Marcel Storr

Marcel Storr (born July 3, 1911 in Paris , † November 18, 1976 ibid) was a French artist whose work is attributed to Art brut .

Life

Marcel Storr grew up under difficult conditions. After several stays at home, during which he suffered abuse, he was finally entrusted to religious sisters in Alsace for education.

As an adult he worked in various professions before he married in 1964 and was hired by the city of Paris as a street cleaner in the Bois de Boulogne .

While he gradually became more and more deaf, Storr also suffered from psychological problems of which not much is known in detail. Since 1974 he was housed in the Hôpital de Ville-Évrard, which he only left for a short time as an external patient.

Marcel Storr died of cancer in the Hôpital Tenon.

plant

It seems that Storr started his artistic work very early.

The first period of his work extends from the beginning of the 1930s to the beginning of the 1960s. Small-format representations of churches predominate, as naive as they are realistic and with great care in terms of architectural and decorative details.

The second period extends from 1964 to 1969 and is rich in large-format representations of palatial or cathedral-like buildings that seem influenced by the great churches in Paris as well as the Moscow Kremlin , Hagia Sophia and Austrian baroque architecture . These architectural visions, no longer realistic, but entirely imaginary, exaggerated to the sublime and monstrous, were first sketched out in pencil, then reworked with ink and finally colored.

The last period, which lasts from 1969 to 1975, continues the expansion of his gigantic architectural visions on sheets in the Raisin format (approx. 50 × 65 cm) . Stylistically, there is a resemblance to neo-Gothic skyscrapers and to the buildings of Ferdinand Cheval .

At the end of the 1960s, Storr's wife, who was the caretaker in a primary school, once took advantage of her husband's absence to invite a collector couple, Liliane and Bertrand Kempf, to their home. She showed them his pictures, which he kept hidden under the ceiling of the kitchen table. Since then, the Kempf couple have followed Storr's work with great interest - even though the latter resolutely refused to sell his pictures - and have preserved most of his oeuvre. However, it was not until 2001 that Storr's works were shown publicly for the first time, namely in the exhibition Aux Frontières de l'art brut 2 in Paris.

literature

• Laurent Danchin, Marcel Storr , Raw Vision # 36, 2001
• Laurent Danchin & Martine Lusardy, Aux Frontières de l'art brut 2 , Halle Saint-Pierre, Paris 2001 (exhibition catalog)
• Françoise Cloarec, Storr. Architecte de l'ailleurs , Paris: Phébus 2010

Web links

• Marcel Storr, dessinateur clandestin (conversation with Laurent Danchin on the occasion of the Marcel Storr exhibition organized by Liliane and Bertrand Kempf in January 2005)
• Storr, j'adore! (Blog about another Storr exhibition in Paris 2012, with pictures, a photograph by Storr and an interview with Liliane Kempf)