Georges MALKINE. - Lot 162

Lot n° 162
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Result : 50 000EUR
Georges MALKINE. - Lot 162
Georges MALKINE. White magic. 1926. Oil on canvas (55 x 32.7 cm), signed lower left "Malkine 26"; black wood frame. Legend in pencil on the stretcher. Important oil by Georges Malkine from the beginning of his career. Georges Malkine was the only painter among the few names celebrated by André Breton in 1924 in the Manifesto for having "made an act of absolute surrealism". Linked to Desnos and the first Surrealist group, he designed the letterhead of the Surrealist Revolution. "White Magic" appears in fourth position in the notebook where Malkine, from January-February 1926, notes the titles of his works and their possible buyers. ...] From the previous year, only one work is known to us: Alcools, dated 1925. ...] This work curiously echoes, even in the detail of the slide, the text Malkine published in the first issue of The Surrealist Revolution: "Then, a smell, which came from the breasts of the passer-by and which ... suddenly transformed our nervous road into a kind of slide strangely ascending and strictly comfortable." In the first Manifesto, Breton speaks of the "secrets of surrealist magic art" to qualify the automatism. "Flesh and blood of poetry", magic stands on the edge of surrealism and merges with the dream and wonder that are its source. White magic responds to this programme, which seems to transcribe the episode of a dream by combining realistic elements" (Georges Malkine, le vagabond du Surréalisme, 1999, p. 45). Georges Malkine stopped painting between 1933 and 1946, when he settled in the United States, where he lived for twenty years. The Mona Lisa Gallery organized a retrospective of his work in 1966: White Magic was exhibited there (no. 38 in the catalogue). The painting comes from the collection of Louis Aragon. It appeared in 1995 at the exhibition Passions privées at the Musée d'Art moderne de Paris (p. 194, no. 39).
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