During a European scale exhibition in Brussels for the 100th anniversary of the birth of the immense Belgian artist, Dotremont, it was important to show his links with Asia, especially China, and the strange world of his very personal calligraphy called by him, « logogram ».
Did you know that Dotremont had studied the basics of Chinese for two years, and used until the end of his life the instruments of the Chinese scholar – stick and ink stone, brush, craft china paper? Even if it was in Lapland (Finland) that this major artist of the second half of the 20th century practiced the in situ logogram, the « Logoneige » ( In English : logo-snow )
Meaning and « Chinification »
He was born in Tervueren in 1922 and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels celebrate the centenary of his birth via an exciting exhibition. A hundred works and various documents (among others two extracts from films) take us at the heart of the creative process, the culmination of which was the logogram.
Dotremont has always written, as he breathes, and traveled as long as he could. If only by examining the escaped page of his manuscript “the Mongolian train” … looked upside down, in transparency, he remains amazed: would he have written in Chinese? A « chinification », as he cried ! It is an indecipherable poem, another world, « Vertical », a hundred leagues from this abstract art that is written in French. We are in 1950 and he relates this moment in “Cobra” the review of the artistic movement of 1948 of which he is co -founder. “True poetry is the one where writing has its say” becomes an obviousness that it will put into practice 12 years later, by extending its arm with a brush dipped in China ink. The logogram is born.
Surrealism in wartime
A brilliant but unruly pupil, Dotremont lived “his” life in contrast to the Bourgeois Catholic Middle where he was born, a muffir. He is not 20 years old when he enters surrealism as one enters religion. In Brussels where Magritte, Scutenaire, Delvaux, etc. In Paris where, thanks to a word of introduction by Paul Eluard, he finds accommodation and ties with friendships with Picasso, Cocteau… He collaborates with the Revue la Main à la Plume where his poem in extenso neighboring with Works by Magritte and Delvaux…
During the war years, he survives and it will long be his way of life. The Piqueray brothers, speaking of him, describe his Bohemian life, his life on the branch, his life as a “bric-a-brac” … but he works tirelessly. He is interviewed about the future of surrealism in the newspaper L’Avenir and it is a portrait produced by Cocteau which illustrates the report!
At the end of the war, he entered the Communist Party, like many surrealists, and displays his anticlexralism in an exhibition organized by Magritte: he exhibits a Christmas tree decorated with pious images and Nazi badges. Provocation !
Four-handed words
The experience of the verb and the image dialogue on paper, started with the Danish painter Asger Jorn and continued with Alechinsky, Corneille, Hugo Klaus and other Cobra artists. Enjoyable practice that participated in the invention of the logogram. It was first seated and in the reduced space of the page that Dotremont began to experiment with pastel and ordinary ink in the pen. The standing position was then established for large formats with the use of the Chinese brush and ink.
1951 is a major year in the artist’s life: it is the end of Cobra, the discovery of his illness, tuberculosis, and the meeting of “Danish” in a cafe in Copenhagen. His “blonde bane” is in turn Gladys, Ulla, golden ball in the lyric, tragic logograms that testify to the love-passion that has chained them. They can be seen in the room bringing together the works led by the Alechinsky couple. We can also understand them because Dotremont translates them from his little fine writing at the bottom of the paintings.
Lapland and “Logoneiges”
From his first trip in 1951, he fell into love of this wild country, Lapland, his whiteness, his brilliant light. Nomadic in the soul and often constrained in sedentary by his illness, he then saw himself tracing his first » logoneiges »(« logogram in the snow » in English) in 1963 and photographing them so as not to forget them.
Let’s try to imagine him thinking “being a quick sled lapon on the blank page …”, page e illuminated by the sad light emitted by the skylight of his attic -workshop.
« House arrest nomad » Dotremont has indeed offered the luxury of a rental in the rain pension of roses in Tervueren.
He works there as a madman with his alter ego, « Logogus » of which he says “Logogus has the sudden desire to make a logogram suddenly“. Considering the incredible quantity of production, there are logograms everywhere, even on the ground where they are put to dry and … trampled on occasion by passing friends. Dotremont regularly clean up. A film extract shows him out of the house where he worked arms full of logograms and offer them to the flames of a brazier. This image makes us sad. Similarly, his cardboard suitcase, his books and notebooks of students, the souvenirs of his trips, trains tickets, plans, envelopes ennobled by his collages, his annotations.
Dotremont returned to “four-handed” works in the seventies, especially with Pierre Alechinsky, the lifelong friend. Their fresco “seven scriptures” developed in 1976 to decorate the Metro Seniessens station is still visible, but at the Delta station.
Christian Dotremont died on August 20, 1979 at the Rose Sanatorium of the Queen in Buizingen.
It is an immense privilege of being able to find it vibrant of life in the exhibition dedicated to him at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels until August 7, 2022.
