CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Roger Edgar Gillet: The Figure Disfigured

By Raphael Rubinstein

One evening in 1971, at the end of a frustrating day in the studio, things suddenly begin to gel for Roger Edgar Gillet. In a mere 20 minutes he completes a 51-inch-square oil painting of a naked, hairless, nearly faceless figure spreading its weirdly atrophied legs to the viewer on a bare bed. Hovering in the background behind this bone-colored figure is an additional presence, a barely sketched-in froglike creature perched improbably on a trapeze swing. Contemplating this unexpected composition he has just created, Gillet realizes that the figure on the bed is “a horrible subject, absolutely horrible, even fairly ignoble, something that could have been in the Musée Dupuytren.” 1 Although this is by no means the artist’s first excursion into the realm of the grotesque, what shocks him is the incongruity between the creepiness of the image and the great joy he felt while painting it. How could he, or anyone, find such pleasure in bringing to life something as horrific as those jars of diseased and deformed body parts lining the shelves of Paris’s medical pathology museum? He decides to give the painting a title that acknowledges this uncomfortable disconnect: Que ma joie demeure. Literally meaning “May my joy remain,” the phrase is usually rendered in English as “the joy of man’s desiring,” derived from Bach’s famous Cantata #147, which features a wonderfully lilting melody that has made it a favorite wedding tune.

This anecdote, dating from the middle phase of Gillet’s career (in 1971, he was 47), reveals several important facts about the artist’s work: first, his titles nearly always came after the paintings were done; second, he worked quickly, preferring to finish a painting in a single session (with the obvious exception of his very large canvases); third, and most importantly, the images that emerged on his paintings were nearly always unforeseen, elicited through the process of painting and the visual memories that arose unbidden rather than conforming to any preexisting concept. Even more unforeseen, if we take a longer view, is that Gillet came to paint recognizable images at all. As a young painter, he was an active participant in the flourishing of abstract art in 1950s Europe, creating paintings in which gestural marks, incised lines and smears of paint were built up on loose linear structures. These early works have clear affinities with abstractionists such as Pierre Tal Coat, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Roger Bissière, and François Arnal, among others, but they also have a literal grittiness—achieved by the use of sand, pebbles and rabbit-skin glue— that evokes Dubuffet, whose radical rejection of accepted notions of “ugly” and “beautiful” Gillet would later share. These early paintings also establish the muted palette of ochres and browns that the artist would continue to favor throughout his life.

Coming of age in postwar Paris, Gillet witnessed and participated in the intellectual and artistic ferment centered around Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1948, he was present at the funeral of Antonin Artaud. Along with his friend Maurice Ronet, he was cast (albeit in a small part) in Jacques Becker’s Rendez-vous de juillet (1949), one of the first films to depict the restless youth culture emerging in postwar Europe. (At the time, Gillet and his wife Thérèse shared modest living/working quarters with Ronet and his wife Simone; Maurice would soon abandon art for acting to become one of the leading French actors of his generation, most notably as the suicidal playboy of Le Feu Follet, Louis Malle’s masterly 1963 study of modern alienation.) Supported (défendu, as they say in French) by both of the leading theorists of art informel, Michel Tapié and Charles Estienne, Gillet showed alongside most of the prominent Parisian abstractionists. His work was included in two versions of Tapié’s epochal “Un Art Autre” (at Studio Facchetti in Paris, 1952, and Galerie Cortina in Milan, 1953) and in Estienne’s legendary “Alice in Wonderland” at Galerie Kléber in 1955. He also had numerous solo shows in Paris and Brussels. In 1956, the influential critic Michel Ragon pronounced him “one of the ten best painters of the new generation.” 3 His career as an abstract painter seemed to be more or less launched. In 1955, he was awarded the Catherwood Prize, which funded several months of travel in the United States. 4

As well as enjoying an inspiring meeting in New York with Jackson Pollock, Gillet had another encounter during his American travels that would deeply influence his future work. “I remember very well,” he later recalled, “that in 1955 I had already started to ask myself questions about what I was doing. In short, I had doubts. And then, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York I was stopped cold in front of a painting by El Greco, the portrait of a bishop or a cardinal, wearing tiny glasses. Faced with the cruelty of this gaze, I said to myself that with abstract painting one lost something: one could no longer paint the depths of that gaze.” 5

For an artist who had already garnered recognition as an abstract painter (though it could be argued that the insect-like motifs in some of his mid-1950s were not strictly abstract) the introduction of figures entailed a real risk to his career. Gillet’s friend and long-time dealer Jean Pollak recalls the shock he felt when Gillet showed him his first venture into portraiture: “We were living the full euphoria of abstraction. We all believed that painting would never again be figurative. As proof: when one day in 1958 Gillet brought me a painting—which I still own—representing Saint Thomas, I gave him hell. There was a kind of face with a big open mouth. Turn figurative? At the time that seemed like sheer madness.” 6

Despite his El Greco revelation, Gillet didn’t immediately purge all traces of abstraction from his work; it took until 1963 for his paintings to become fully figurative. Of course, Gillet was hardly alone in turning away from abstraction in the early 1960s. In the wake of Nouveau Réalisme, Neo-Dada and Pop art, a new generation of painters in France loosely grouped under the terms Nouvelle Figuration and Figuration Narrative were filling their canvases with all manner of recognizable imagery, much of it taken from the realm of everyday life: cars, movie stars, supermarkets, city streets, as well as from current political events. Although Gillet frequently found his inspiration, especially in later years, from the day’s news, nothing in his paintings identified them as having been made in the present day. First of all, his palette, which had always been muted, was dominated by ochres, umbers, dirty grays and curdled whites, with occasional slivers of blue and crimson. As distant as possible from the bright, flashy colors of the 1960s, his paintings seem to issue from a time before the invention of the electric light. And yet, for all their Rembrandt-like tones, his paintings refuse historical pastiche. (Another artist then working in Paris whose paintings had a similar non-contemporary look was Leon Golub; interestingly, in 1963, Gillet and Golub were both included in the 18th Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.)

If Gillet declines to show us any mythologies quotidiennes—to borrow the title of an influential 1964 exhibition of Nouvelle Figuration painters—neither is he out to charm us with luxe, calme et volupté. Instead, his paintings—both the portraits and the large crowd scenes—are the stuff of nightmares. Barely recognizable as human, his figures sport misshapen heads, faces whose features have been largely scraped or melted away as if by some horrific accident; many of them are saddled with strange protuberances, seemingly more vegetable or mineral than human. In the 1966 painting Hétaïre, for instance, while ostensibly a portrait, and if we go by the after-the-fact title, a study in eroticism (in ancient Greece the term hétaïre or hetaira, referred to a prostitute of a higher class), one would be hard-pressed to identify any human features in the central stack of shapes. Possibly something about the outline of these impastoed forms reminded Gillet of the naked hetaira shielding her face in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s salacious history painting Phryne Before the Areopagus (1861). Very slightly more human is the golden fetal form of Personnage (1966), which is surmounted with a headlike shape (more monkey skull than human head) out of which the painter has roughly scraped away patches of paint to indicate eyes, nose and mouth. “Creature” seems a more apt designation than “personnage” for this demonic apparition. The subject in an untitled painting from 1982, again in portrait format (centered head-and-shoulders against a background), appears to be sporting a cravat and heavy overcoat but something unfortunate has happened to the figure’s head which resembles nothing so much as a lump of half-melted wax.

Notably, these unsettling effects are achieved with bravura painterly techniques. Every one of Gillet’s canvases offers a masterclass in alla prima brushwork and fearless scumbling and scraping with a palette knife. He activates his surfaces with wave upon wave of buttery oil paint, applied with generosity and nervous energy. Everywhere there is visible evidence of the exultation the artist felt while painting. But to what end, you may ask? Is all this spirited brushwork and uncanny imagery just a matter of painting for painting’s sake? To some degree it is, and yet, paradoxically, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not just a gloomy palette that Gillet borrows from the past of European art, he also picks up the notion of painting as a weapon to wield against society, against its hypocrisy, its deceitful ways, its cruel spectacles, its intolerable absurdity. His deformations, and the way in which the very brushstrokes that establish a figure seem to simultaneously decompose it, must be read as protests against the crueler aspects of the human condition as well as expressions of the artist’s emotional state. As he told Alexis Pelletier in 1998, “I don’t distort [déforme] the faces for the pleasure of distorting them. I distort them to arrive at the maximum point of expression.” 7

As he turned toward figuration, Gillet reached out to a new set of influences and affinities. He now began to look to back to grand discontents such as Goya, Daumier and Ensor for inspiration, and among his contemporaries, felt close to the work of Maryan, Zoran Mušič and Eugène Leroy, painters who, like him, had embraced expressionist figuration. It’s no accident that two of the contemporaries Gillet connected with were marked by the trauma of war and terror: Maryan, who was Jewish, was a survivor of Auschwitz; Mušič, who had been active in the Yugoslavian resistance, survived imprisonment at Dachau. Gillet readily acknowledged that he hadn’t personally experienced what Maryan and Mušič had gone through, but he did live through the Second World War, albeit as a teenager, and, as he later said, “It’s likely that this marked all of us and that it enters into my faces.” 8 Gillet also enjoyed close friendships with several painters associated with CoBrA, especially Pierre Alechinsky, though his artistic preoccupations took him in different directions. Closer in spirit, and an obvious antecedent, to his post-1963 paintings is Jean Fautrier’s work of the 1940s, particularly the “Otages” (Hostages) paintings that memorialized victims of Nazi terror via floating featureless heads and stonelike torsos. But if he was influenced by the “Otages,” which seems probable, Gillet’s “Portraits” depart from Fautrier in significant ways. For one thing, his heads are always attached to a body, they are never “disembodied.” This feature is primarily a consequence of Gillet’s engagement with the format of traditional portraiture. His figures may seem barely human, but they respect the conventions of the painted portrait, centered on the canvas against a dark background, often cropped near the waist, facing (as far as one can tell) the viewer. Gillet also indulges in much more brush- and knife-work than Fautrier, whose paintings can seem as if they were the result of some natural process (mold, decay, calcification) than any human effort. Another noteworthy difference between Gillet and Fautrier is that the former brings to his art an engagement with the carnivalesque that is absent from the older artist’s work. In fact, Gillet in his many crowd paintings may be, after Ensor, the preeminent painter of the carnivalesque, a subject that also of course attracted Goya, most obviously in The Burial of the Sardine, a painting that is echoed in many of Gillet’s multi-figure compositions. One of Gillet’s most vivid childhood memories was witnessing the wild marriage celebration in the Place Denfert Rochereau of two dwarfs from different street circuses, an event that gave birth to a series of paintings titled “Les Nains” (The Dwarfs). In painting after painting, Gillet invites us to both celebrate and tremble before chaotic festivals, to revel in orgiastic scenes where order and decorum are temporarily suspended and to recoil from unleashed primal energy. Somehow “expressionism” doesn’t adequately describe his work. A better term might be “grotesque realism,” a genre identified by Mikhail Bakhtin, the influential Russian literary theorist of the carnivalesque.

It may seem counterintuitive, but it is Gillet’s interest in traditional painting conventions and techniques (and in distorting them) that can make him seem ahead of his time, a postmodern artist avant la lettre. The dialogues he initiates with Goya’s Black Paintings or Daumier’s courtroom scenes or Ensor’s mad crowds, and, later, with Piranesi’s Prisons and Turner’s marine-scapes, were only possible because he rejected, or simply ignored, the modernist myth of artistic progress and pure originality. But claiming Gillet as an early postmodernist, an artist who roamed freely in the archives of his medium, is not to overlook the deeply personal nature of many of his paintings, nor his artistic engagement with the events of his time and place.

Among the strangest features of Gillet’s figures are their atrophied limbs, arms that hang limp and useless, tapering legs that seem far too weak to support the chunky torsos and heads to which they are attached. Often, these emaciated appendages resemble bones rather than flesh. The arms of the seated figure in Jeune Fille Assise (1966) droop like wet noodles and the legs that stick out from her aqueous green dress are frighteningly skeletal, an effect made still more grim by the spotty background that suggests an old, much-deteriorated mirror. Two years later, in Sur Canapé (1968) an apparently nude figure reposes on a striped sofa: one breadstick-like arm ends in a stump, the other seems broken off. Les Voyeurs (1974), one of the frenetic crowd scenes that Gillet orchestrated like a Hollywood film director, appears to depict a troupe of female dancers displaying their private parts to an agitated mass of spectators consisting of overgrown babies, giant frogs and huge insect carapaces. The limbs of all are withered. With his usual sense of visual drama, Gillet uses the darkest umber for some of the “voyeurs” while drenching the feather-clad dancers in pale yellow. The scene looks illuminated by old-fashioned gas lights. Similar spindly appendages appear in La Dame au houla hoop (1996), Le Podium (1997) and La Danse (1998), and the only reason they are absent from the panoramic Le soleil se leve aussi (1988-89) is probably because the marching figures are wrapped in robes.

The effect is so extreme that it may be unique to Gillet, yet nowhere does he explain why he gives his figures such puny appendages, leaving viewers to wonder if it is just a stylistic quirk. Maybe he paints ultra-skinny legs the way some Old Masters favored long necks. But these signs of disability are so pervasive in Gillet’s work, and so unsettling in effect, one feels their origin must be more than a matter of style. One possible explanation is found in the artist’s early life. In 1945, at the age of 19, he was called up to serve in the French Army. His service turned out to be unexpectedly short-lived—after only three days, he was diagnosed with polio and discharged. He spent the next 18 months in bed.

Happily, Gillet appears to have fully recovered from the disease, but he was doubtless keenly aware of what it could do to its victims, even long after the initial infection. Post-polio syndrome, which usually appears decades later, can result in extreme loss of muscle tissue in the arms and legs, leaving some victims permanently wheelchair bound. Once having learned about Gillet’s youthful illness, it’s impossible to miss the similarities between the dangling arms and withered legs in so many of his paintings and the atrophied limbs of Post-polio syndrome sufferers. Although polio never affected as large a percentage of the population in France as it did in the United States, the French medical establishment had a strangely muted response to the epidemic, which was followed by a long marginalization in the national memory. 9 While it’s probably too much to ascribe Gillet’s manner of painting figures to any conscious wish to draw attention to the ravages of polio, one can more easily imagine how a visceral awareness of the disease might have contributed to a compulsion to depict the human body as a damaged, crippled, compromised thing—that nonetheless was a worthy subject of art. A similar connection could be made between Gillet’s overpopulated crowd and city scenes and the agoraphobia the artist confessed to suffer from in later years.

As one learns more about Gillet’s work, which until now has remained essentially unknown in the United States, the more one is struck by how close his preoccupations are to some of the central themes in 20th century French intellectual and literary culture, from the tortured visionary writings of Artaud to the cruel satire of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, from Bataille’s description of a “base materialism” that can disrupt oppressive social orders to Julia Kristeva’s theorizing about abjection. Occasionally, Gillet drops a hint about his extra-painting sources, as when he titles a 1986 canvas Guignol’s Band, after Céline’s 1944 novel. Here to close, then, is a passage about Céline from Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror, a passage that could just as easily be describing the effect of Gillet’s deeply disturbing and uncannily beautiful paintings:

“When reading Céline we are seized at that fragile spot of our subjectivity where our collapsed defenses reveal, beneath the appearances of a fortified castle, a flayed skin; neither inside nor outside, the wounding exterior turning into an abominable interior, war bordering on putrescence, while social and family rigidity, that beautiful mask, crumbles within the beloved abomination of innocent vice. A universe of borders, seesaws, fragile and mingled identities, wanderings of the subject and its objects, fears and struggles, abjections and lyricisms. At the turning point between social and asocial, familial and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and murder.” 10

1 Roger Edgar Gillet, quoted in Philippe Curval, Gillet, Éditions de l’Amateur, Paris, 1994, p. 36. (All translations by
the author unless otherwise noted.)
2 As Gillet would have known, Que ma joie demeure was also the title of a best-selling 1936 novel by Jean Giono
that celebrated the pagan forces of the natural world.
3 Michel Ragon, Cimaise 4 °série n° 2, Novembre 1956.
4 Established in 1947 by Philadelphia banker Cummins Catherwood (1910-1990), the Catherwood Foundation in
addition to its legitimate philanthropic activities reportedly served as a conduit for C.I.A. funds.
5 Roger Edgar Gillet, in “La Matière et le Geste: Entretien avec Alexis Pelletier, 1998,” https://roger-edgar-
gillet.com/documents/17_matiere_et_le_geste.pdf, accessed September 7, 2022
6 “Souvenirs de Roger Edgar Gillet par Jean Pollak,” https://roger-edgar-
gillet.com/html/textes/Francoise_Monnin.html, accessed September 7, 2022.
7 “La Matiere et le Geste: Entretien avec Alexis Pelletier,” 1998.
8 Ibid. (“Moi je suis plus jeune que Mušič, d’un peu plus d’une dizaine d’années. Je n’ai pas vécu son expérience,
mais j’étais dans l’histoire de cette époque. Il est probable que ça nous a tous marqués et que ça passe dans mes
visages.”)
9 American scholar Rebecca Scales is working on a book titled Polio and its Afterlives: Epidemic Disease and
Disability in Twentieth Century France, which promises to be an illuminating study of the subject.
10 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press,
New York, 1982, p. 135.