" Fashion paint is much more ravaging than grasshoppers "(Letter to friends written in 1959). A marginal French painter, Jean Michel ATLAN died suddenly at the age of 47, his pictorial career lasted 15 years. Professor of philosophy in Laval and Condorcet high school in Paris, he began to paint in the 1940s in an abstract expressionist spirit, and joined the movement CoBRa in 1946. His style asserts from 1950, informs leaving room to a plastic organization. His knotted painting, framed by blacks intense as stained glass, has an archaic appearance. Rhythmic and dense, a certain mysticism emanates from his painting. "I am not abstract or from the point of view of the climate of my works, nor from the point of view of" execution ". A form interests me only when she lives (or when I managed to make her live) and then she is no longer abstract: she is alive! Jean-Michel Atlan.
The oil on canvas presented for sale on Saturday, November 26, 2016 at the Saint-Aubin auction house was painted 1 year before his disappearance. Neither abstract nor figurative, his formula "my forms are alive"takes all its meaning in the face of this masterful work.The color is shaped, the undulating ocher and beige shapes are boosted by the eruption of the royal blue.The dark circles, irregular and tortured breathe into the whole a dynamism, the composition This Jew of Algerian origin will be arrested by the Nazis in 1942, and it is by posing as mad that he escapes the extermination camps.Internet at the Sainte-Anne hospital until the liberation he learned to write many poems in captivity in 1944. This poetic spirit is also perfectly expressed in this work, whose title "Salambo III" is an invitation to the fantasized and idealized Orient.
This painting was sold for € 82,600 costs included on November 26, 2016.