This study of Francis Ponge’s essays on contemporary artists (L’Atelier contemporain) attempts to broaden the popular view of the author as a ‘poet of objects’. It explores Ponge’s perception of art criticism as an inherently problematic genre and exposes the inhibitions surrounding the production of the essays.
The study demonstrates how Ponge’s essays on artists parallel developments in his other works. They are seen as instrumental in his movement towards open texts and a stress on the creative process itself, as well as opportunities to reaffirm his philosophical and aesthetic stance.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1994 under the ISBN 978-0-901286-39-0, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
The art criticism plays a crucial role in Ponge’s post-war output and yet, like his other works on people, it seems there have been few critics prepared to give these texts their rightful place in the mainstream of Ponge’s work. Such neglect is doubtless due to the problematic status of these texts which break the archetypal model of Ponge as chosiste and are therefore considered as marginal. It is, however, precisely their problematic status which makes them worthy of study.
This chapter will attempt to assess Ponge’s idiosyncratic critical discourse, to place it with respect to his poetic texts and to see how some of the features of the latter are carried over into the criticism. A major centre of interest will be the fluctuating view we receive of the critical essay as alternately transitive or opaque, as mirror or window, as a text preoccupied with foregrounding its own medium and mechanisms, yet whose raison d’être is to provide the reader with information concerning those of the artist.
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45-73
Chapter 2: Ponge and Fautrier: Criticism as Catharsis Shirley Jordan doi:10.59860/td.c37e74c
On 22 October 1941 at Châteaubriand forty-eight French hostages, families and friends of known or suspected résistants, were executed by the Germans in reprisal for an assassination. On 23 October another fifty were executed in further reprisals. The horror of these murders was to be given frequent expression by many of the French poets who were writing during the Occupation, but the atrocities also had their painter, Jean Fautrier, who made of them his unique and terrible subject. Pursued by the Gestapo, Fautrier had taken refuge in a sanatorium in the Vallée-aux-Loups with the help of Jean Paulhan, and from his hiding place he overheard the shots from the nocturnal executions conducted in the nearby woods by the occupying forces. It was this experience which gave rise to one of his most passionate creative outbursts, the series of sculpted and painted Otages which are celebrated in Ponge’s first major essay of L’Atelier contemporain.
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74-113
Chapter 3: Ponge and Giacometti: Corrective Criticism Shirley Jordan doi:10.59860/td.c48db2f
If the mere existence of Ponge’s art criticism can surprise the reader of his self-conscious descriptions of the material world, then the choice of somebody as temperamentally detached from Ponge as Giacometti is more surprising still. The creative energies of writer and sculptor — the one a robust, humorous relish for life, the other a compulsive lament — appear irreconcilable. Giacometti has not a trace of the joie de vivre which Ponge appreciates in Kermadec or Picasso, and not a whisper of the serenity he so admires in Braque. Giacometti is the exception amongst all Ponge’s chosen sculptors, since his work is melancholic, suggestive of the alienation of man and nature and of the frailty of existence. This chapter incorporates Plates 1 to 4, placed between pages 74 and 75.
In his studies of Fautrier and Giacometti, Ponge has been concerned with representations of humanity in the aftermath of war. A more characteristic emphasis comes with his texts on Braque and the object in art, which take us to the heart of his own creative endeavour. If L’Atelier contemporain provides a series of mirrors in which Ponge notes the correspondences between his own poetic work and the works of contemporary artists, then it is his eight texts on Braque which provide the clearest reflection. In Braque Ponge finds many confirmations, not least of which is a painted version of his own ‘parti pris des choses’. Both share a predilection for everyday objects. More importantly, both share the notion that man is more himself when dealing with such humble objects than when contemplating human affairs.
What is remarkable in the art writing as a whole is that Ponge remains true to his initial imperatives, yet despite his inhibitions he still manages to open up a critical space for himself, producing a fascinating, contagious mélange of art criticism, autobiography, indirect manifestos, poetry, and prose. As far as any charge of self-portraiture goes, it is true that Ponge’s criticism constitutes a self-defining process, and that each artist represents a fresh opportunity for Ponge to verify his beliefs, but then this is surely true of writing of any kind. Any definition of criticism evoking ‘parasites’ and ‘hosts’ is invalid here, since Ponge deals with artists and their works in a supple and fluid manner which will not ‘petrify’ them into a single meaning. It is indeed a tribute to Ponge that despite the metatextual nature of much of his writing, despite his tendency to involve us in the intricacies of his text rather than those of his elected subject, he gives us such an insight into modern art whilst still retaining his writerly integrity.
This title was first published by W. S. Maney & Son Ltd for the Modern Humanities Research Association but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association.
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