who is who
Eddy Novarro
and the avantg
arde from the
50s to the 70s
Edited by Markus Müller
For the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Münster
wienand
contents
Preface
7
Margrit Bernard
The double epidermis of the modern artist
9
Markus Müller
Eddy Novarro and the Art Center of Paris
in the 50s and 60s
24
Beate Reifenscheid
The American Avant-garde in the Eddy Novarro
Collection
35
Markus Müller
Catalog
4
| r Eddy Novarro
& Salvador Dalí
45
Appendix
245
List of works
246
Eddy Novarro photographs
252
| 5
Preface
“Eddy Novarro has a special place in the world of modern photography.”
E
Pierre Restany
ddy Novarro was a photographer, a collector and a cosmopolitan. He dedicated his artistic work to the great artists of the 20th century. Important
painters and sculptors such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Joseph
Beuys und Robert Rauschenberg were among Novarro’s friends and he met with
them again and again in the course of four decades in order to preserve them for
posterity in vivid photographic portraits.
Eddy Novarro was of Romanian descent and was born in Bucharest
sometime between 1925 and 1930. After emigrating to Brazil via Italy in the fifties,
he found his second home in Rio de Janeiro. In 1958, Novarro accepted an invitation from the architect Sergio Wladimir Bernardes to travel to the EXPO in Brussels and document the Brazilian pavilion in a photo series. It was there that he met
René Magritte, who introduced him to the Paris Surrealist circle.
From the seventies onward, Novarro lived part of the time in Germany,
since Europe, as he himself once said, was where “the center of art” was. On a visit
to New York in February 1978, Novarro met Leo Castelli, the owner of a gallery
there, who familiarized him with the Pop Art scene. He soon came into contact with
Pop Art artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
But Novarro’s friends and clients included heads of state, presidents and actors as
well as artists. In the course of several decades he made portraits of Ava Gardner,
Elizabeth Taylor, King Hussein of Jordan, Evita Peron and the Dalai Lama, who was
his very good friend for as long as he lived.
Novarro often told me about his encounters with the “greats”, and when
he was talking about how Picasso made pancakes for him once after he arrived in
southern France his eyes lit up and you could see what an exceptional artist and
witness to the times he himself was.
The private German collection being shown here for the first time combines Novarro’s photographs with works by the artists portrayed, dedicated to him
and his muse Nana in friendship and gratitude. It ranges from the art of the Ecole
de Paris with works by André Masson, Man Ray, Pierre Soulages, Alfred Mannessier and Hans Hartung through Surrealist painters and writers such as André Breton,
Tristan Tzara, Wifredo Lam and René Magritte all the way to works by the American Expressionists Mark Rothko und Willem de Kooning. The exhibition reaches
its magnificent highlight in several works by each of the artists Pablo Picasso, Joan
Miró, Lucio Fontana, Mark Tobey and Massimo Campigli and of course in the photographic masterpieces of Eddy Novarro.
Margrit Bernard
6
| r Joseph Beuys
| 7
Wifredo Lam’s Surrealist companion André Masson is present in the collection with
several drawings. His richly color-orchestrated crayon and felt pen drawing R fig. 11
& cat. 69 combines seemingly cursorily drawn graphic codes with color surface elements. The style of this work, dated January 5, 1965, can be seen as a late echo
of the Surrealist-propagated principle of écriture automatique The idea was to
eliminate control by reason and produce the work of art in an associative, semiconscious state. Picasso once polemicized in a conversation with the photographer
Roberto Otero about this Surrealist creativity concept, saying that he had seen the
original manuscript of Breton and Eluard’s work L’ Immaculée Conception and that
it abounded with corrections. One could imagine what degree of “automatic writing” was involved here.8
11 André Masson, untitled,
1965
12 Joan Miró, untitled, 1976
16
| In his elegy on the work of Masson, André Breton went so far as to state
that he could be “regarded as the most Surrealist of us all”.9 He saw the artistic
principle of psychic automatism exemplarily implemented in his œuvre, declaring
“. . . in the quest for principles that one can firmly rely on, André Masson came upon
automatism at the very beginning of his career. The painter does indeed have a
winged hand here. It is no longer the same one that slavishly copied the form of
objects, instead it is in love with its own motion and that alone and now describes
the involuntarily emerging forms which experience teaches have the purpose of
taking on a real shape.”10 In particular the free, stenography-like flow of graphic
motor skills and the “involuntarily emerging forms” described by Breton characterize the works represented in the collection in a special way.
exceptionally generous to the Novarros. In their combination of graphic codes and
ideograms with color surfaces determined by junctions and superimpositions, the
drawings breathe the spirit of the free and relaxed late work of Joan Miró. He had
already noted in 1940 with regard to these absolutely constant basic components
of his imagery that “The schematic characters must have an enormous suggestive
power, otherwise they would be an abstract and therefore a dead thing . . .”13 It
is that very tension that the works maintain in their makeup by ensuring that the
linear graphic structures always refer to the world of shapes. Out of the bits of
graphic code in the works, heads with pairs of eyes, extremities and star formations
keep transforming into harlequinades of seemingly childlike innocence. The cheerful and lively style of these characters makes us forget that Miró was over eighty
years old when he made them.
In the winter of 1920, André Masson got a new neighbor in the rue Blomet
in Paris whose housekeeping and studio-keeping differed profoundly from his own.
The new neighbor was the Catalan artist Joan Miró, who said in retrospect “Masson was living with his wife Odette and his little daughter Lili in an indescribable
dirty mess. I was obsessed with order and cleanliness. The canvasses were neatly
cleared away, the brushes washed, and I even waxed the parquet floor.”11
This anecdotal detail about the two neighbors would not be worth mentioning if Joan Miró had not just gained access to Paris Surrealist circles through
the good offices of André Masson. Masson belonged to André Breton’s circle of
artists and writers who met regularly for discussions in their local cafés in Paris.
Miró is said to have attended these meetings principally as a silent listener, but
the introverted artist assimilated in the steaming kitchen of ideas that was the Parisian Surrealist movement many ideas that were to become virulent in the following
years and decades of his work.
“It takes a long time to become young”, his compatriot Pablo Picasso
once said. Like Miró, Picasso still had amazing creative power in his old age. He
was already an international star on the international art scene when Eddy Novarro
met him on October 27, 1964. The meeting, arranged by the Spanish bullfighter
Luis Miguel Dominguín, took place in the Villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins. In
the two works Picasso dedicated to Novarro, the head of the bull varies not only
in format but also with regard to the execution of the drawing R gs. figs. 13, 14 &
cat. 20. The sketch in vertical format stands out for the cursory and concise management of the contour line around the animal’s head. The picture done in horizontal format the same day is more differentiated and elaborate in the way it is drawn.
Picasso was, as we know, an “aficionado”, an ardent supporter of the bullfight as the
Spanish national sport. His first drawings as a child were about the physiognomy
of the bulls and the imagery of the corridas. The extraordinarily strong, elementary imprint of the bullfight on Spanish culture was once described by Picasso with
the terse comment “For us as Spaniards, it’s mass in the morning, bullfight in the
afternoon and whorehouse in the evening.”14 The bullfight is more than a Spanish national sport for Picasso, however; it even becomes a metaphor for his own
existence as an artist when he confides to his friend Hélène Parmelin, for example,
“Imagine for a moment you are in the middle of the bullring. You have your easel
and your canvas; it is white, it needs to be painted on, and all the people are there
to watch you. Come on, get on with it, you have to start the painting, you have to
paint it. Imagine it. There is nothing more terrible. Ten or fifteen thousand people
watching you. The slightest mistake and you are dead, and you don’t even need a
bull.”15 It may be pure coincidence or the expression of a subtle homage to Picasso,
but the great American artist Jackson Pollock was fond of using the metaphor of
the canvas as the arena where the action takes place.16
Eddy Novarro met Joan Miró on November 4, 1976 in his studio in Palma
de Mallorca. Apparently the Catalan asked Novarro to show him some photographs of other artists, and significantly Miró chose the portraits of Picasso and
Braque to put in his studio and look at.12 There are no less than four color drawings dedicated to Nana and Eddy Novarro R fig. 12 & cat. 74 – 77. So Joan Miró was
Against that background, Picasso’s bull’s-head drawings of October 1964
are certainly to be understood as friendly gestures towards Nana and Eddy Novarro, but their theme is doubtless attributable to the fact that they were introduced to Picasso by the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín R fig. 15. He was one
of the most successful and most popular matadors and he and Picasso had been
13 Pablo Picasso, untitled,
1976
14 Pablo Picasso, untitled,
1976
15 Luis Miguel Dominguín
| 17
The American Avant-garde in the Eddy Novarro
Collection
Markus Müller
E
ddy Novarro, as explained in the introductory article, was involved as a
press photographer in organizing the Brussels World Fair. That fact is significant with regard to his knowledge of the international art scene in that in their
pavilion there the Americans were presenting the “spearhead” of the latest developments in art in the United States.1 In the same year the Kunsthalle Basel featured
an exhibition designed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled Die
neue amerikanische Malerei (The New American Painting). In an article published
in 1960 the eminent American art critic Clement Greenberg noted in that context
that the older generation of American artists had contributed to making American
painting an “exportable article” for the first time.2
There was growing self-confidence in the world of American art in the
two post-war decades, especially vis-à-vis Paris as the established world capital of
the arts. The New York School was the term chosen for the latest American trends,
and the opposition to the Ecole de Paris is evident in this geographic definition.
European-style art was increasingly rejected by the American artists as bloodless
estheticism. In a text written in 1948, Barnett Newman formulated this specific postwar perspective very aptly as follows: “Everything [in Europe] is so highly cultivated.
The artist in America is a barbarian by comparison. He does not possess the finehoned sensitivity towards the object that dominates European feelings. He does
not even possess the objects. So this is our opportunity to get closer to the origins
of tragic feelings, free from the old bric-à-brac. Shouldn’t we as artists search for
new objects to depict?”3
Their search for a specific American art of their own on the basis of a
new esthetic naturalness resulted in Abstract Expressionism. The term ‘Abstract
Expressionism’ is not a neologism of the post-war years; it emerged as a concept
shortly after World War One in connection with the various facets and varieties of
German expressionism. Abstract Expressionism in America as the first major postwar development in the fine arts was based on the Surrealist and Lyrical-Expressive currents in pre-war abstract art. The Janus-faced character of that artistic development was described by Edward Lucie-Smith when he remarked that Abstract
expressionism looked both forward and back. 4
As with so many “isms” in art history, ‘Abstract Expressionism’ is a classificatory word that describes individual and sometimes even diverging positions in
art. The American artists we honor with that collective stylistic term did not come
together in the fashion of an artists’ community or author joint programmatic texts.
34
| r Andy Warhol
| 35
Marc Chagall
JULY 7, 1887 WITEBSK – MARCH 28, 1985 SAINT-PAUL-DE-VENCE
64
| | 65
20 Giorgio
78
| de Chirico November 2, 1964
21 Giorgio
de Chirico January 13, 1977
| 79
74 Joan
168
| 1976
Miró 75 Joan
Miró December 16, 1964
| 169
98 James
204
| Rosenquist * NOVEMBER 29, 1933 GRAND FORKS
1979
99 Mark
Rothko SEPTEMBER 25, 1903 DÜNABURG – FEBRUARY 25, 1970 NEW YORK
May 3, 1965
| 205
R
André Breton
FEBRUARY 19, 1896 TINCHEBRAY –
SEPTEMBER 28, 1966 PARIS
R
p. 64
Marc Chagall
p. 75
Salvador Dalí
MAY 11, 1904 FIGUERES –
January 23, 1989 FIGUERES
JULY 7, 1887 WITEBSK – MARCH 28,
1985 SAINT-PAUL-DE-VENCE
R
p. 21
R
R
p. 86
Jean Dewasne
MAY 21, 1921 LILLE –
JULY 23, 1999 PARIS
p. 77
Alberto Burri
Marc Chagall
Giorgio de Chirico
Otto Dix
MAY 12, 1915 CITTÁ DI CASTELLO –
FEBRUARY 1995 NICE
JULY 7, 1887 WITEBSK – MARCH 28,
1985 SAINT-PAUL-DE-VENCE
JULY 10, 1888 VOLOS –
NOVEMBER 19, 1978 ROME
DECEMBER 2, 1891 GERA –
JULY 25, 1969 SINGEN
p. 23
Alexander Calder
Eduardo Chillida
Sonia Delaunay
Luis Miguel
Dominguín
JULY 22, 1898 PHILADELPHIA –
NOVEMBER 11, 1976 NEW YORK
JANUARY 10, 1924 SAN
SEBASTIÁN – AUGUST 19, 2000
SAN SEBASTIÁN
NOVEMBER 14, 1885 ODESSA –
DECEMBER 5, 1979 PARIS
NOVEMBER 9, 1926 MADRID –
MAY 8, 1996 SAN ROQUE
R
R
p. 4
Eddy Novarro
c. 1925 Bukarest – 2003
254
| R
Carlo Carra
Salvador Dalí
Paul Delvaux
FEBRUARY 11, 1881 QUARGNENTO –
APRIL 13, 1966 MILAN
MAY 11, 1904 FIGUERES –
January 23, 1989 FIGUERES
SEPTEMBER 23, 1987 HUY –
JULY 20, 1994 VEURNE
p. 97
Marcel Duchamp
JULY 28, 1887 BLAINVILLECREVON – OCTOBER 2, 1968
Neuilly-sur-Seine
| 255