Jacqueline Lamba

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Jacqueline Lamba , also Jacqueline Lamba Breton (born November 17, 1910 in Saint-Mandé , † July 20, 1993 in Rochecorbon ) was a French painter. Lamba became known as the second wife and muse of André Breton ; between 1934 and 1947 she was an active participant in the surrealist movement led by Breton. Her second marriage was in 1946 in the United States with the American sculptor David Hare . After separating in 1955, she returned to France and devoted herself exclusively to painting, which approached the style of Abstract Expressionism .

life and work

childhood and education

Jacqueline Lamba was born in Saint-Mandé, the second daughter of José Lamba, an agricultural engineer, and Jane Pinon. In Lamba's early life and into late adolescence, she wore pants, cut her hair, and referred to herself as "Jacko". This nickname and change in her appearance seemed to have been the result of her parents' disappointment after having a girl and not a boy at birth. In 1912 the couple moved to Cairo with her and her sister Huguette for professional reasons . Two years later, the father died in a traffic accident in Heliopolis , and the mother returned to France with her daughters. The Lambas' art education began with frequent visits to the Louvre with their sister and mother, reinforced by their friendship, from around the age of twelve, with Marianne Cluzot. After attending school in Neuilly and Versailles , she studied art at the École nationale des arts décoratifs and took courses in André Lhote's painting school in Paris . Fellow student and lifelong friend was Theodora Markovitch, later known as Pablo Picasso's lover Dora Maar . As an idealist, Lamba was committed to the new ideas of her time and joined left circles and communist students. Her nickname was "Quatorze Juillet" (July 14th). The French Revolution began on July 14, 1789 .

André Breton

In 1927 her mother died of tuberculosis . Lamba had to become self-employed and worked as a French teacher in Cardiff and in Greece. After returning to Paris, she worked as a decorator in a department store and at night as an underwater dancer in the Coliseum, a revue theater in the Parisian entertainment district of Pigalle . Influenced by her friend Dora Maar, she began experimenting with photography. Several of her pictures addressed the publisher José Corti, who reproduced them in the magazine Du Cinéma in 1928 . Lamba's interest in light is evident for the first time in these abstract photographs of the Paris bridges and the Eiffel Tower. In May 1934, in the “Cyrano” café on Place Blanche in Paris, she made the acquaintance of André Breton , whose writings she had already greatly appreciated, for example the novel Nadja . Both took a long stroll through Paris at night. Breton anticipated this meeting in La nuit du Tournesol , Breton's poem from 1923. The wedding took place on August 14th of that year. The bride's best man was the sculptor Alberto Giacometti , the writer Paul Éluard for Breton , and the photographer Man Ray . Lamba, who had already published experimental photographs in the magazine La Revue du Cinema , from then on took part in exhibitions by the surrealist group. Breton will portray them in his works L'Amour fou , L'Air de l'eau and Fata Morgana . This is how he described the time they met in the work L'Amour fou , published in 1937 :

“The young woman who just came in had a touch - fire-clad? - surrounded, everything was discolored, iced over before this complexion like a dream of rust and green. [...] I must say that - at this point, on May 29, 1934 - this woman was scandalously beautiful. "

- André Breton, 1937

Their daughter Aube was born on December 20, 1935. For the next decade, Lamba was at the center of the surrealist art community. In 1935, she exhibited Les Heures, a painting of a solitary clam lying on the ocean floor, a waiting pink vulva with a crowned woman's head and a delicate high-heeled foot. The image was interpreted as a symbol of Lamba's role as a sexual object and her isolation and is shaped by her emotional state during pregnancy. Lamba was an active member of the Surrealists, but despite participating in the group's exhibitions, she received little recognition. In May 1935 Lamba showed two paintings in the “International Surrealist Exhibition” in the Ateneo de Santa Cruz de Tenerife, but neither their name nor the title of their works were listed.

In 1938 she took part in a lecture tour with her husband in Mexico , where she met Leon Trotsky , Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo , with whom she was a close friend. When Breton was called up for military service in 1939, she lived for a short time with Dora Maar and Picasso in Antibes . In Picasso's painting from August of the year Pêche de nuit à Antibes , she appears as a figure together with her friend Dora.

Emigration to the United States

In Spite of Everything
Jacqueline Lamba , 1942
Oil on canvas
Privately owned

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

In 1940 Breton was discharged from military service. In German-occupied France under Petain's Vichy government , artists who sympathized with left movements were persecuted. Varian Fry , who headed the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille , supported the Breton family's departure. Until they left for the United States , they lived in Air-Bel Castle near Marseille, where they met artists willing to leave, such as Max Ernst , André Masson and Marcel Duchamp . In the summer of 1941 the Breton family arrived in New York after a stopover in Martinique . A group of emigrated surrealist and interested American artists soon met there in Bretons or in Peggy Guggenheim's apartment. The couple's roles were suddenly redistributed. She, who was fluent in English, a language he didn't want to learn, communicated for both of them. In 1942 the surrealist magazine VVV was founded. VVV was published by Breton in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and David Hare . She was involved with four works. Few surrealist works from this period - objects, collages and paintings - have survived. They are mostly geometric shapes that are reminiscent of the work of Óscar Domínguez and especially Roberto Matta , for example . In January 1943 she took part in Guggenheim's exhibition "Exhibition by 31 Women" at the Art of This Century gallery with the painting In Spite of Everything (1942) .

Separation from Breton and second marriage to Hare

Lamba separated from Breton in the fall of 1942 after an affair with David Hare and moved with Hare to Roxbury in Connecticut in the fall of 1944 , where Alexander Calder and Yves Tanguy also lived. In April of that year she had her first solo exhibition at New York's Norlyst Gallery; on this occasion she wrote the catalog text Manifeste de peinture . The wedding with Hare took place in January 1946. After a ten month stay in Mexico with Frida Kahlo, she traveled to the western United States and explored the way of life of the Indians . The following year she met Dora Maar and Picasso again in France; she took part for the last time in a surrealist exhibition in the Parisian gallery Maeght and organized her first exhibition in Paris in the gallery of Pierre Loeb . In June 1948 their son Merlin was born in New York. That year she broke with the surrealist style and destroyed some of her works.

Separation from Hare and a change in style

Paysage Simiane
Jacqueline Lamba , 1967
Oil on canvas
120 × 180 cm
Privately owned

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

In 1955, Lamba separated from David Hare and returned to Paris, where she devoted herself exclusively to painting. She experimented with different techniques and styles for a long time. In Simiane-la-Rotonde in Provence , where she spent her summers, she found her own painting, which was mainly based on landscapes: her paintings and drawings, similar to American Abstract Expressionism , also bring the unconscious, liberated by the Surrealists, to the fore Expression. In 1967 Picasso arranged an exhibition for her at the Musée Picasso in Antibes.

Jacqueline Lamba had lived in a very secluded home in Rochecorbon since 1988, where she worked on pastel paintings until her death . She died on July 20, 1993 after suffering from dementia . Her grave can be found in Saché in the Indre-et-Loire department .

reception

Perception as an artist

Lamba's artistic career has suffered from Breton's perception, which did not even include it in the second edition of his work Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1945). In Mark Polizzotti's biography of Breton, Lamba is quoted as saying:

“Il me présentait à ses amis comme une naïade parce qu'il jugeait cela plus poétique que de me présenter comme un peintre en quête de travail. Il voyait en moi ce qu'il voulait voir mais en fait il ne me voyait pas réellement. "

“He presented me to his friends as a naiad because he found it much more poetic than presenting an artist and her work. He saw in me what he wanted to see, but he didn't really see me. "

- André Breton on Jacqueline Lamba

Posthumous exhibitions

The 1900–2000 Gallery in Paris hosted Lamba's first posthumous exhibition in 1998, which contained 37 works from 1946 to 1984. In 2001, a traveling exhibition followed in Santiago de Compostela , New York, Oakland and in the Salvador Dalí Museum in Saint Petersburg . In 2007 there was a retrospective in the Château de Tours and in June 2008 exhibitions in the gallery La maison de Brian and in the Château de Simiane-la-Rotonde . Another exhibition by Lambas took place as part of the FIAC 2009 art fair in the 1900–2000 gallery. She was also represented in the “elles @ centrepompidou” exhibition from the same year, which dealt only with the art of women . However, there is little circulation of Jacqueline Lamba's works on the art market.

Movie

Jacqueline Lamba's daughter, Aube Breton-Elléouët, produced a film on DVD. In 2004 Fabrice Maze filmed the Parisian Atelier Lambas on Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle under the title Jacqueline Lamba, peintre and documented her life with photos and interviews.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Salomon Grimberg: Jacqueline Lamba: From Darkness, with Light . In: Woman's Art Journal . tape 22 , no. 1 , 2001, p. 1 , doi : 10.2307 / 1358725 , JSTOR : 1358725 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Quoted from jacqueline-lamba.com
  3. ^ Volker Zotz: André Breton , p. 76
  4. ↑ a b c Angelika Heinick: Known as Frau von Breton, forgotten as an artist: A film about Jacqueline Lamba. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 17, 2006, accessed August 29, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Picasso Online Project  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: dead link / picasso.shsu.edu  
  6. ↑ Volker Zotz: André Breton , p. 114 f
  7. ↑ Amy Winter: Art of This Century: The Women . In: Woman's Art Inc. (Ed.): Woman's Art Journal . tape 20 , 1 (Spring - Summer), 1999, pp. 61-63 , doi : 10.2307 / 1358852 , JSTOR : 1358852 .
  8. ↑ Mark Polizotti: Breton , Gallimard, 1995, p 459
  9. ↑ Quoted from the web link of the Center Pompidou
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personal data
SURNAME Lamba, Jacqueline
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lamba Breton, Jacqueline (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint-Mandé
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 1993
Place of death Rochecorbon