Skarstedt Paris is delighted to announce Petits Formats, a group show exploring the creative capacity of expression through small scale. Throughout art history, large-format paintings have dominated as the preferred size for works of art. From the official history paintings hanging in the salons of Paris to the expansive canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, and even the epically-scaled works of today, there is a tendency towards the larger-than-life. Nevertheless, much can be admired in the special moments of experiencing a work of art on a more intimate scale—details may become more apparent, fuller images can be gleaned, and artists can experiment with different subject matter and techniques more freely. With an eye towards modernism and the early twentieth century, Petits Formats will feature works by Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein, André Masson, Henri Michaux, Joan Mitchell, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Nicolas de Staël, Yves Tanguy, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva Édouard Vuillard, and Zao Wou-Ki, each of whom spent at least a significant portion of their careers in Paris.
Within the parameters of scale, the exhibition is divided between the figurative and the abstract. Working in figuration, Alberto Giacometti’s Buste de Diego (Buste d’homme et deux figures, de face et de profil) (c. 1954) utilizes the smaller format to embody and record the day-to-day efforts of the artist at his easel, with all the nuances of his brother Diego’s face scored into the canvas. If Giacometti’s portraits are studies into the depths of a particular person, Picasso’s Tête de femme (1908) and Georges Rouault’s Fleurs du Mal (Figure in profile) (1945-46) view the female form more generally. Here, the scale of these works allows the artists to quickly work out ideas, such as Picasso’s groundbreaking method of depicting multiple angles at once. In Rouault’s work, the thick black paint that outlines the female figure and her surroundings bears the longstanding mark of the artist’s training in glass painting, while the bright, expressive colors continue his affiliation with the Fauves. Yet, where Picasso was more admiring of the female figure, Rouault took on a more moralistic tone, notably titling this work “Flowers of Evil."
One artist who has always been particularly known for painting on a modest scale, Édouard Vuillard’s Le salon des Hessels, Rue de Rivoli (c. 1905) is a touching view of two of the most important people in Vuillard’s life: his dealer, Jos Hessel, and Jos’s wife and Vuillard’s muse, Lucy Hessel. Rendered with the quintessential decorative touch of the Nabis group, it captures the immediacy of a buzzy salon at the turn of the century. Meanwhile, André Masson’s Le Voyant – Ville Crânienne (August 1940) shows the influence of the artist’s second and final period with the Surrealists, coupling the tension of the bourgeoning war with his interest in mythology and spirituality. Hovering between the figurative and the abstract, Max Ernst’s La joie de vivre (1936) is one of only three works in his oeuvre that bear that ironic name. It’s ominously twisting botanical phantasmagoria belies the painting’s title, depicting a Garden of Eden turned into an uninhabitable jungle where Ernst’s avian alter ego is hiding. Echoing the creeping growth of political unrest throughout Europe, Ernst astutely predicts the dangers to come.
One of the abstract painters on view, Nicolas de Staël was experimenting with innovative means of applying paint to canvas between the years 1946 and 1951, combining the power of the brush with the sharpness of the knife to give his works a distinctly expressive energy. Composition (1947) harnesses that force as earthy tones of brown and black swoop and slash through the canvas’s reds, blues, and greens with characteristically thick impasto. Painted in 1947, the 24 x 19 ½ inch size of the canvas reflects the limitations of the cramped workspaces he was forced to work in until that year, yet de Staël nevertheless manages to make the painting full of dynamism. In Yves Klein’s “L’eau et le feu”, (F 122) (1961), the artist likewise focused his work on the experimentation of applying medium to support, taking it to even new heights. Part of his series of Fire Paintings—which, incidentally, were born out of a group of spectacularly large public sculptures—its lyrically monochrome surface presents a ghostly dialogue between production and destruction, presence and absence.
Known for his experiments with and writings about psychedelic drugs, Henri Michaux’s Mescaline (1956) presents in abstraction and small-scale the larger-than-life experience of using the plant mescaline for its therapeutic effects. Executed the year he published his first book on the subject, Miserable Miracle, Mescaline would have been rendered shortly after one of his experiences with the drug. Appearing as black scribbles on a beige ground, this dizzying array of lines records a swirling vortex of forms, marks, and sensations. Likewise evoking the dreamlike and the surreal, Yves Tanguy’s Le Jeux nouveaux (1940) typifies the artist’s poetic fusion of land and sky, illustrating a maturing moment in his career and the palette becomes more complex and the treatment of space more fluid. Painted the year after Tanguy emigrated to America, the composition manages to capture both the hopefulness of his safety in a new country and the mystery and strangeness of a world in the throes of war.
Each work on view simultaneously encapsulates each artist’s most well-known motifs, subjects, and styles and presents them to the viewer in an intimate experience. Taken together, Petits Formats illustrates the power of the small picture in its ability to convey the genius of the artist through the dismantling of ideas via the use of scale. In reducing the plane in which to work, each artist pushed themselves towards their creative zeniths.
For the french version, please email paris@skarstedt.com
