ELT Mesens

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Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens (born November 27, 1903 in Brussels , Belgium ; † May 13, 1971 ibid) was a Belgian art dealer and critic, musician, painter and writer who was associated with the surrealist movement in Belgium.

Live and act

Mesens began his artistic career as a musician, influenced by Erik Satie , and as a writer of Dadaist poems. He published the Dadaist magazines Œesophage (1925) and Marie the following year together with René Magritte , with whom he had a lifelong friendship since 1920. At the end of 1926, Mesens was one of the founders of the surrealism group in Belgium together with Magritte, Camille Goemans (1900-1960) and Paul Nougé (1895-1967). In 1928 he became director of the Galerie L'Époque in Brussels, where he organized a solo exhibition for Magritte. Four years later he succeeded Goemans as his art dealer.

In 1930, Mesens opened his own gallery, but after a few months in 1931 he was hired as secretary at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. There he organized the surrealist exhibition Minotaure in 1934 .

Mesens was co-organizer of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 , where he settled in 1938. There he became director of the London Gallery on Cork Street , which he ran with Roland Penrose in the late 1930s and after the end of World War II . For example, European artists such as Max Ernst , Kurt Schwitters and Yves Tanguy were exhibited . He was also the editor of London Bulletin from 1938 to 1940 , one of the most important English-language publications on Surrealism. In 1940 he met Sybil Stevenson, who became his wife. In 1947 he was together with Penrose, Herbert Read and others founders of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), which advocates new and experimental art of all kinds.

In August 1952 Mesens returned to Brussels and in 1954 organized Magritte's first post-war exhibitions in the Knokke Casino and in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. From 1954 he turned to working on collages in particular . In 1958 he had his first solo exhibition in the Furstenberg Gallery , Paris.

Mesens died in 1971 after a long and serious illness. In an obituary published by the poet and historian Franklin Rosemont , it was said that Mesens had drunk himself to death by drinking absinthe and that he had not followed the doctor's instructions to completely renounce alcohol.

Mesen's activity as a collagist has two periods: In the early phase from 1924 to 1946 he created only a few collages each year, often based on photographs. In the intensive phase from 1954 to 1971 he created around 40 collages in color per year. He was influenced by Man Ray's experimental photography , by Giorgio de Chirico's early work and by the Dadaist collages of Max Ernst and Raoul Hausmann .

In 2011 a retrospective of his work on the 40th anniversary of his death took place at the Verbeke Foundation in Kemzeke, Belgium, with the title "ELT Mesens comme nous l'entendons ..."

Mesen's collages are represented, for example, in the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles.

Work (selection)

Publications

  • Alphabet sourd aveugle . Flamel, Brussels - with a foreword by Paul Éluard (1933)
  • Troisième front . London Gallery Editions (1944)
  • Free Unions - Unions Libres . Free Unions (1946)
  • The Cubist Spirit In Its Time . London Gallery Editions - with Robert Melville (1947)
  • Poèmes, 1923-1958 . Le Terrain Vague (1959)

Collages

  • Masque servant à injurier les esthètes , photo collage (1929), Getty Museum
  • Le Noctambule (1955), Tate Modern
  • Mouvement Immobile II (1960), Tate Modern
  • Thème de Ballet (1960), Tate Modern
  • L'État-Major (1962), Tate Modern

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ ELT Mesens , oxfordindex.oup.com, accessed April 16, 2013
  2. ↑ Uwe M. Schneede : The Art of Surrealism: Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Photography, Film , p. 221
  3. ^ Mesens, Edouard Léon Théodore , metmuseum.org, accessed on February 10, 2016
  4. ↑ Quoted from the Tate Gallery web link
  5. ^ Friends ( memento of October 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), musee-magritte-museum.be, accessed on April 17, 2013
  6. ↑ Quoted after the web link Tabular Biography
  7. ↑ Roland Penrose Biography , rolandpenrose.co.uk, accessed April 18, 2013
  8. ^ Friends ( memento of October 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), musee-magritte-museum.be, accessed on April 17, 2013
  9. ↑ Quoted from the Tate Gallery web link
  10. ^ A b Franklin Rosemont, "ELT Mesens," Radical America, vol. 6, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1972), pp. 103-107.
  11. ↑ Quoted from Weblink Matteson Art
  12. ↑ ELT Mesens comme nous l'entendons ... ( Memento from February 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), verbekefoundation.com, accessed on April 17, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Mesens, ELT
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mesens, Édouard Léon Théodore (full name); Mesens, ELT
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian art dealer, art critic and surrealist painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Brussels
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 1971
Place of death Brussels