Henri-Georges Adam
Henri-Georges Adam (born January 14, 1904 in Paris , † August 27, 1967 in Perros-Guirec , Bretagne ) was a French university teacher , painter , graphic artist , sculptor and designer of (mostly) monumental tapestries . He is attributed to the École de Paris .
life and work
Henri-Georges Adam, son of a Breton woman, spent the summers of his childhood and youth in the Breton town of Saint-Malo and its suburb of Saint-Servan . After attending a watchmaking school in 1918, he began to work in his father's workshop, who ran a jeweler and goldsmith in the Marais district of Paris .
From 1925 Adam attended evening courses at a drawing school in the Montparnasse district and in 1926 began working as a drawing teacher for the city of Paris.
From 1928 he made satirical drawings and political caricatures . Waldemar George wrote about him in 1968: “His cynical and apocalyptic mockery is of the same nature as that of Rouault , who illustrates misery and war. As an anarchist and pacifist anti-militarist, Adam overturns all taboos. He makes fun of the myths of the fatherland, of the family and religion. "
From 1934 Adam created copperplate engravings and etchings and from 1936 worked on an expressionist cycle of copperplate engravings in which he dealt thematically with the catastrophes of the war (especially the Spanish civil war ). Adam joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists ( AEAR ) in 1936 . He frequented the circles of surrealist artists such as André Breton , Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard and accepted with Pablo Picasso , Henri Matisse , Georges Rouault , Raoul Dufy , Fernand Léger , Marc Chagall , Chaïm Soutine , Ossip Zadkine , Roger Bissière and Édouard Pignon participated in a group exhibition at the Théâtre de l'Alhambra .
In 1939 he was drafted into the war and transferred to the Saint-Jacques hospital in Besançon as a prisoner-of-war prisoner (until 1940) . There he made numerous drawings of injured soldiers.
Adam began sculpting in 1942. In October 1943 he was one of the fifteen founders of the Salons de Mai artists' forum together with Gaston Diehl , Léon Gischia , Jean Le Moal , Alfred Manessier , Edouard Pignon and Gustave Singier . In the same year he created decorations, costumes, masks and two statues four meters high for a performance of The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre .
Adam became friends with Pablo Picasso, who made his workshop on Rue des Grands-Augustins available to him, where he worked from 1948 to 1950.
From 1947 he began to create black and white tapestries and finally black and white abstract tapestries , for which he developed his own manufacturing technique. In 1952 the first retrospective of his complete oeuvre took place in Paris.
From 1950 to 1955 Adam worked as a drawing teacher at the art school in the suburb of Antony , which today bears his name. In 1955 a retrospective of his work was organized in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum .
In 1956 and 1957 Adam created one of his most famous series of copper engravings about the play of the sea and the sand and the shades of granite from Penmarch in Brittany . In 1957 he furnished the French embassy in Washington with tapestries, in 1958 he worked for the main UNESCO building in Paris and in 1961 for the Air France agency in New York . A monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner in 1951 was followed by Le Signal , which was installed in 1961 on the forecourt of the Museum of Le Havre .
Numerous monumental sculptures followed from 1962, including the white swan for the Charlemagne high school in Vincennes (1962), the oblique obelisk (1962) for the French pavilion at the 1967 Expo in Montreal , some sculptures and wallpapers for the church of Moutier ( Switzerland ), a wall 22 meters long and the “ sheet ” for the high school in Chantilly (1965), sculptures for La Flèche (1965), Vichy (1960–1966) and for the House of Culture in Thonon (1966) Fountain for the city of Bihorel (1966), a Minotaur for Segré (1967), the granite bird and the large conference table for the Technical High School of Saint-Brieuc (1967).
Adam was appointed professor of copperplate engraving in 1959 and then head professor of the sculpture workshop of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris .
His workshops were located near Montlhéry , southwest of Paris. Numerous exhibitions of his work took place in French and European museums. In 1959 he was a participant in documenta 2 in Kassel. Another retrospective of his work took place in 1966 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.
Henri-Georges Adam died of a heart attack at the age of 63. He was buried in the Mont-Saint-Michel cemetery, which was the subject of his last tapestry.
Web links
- Literature by and about Henri-Georges Adam in the bibliographic database WorldCat
- Materials by and about Henri-Georges Adam in the documenta archive
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Adam, Henri-Georges |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French sculptor and tapestry designer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 14, 1904 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 27, 1967 |
| Place of death | Perros-Guirec , France |