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”. THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 JEAN DUBUFFET 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 mono- chromatic 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. THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Hans Hartung (1904-1989) T1962-L17, 1962 Oil on canvas 162 x 130 cm Signed Hartung and dated 62 (lower left) 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 THE ART OF HOPE | VILLEPIN | HONG KONG | NOVEMBER 2020 - APRIL 2021 Hans Hartung (1904-1989) T1965-R7, 1965 Oil on canvas 130 x 81 cm 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.