, A 75th Birthday Tribute, January- February 1981 Berlin, Galerie Pels-Leusden, Hans Hartung, A Vision into Abstraction 1923-64, A 75th Birthday Tribute, April 1981

Literature Exhibition catalogue, Hans Hartung, A Vision into Abtraction 1923-1964, A 75th Birthday Tribute, London, 1981, no. 10 (illustrated)

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 There is perhaps an expression of such in T1956-23, the earth to germinate a new reality. Everyone feels where the sign seems to outline movement of elevation, this call of hope in a world to be rebuilt. It expresses suggesting the gesture of two hands in prayer, like itself to them with the radiance of regained joy, raven’s feathers being carried away by the breath and peace appreciated at its true value. In 1945, of wind. The sign stands out against the sooty and Fernand Léger captured the spirit of the times when powdery background, ready to crumble and dissolve he exclaimed: “See how beautiful our world is. Art as these dancing, black and blue shapes seem hard Nouveau brings peace and happiness.” Everything yet smooth as piercing metal, like a plowshare lifting was disappearing, but everything had to be rebuilt.

Provenance Galerie de France, Paris (acquired in 1973) Private Collection, Europe Christie’s, London, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Morning Session, 6 February 2007, lot 145 Galerie Brimaud, Paris Acquired from the previous by the present owner

Literature Georges Boudailles et Catherine Millet, Hans Hartung. Hier et aujourd’hui, Art Press, Paris, November 1974

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Hans Hartung (1904-1989) T1967-H16, 1967 Acrylic on canvas 65 x 81 cm

Provenance Gaston Diehl Collection, Paris (acquired directly from the artist around 1968) Anonymous sale, Christie’s Paris: June 5, 2019, Lot 00177 Acquired from the above by the present owner

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 For Hartung, to paint is to capture. The spontaneity of with flat surfaces smoothed out by industrial processes, gesture was not improvised; on the contrary, he has since in particular with a compressed air pistol, in his large the 1930s increasingly restricted himself to the techniques workshop on Rue Gauguet. The twirling white spire of reproducing squares, transferring drawing that somehow seemed torn from the bottom of the canvas, a vibration of allowed freezing, and working on the inspiration to create light at the heart of the canvas. One recalls a commentary a durable basis, such as the passage from quickly executed on Alain Resnais’s 1947 filmVisite à Hartung (Visit to plaster model bristling with dry clay beards, pressure Hartung) published on the newspaper Combat, which marks, and stylus to the bronze model broken outside described: “In closeup, Hartung’s hand was digging a the mold. T1967-H16 bears witness to Hartung’s work, spiral with a scraper, with the same apparent hesitation and emblematic of his style during the 1960s, combining wide the same infallibility as a chrysalis rejecting its cocoon.”

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 PIERRE SOULAGES

French painter and printmaker and a major figure in the postwar abstract movement. He was a leader of Tachism, the French counter- part to Action painting in the United States, and was known for the restraint of his works and his preoccupation with the colour black.

The last surviving member of the New School of Paris, Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages was lauded in 2014 by President François Hollande as “the world’s greatest living artist”. On account of his insatiable interest in the color – or non-color – of black, he is referred to by some as “the painter of black”, but Soulages steadfastly rejects such notion, arguing that his instrument is not black, but the light reflected therefrom, which he views as a material. Using such objects as rakes, spoons, and rubber to cut, dig, etch, and scrape thick layers of paint in vertical and horizontal lines, he creates uneven surfaces and textures that disrupt the uniformity of black in various angles and forms. His famed Outrenoir (Beyond Black) series is not so much monochromatic as infinite, for black is the total absence of light, whereas white is the gathering all lights.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Pierre Soulages Untitled, executed in 3 December 1952 Oil on canvas 130 x 162 cm

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 “A triple renunciation. First to color, which is sensuality. and delimitation of the sacred. Here, dark, thick signs Second to lines, whose accents are the expression of an indi- brushed on the canvas evolve against a light, moving back- vidual sensitivity that the ascetic approach intends to con- ground, at times almost golden. One seems to be witnessing trol. Third to figuration, since the appearance of objects is the mystical wedding of light and shadow, on a summer only a mask plastered over real reality .” As such, these paint- day streaked with night. The sign is thick, it resists the eye ings construct a “stripped, burnt work of tragic austerity”. and acts as a screen. However – and this is the lesson he No doubt one has the testimony here, in a painting pri- gave us – it is he who reveals the light and sublimates it. or to the shift of the outre-noir (beyond black) in the The golden yellow background is all the more vivid and 1950s, many paintings such as Untitled 1952 contained radiant as it approaches, contrasting with the form, design, characteristics of icons or medieval altarpieces; these are sign, and its darkness. It is not a chiaroscuro that would sacred images, even invested with a supernatural pow- play on the slides and the gray nuances; it is the violence er of healing sometimes, where gold is the real presence of the contrast that constitutes the apparition itself, which of divinity. Gold became a signature and sign of divinity is the principle of life and death at the heart of the canvas.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 GEORGES MATHIEU

The New School of Paris boasted erudite essayists in its ranks, but no one conceptualized and theo- rized art as perspicaciously as Georges Victor Mathieu. Beginning his artistic journey with figuration, he soon decided that painting required no representation to justify its existence. From dripping in his early works to Zen in the 1960s and the abolishment of the center in the 1980s, the founding father of European lyrical abstraction was constantly probing. He published a number of manifestos to define lyrical abstraction, postulating four conditions that characterized the movement: primacy of speed, no preexisting shapes, no premeditated moves, and the ecstatic mind. He considered lyrical abstraction the sixth and last of all cyclical transitions in the history of art, liberated from realism by Impressionism, shapes by Cubism, and representation by Abstractionism, “henceforth in the history of shapes as in the history of the world, the sign precedes its meaning.”

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) Complainte silencieuse des enfants de Bogota face aux commandos de la mort, 1989 Oil on canvas 130 x 162 cm

This is what Georges Mathieu’s painting tells us, which is a howl that never stops. It is the watchman’s painting, seeks within the emergence of violence the same flash of a companion’s painting during the dark hours. It is the humanity, as shown in the painting Complainte silencieuse culmination of the process that confronted the erudite des enfants de Bogota face aux commandos de la mort painter in this artist with both history and the world’s (Silent Laments of the Children of Bogotá Facing the violence in enormous format (up to 12 meters by 4 meters), Commandos of Death). During the darkest hours of the lending itself to the lively and brilliant execution of the civil war in 1989, the painter was emotionally shaken gesture “between dazzling and intuition ”, borrowing Lydia upon learning the news coming from the other side of Harambourg’s expression, even if it means inventing tech- the Atlantic; he created this painting that took hold of, niques to acceleratethe application of paint on the canvas grabbed, and shocked him, refusing to let him go. It is a such as “tubism”, where disemboweled paint tubes spurt out meditation on cluster munitions that keeps exploding in the paste directly onto the canvas. Such tension was already the consciousness to denounce the sheer horror of wars shaping some of his most famous and influential paintings. and barbarities. Guernica is a suspended cry, whereas this

Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the owner Anonymous sale, Artcurial: June 6, 2016 Acquired from the above by the present owner

An important private collection from London

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Rarely has Georges Mathieu pushed the calligraphic a poem in the clouds on an azure surface, or perhaps intention as far as in the Air de France painting dated printed his verse on the electric surface of a mountain lake 1967. Firm and ephemeral, the line traverses the canvas with the characters of rain. There he draws the talisman like sound, a morning sky with the metallic start of a of a corner of France, draped like a lily-flowered tinkle, the roundness of a vibrating bell, the gradual canopy. He poignantly reminds us that all writings are extinction of a loud cry; underlined by the momentum of a fight against time, one lost in advance, as announced the red and yellow curves, echoed by the gushing of a solar from beyond the grave the last lines of John Keats: radiance in the middle, being refined, flattened, and “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.” vanished little by little. It is as if Mathieu has inscribed For a moment, the eternal and the ephemeral unite.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 NICOLAS DE STAËL (1914 - 1955)

“All my life, I had a need to think painting, to paint in order to liberate myself from all the impressions, all the feelings, and all the anxieties of which the only solution I know is painting.”

- Nicolas de Staël

Few have crossed more bridges to and from abstraction and figuration than the Russian-French painter and illustrator, born Nikolai Vladimirovich into the Baltic German baronial family of Staël von Holstein. Subsequent to the Fall of France, an encounter in Nice with Jean Arp, and Sonia and Robert Delaunay inspired him to create his first abstract paintings. His portraits, landscapes, and still lifes would become increasingly abstract during the 1940s, a far cry from his debut exhibition of Byzantine-style icons and watercolors merely a few years prior. Featuring block-like slabs of color created by thick impastos in different zones of color, his distinctive style vis-à-vis Mark Rothko’s was succinctly described as “blobs versus blocks”. His return to figuration in the early 1950s heralded the Bay Area Figurative Movement, whereas the color intensity in his last works prefigured the direction of contemporary painting during the 1960s, including Pop Art.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Nicolas de Staël (1913-1955) Pot a raies, 1953 Oil on canvas 130 x 89 cm

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 As evidenced by Nicolas de Staël’s works, back-and-forth as spoils a southern light, more intense than any he had so between figuration and abstraction is possible. What is far captured, a color that “bangs, and is hard, fair, tremen- this pot, drenched in Italian light that appears in the center dously vibrant, simple, and primary ”; he would not stop of Pot à raies (Pot with Stripes), a still life in the most now, but would constantly create shapes on the canvas, canonical tradition, or an experimental instrument aimed in the variations of the red, orange, and purple paste. at dissociating light, a machine for dividing up space? It is Exhibited at the Cincinnati Museum Center and referred to as if all the attention has been consumed by the section of as the White Bowl, the pot with its blue and white stripes, red wall behind the pot, by this endless horizon of shades, its insensitivity to shadows and the same volume, seems reliefs, and pastes like a summer burn. This painting is like the fixative of this light, the nail capable of riveting it one of the first witnesses of the internal revolution that onto earth, the vase of shadow capable of withstanding the occurred in him during the month of August 1953, which shock of this supernatural fire. It is the light that sings in he spent traveling through Italy and Sicily, between the the eyes of Nicolas de Staël: “What you want from the sun love of light and that of Jeanne Mathieu, a desperate love is always as it is; it will make rare lace out of any mop, just that contributed to his suicide in 1955. He brought back a little blue and a lot of white .”

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 ZAO WOU-KI (1921 - 2013)

“I paint my own life buy I also try to paint an invisible place, that of dreams, somewhere where one feels in perfect harmony, even in the midst of agitated shapes or opposing forces. Every picture, from the smallest to the biggest, is always a fragment of that dream place.”

- Zao Wou-Ki

In 1947 Zao moved to Paris and quickly rose to prominence as an abstract gestural painter, befriending other artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró. Abstraction had not fared well in France during the immediate post–World War II period, as its apparent lack of content or subject matter made it seem ill equipped to tackle the brutal realities of the war and its aftermath. But Zao and other artists associated with the École de Paris (School of Paris) were determined to show that abstract painting could speak to this very condition through the intuitive language of color and line. To this end, Zao began to paint more boldly than ever, combining expressive lines with deeply saturated color. In the mid-1950s he incorporated Chinese influences more directly, sometimes using actual calligraphy instead of loose and winding brushstrokes. Taken in its entirety, Zao’s oeuvre reflects a continual struggle—the artist’s gesture versus the painter’s canvas.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) 15.6.61, 1961 Oil on canvas 71.1 x 58.4 cm

Provenance Galerie de France, Paris, France Acquired from the above and hence by descent to the present owner Private Collection, Arizona, USA Anonymous sale, Christie’s Hong Kong: 28 Nov 2015, Lot 00026 Acquired from the above by the present owner

Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) 05.06.63, 1963 Oil on canvas 130 x 90 cm

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 ZAO WOU-KI

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Villepin is honored and thrilled in equal measure to present exquisite furniture created by the celebrated French interior designer Pierre Paulin (1927-2009) at the upcoming exhibition. Regarded as innovative back then and revered as iconic now, Pierre Paulin has left an enduring legacy in furniture and interior design. He was the mastermind behind the redesign of the living, dining, smoking, and exhibition rooms of President George Pompidou’s private apartments at the Elysée Palace, the refurbishment of Pres- ident François Mitterrand’s office, as well as the Hall of Tapestries of the Paris City Hall. By way of incorporating his genius design, Villepin wishes to create a nonpareil environment to complement the artistic experience that is the Second School of Paris. Let us reminisce and emerge in the Glorious Thirty, the golden age of postwar Paris.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 [email protected] / www.paulinpaulinpaulin.com / 173 - 175 Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, 75009 Paris

Pierre Paulin Tapis-Siège

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Le fumoir (Smoking Parlor), Elysée Salon Paulin (The Paulin Dining Room), Palace, designed in 1971. Elysée Palace, designed in 1964.

Salon Paulin (The Paulin Dining Room), Elysée Palace, designed in 1964.

THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Gallery 53-55 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong

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THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021