Eulogy of Félix Labisse

Ladies and Gentlemen, my dear Colleagues,

It is not without apprehension that I take the floor before your green-coated Company. Apprehension at failing to convey, in exact words, my emotion and my gratitude. I am a painter, and I more readily practise the language of silent things, which is precisely the art and the power of painting. Like the Juggler of Notre-Dame, who paid his compliment by turning somersaults, the painter ought to be able to paint you his thanks, the sculptor to sculpt them and the mime, as perhaps tomorrow, to mime them.

That, moreover, is what the old Académie meant by those reception pieces, so aptly named, with which the artist tried to settle his debt to you. And it is also with some trembling, for you as much as for me, that I venture this speech. For to summon the blue shadow of Félix Labisse, blue of night and blue of day, is an undertaking not without peril. You know that he was something of a sorcerer and that he had tamed many of the forces that inhabit this world.

He occupied two chairs: yours, of course, but also, at home, an extraordinary seat with the legs and horns of a goat, which once belonged to Anatole France and which, it is said, had served at black masses.

Félix Labisse, who loved to write, had compiled and completed an almanac of the mysterious powers that govern our days, entitled “the family sorcerer”. I naturally opened the book of spells that Félix Labisse left us at the date of 17 April, and I must warn you that the saint of the day is Arnet, the successor of Cyriacus, the pope who abandoned Rome to follow, without hesitation, Ursula and above all her eleven thousand virgins. The devil of the day is Ardad, “a vampire of the East who, it seems, prowls the tracks and roads at night”; the man of the day is David-Georges, the sixteenth-century glazier from Ghent who spoke the language of birds.

Know that it was on a 17 April, in 2254 before our era, that Joshua stopped the sun, and on a 17 April, in 1955, that Labisse met Albert the Great in Cologne. I therefore conjure all the powers, auspicious and baleful, to protect our session and to beat their wings around the memory of Félix Labisse, magician painter, expert in all that lies on this side of appearances and beyond them.

Félix Labisse was born on 9 March 1905 in Marchienne, a land of abbeys near Douai, where he spent his early childhood: the Douai whose belfry Corot painted in an image of pictorial happiness, beyond the reach of every war. Labisse was thus a man of the North, of a flat country where, as if in compensation, it falls to the wide, cloud-swept skies to show the most fantastic and shifting landscapes… His family soon settled in Ostend, where Félix came to know the presence and the stirrings of the sea.

He very nearly became a sailor, and all his life he kept the bearing, the clear eyes washed by spray, and the cap of a sea captain. Labisse belongs to the clan of those men of the open sea who have no need to leave the quay, since they roam the great waters of the imagination. It is one of the things he would have in common with the man who discovered him, who invented him: Ensor, who never left his native Ostend. A sailor Labisse remained even in the rhythm of his days, with the night watches and the long shifts in his studio facing the canvas, and the great sprees that cast him at evening into the streets and bars of the night.

I have mentioned the great and dazzling name of Ensor. It was in 1923 that the young man met the old painter of masks, by then a baron. Ensor at once recognised in Labisse not a disciple in the strict sense of the word but an exceptional temperament; he discerned a destiny in him, and dubbed him a knight on the spot, on the front line of the painting of imagination where Labisse would win all his spurs. “Hardi, Haro, Hurrah for Félix Labisse, a man, a painter: we must love and protect the young innocents of Art Nouveau.” Thus did Baron Ensor greet his young liegeman.

An innocent Labisse did not long remain, if ever he was one. In any case he kept from Ensor that encouragement towards a painting intent on masking appearances, the better to unmask them. The Ostend years were years of astonishing intellectual and creative ardour. Labisse frequented writers and artists there and organised exhibitions and evenings, in particular in the Ostend Kursaal, one of the hot spots of artistic invention in interwar Europe. It was in Ostend, in that Belgium where Magritte and Delvaux were at work, that he came to know, directly or indirectly, the efforts of those who wished, through a return to reality and an advance into the surreal, to regenerate an art undermined by the negations of Dada or by the excess of invention of the avant-gardes…

The great and terrible adjective has been spoken, and it raises a preliminary question: is Labisse, in the strict sense of the term, a Surrealist? Let us say at once that the official handbooks and encyclopaedias dispute his right to the title, if indeed it has any meaning. Labisse, it seems, did not quite belong to the chapel as André Breton shaped it through his exclusions. In fact, Labisse never got on very well with the pope of the brotherhood.

He belonged to another generation; he did not practise without reservation the sacraments of automatism and of tracing dreams. Labisse was far too independent, far too sardonic to bow to dogmas, to enter any religion whatsoever. His nature was independence. His surrealism would also lie in being above all the pettiness of life, the meanness of the real, the mediocrity of enlistments… Yet Philippe Soupault thanks Labisse for satisfying in us the surrealist and irrepressible passion for the unusual.

Yet Robert Desnos thanks Labisse for having surreally put desire and its thrills into paint. Desnos, who with Éluard and Prévert formed the triad of poets who protected Labisse, had recognised in him an “orderer of mythologies”, a “tamer” who puts his menagerie through its paces at dawn on canvases painted in daylight. I love this condensed portrait of Labisse, tamer of mythical figures always ready to bite and claw.

Labisse’s beauties, in their tights of red skin and blue skin, are indeed not very reassuring. Assembling his gallery of portraits of the great ladies of history, prettily called history-makers, Labisse summons to his harem Circe, Judith, Penthesilea, Mother Jeanne des Anges: enchantresses, cut-throats, Amazons, unusual abbesses. Does he paint Charlotte Corday? He sets her naked in Marat’s slipper bath, where she prepares to scale with her great knife a shoal of fish into which the male sex seems to have been transformed.

Is not Labisse’s emblematic picture, the one that perhaps best embodies his invention, that Bonheur d’être aimée, the happiness of being loved, loved in the feminine, in which a beauty with an Ingres body and the head of a tigress curls up naked with pleasure on a sofa? It was around this same charming monster that he gathered his friends, his confidants of day and night: the diurnal Picasso, Desnos, Jean-Louis Barrault, for whom he made so many memorable sets, but also the nocturnal Blake, Sade, Jarry and Apollinaire, a manifesto picture that is his Painter’s Studio and that joins in our memories those of Courbet, Fantin-Latour and Max Ernst.

I will add that Le Bonheur d’être aimée has just entered the Centre Georges Pompidou through the grace and generosity of the singer Maria d’Apparécida, guardian of his memory, who accompanied the painter and his wife Jony to their last great passage… There is a higher morality in this Bonheur d’être aimée becoming for Labisse another source of happiness: the happiness, for him, of being loved and recognised beside his friends and accomplices, not far from Chirico and Dalí, who belonged to our Académie, not far from Magritte and Delvaux, from Max Ernst and Tanguy.

The concrete and fantastic world that Labisse invites us to enter has its laws and its reasons. Labisse certainly kept his secrets. It would be unseemly to try to stretch him out on that Procrustean bed, the analyst’s couch, just as any attempt to take his mystery apart like a machine would be in vain. But here again, let us be carried by the poets. They are the best art critics, for they have an intuition of what is irreducible in creation, and know how to give us an equivalent, a correspondence.

Let us listen to Paul Éluard recite the ABC of the reciter, this woman who is the spokeswoman for Labisse’s painted women:

My aspects are varied / I have fur / I have feathers
And the bark of a tree adds to my brown skin…
My talents are many / I can ape the beast
And grow light with dawn / Just like a lark.
I have claws and fangs / I have lips of shell…
Who then could reign outside my total heart
I know everything and I am learning to forget / I braid
An enormous crown / for my belly / for my blood.

Like all the great creators of monsters, of true monsters, that is to say viable ones (and how could one not think of Hieronymus Bosch, the pope of the North), Félix Labisse was an expert in hybrids. Human, animal, vegetable and mineral mingle and combine their kingdoms, but always in the clear exercise of reason. Labisse’s grafts take; his creatures breathe. Their strangeness is never that of the absurd, of the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table.

Labisse’s delirious machinery works with perfect logic: that is what makes him a master of the fantastic. André Pieyre de Mandiargues, himself a Labissian, had noted that the painter worked in full light and not in the black vapours of underground worlds. With him, mystery unfolds and is celebrated in clarity, under a bluish sky that is for Labisse like the glass paperweight in which he holds his images of desire. Labisse is fundamentally a classic: he paints and represents the obscure in broad daylight.

He walks us through the jungle of his dreams with the strength and suppleness of a great blue tiger. Dear Félix Labisse, you who were a discoverer of other worlds, you who have been and will remain a beloved painter, whose desiring images will long fill our eyes, you are now writing the fourth stanza of the poem that Robert Desnos dedicated to you.

Little bird will turn blue…
Little bird will turn tiger…
Little bird will choose its cage of fire…

Little bird, grown big, has, we may add, flown away. But the blue shadow of Labisse will never cease, from the beyond, to brush against our vigils.

Gentlemen,

To deliver the eulogy of Félix Labisse will have been a joy for me, even if weighed down by the scruple of not saying all that Labisse deserved. The fateful reasons that led you to call on me to succeed him should please him in any case, so unusual is the result. A discoverer and builder of a new world order is succeeded by a simple gardener, devoted to his own small plot of motifs. I travel around my room, my garden, my kind models who agree, for the length of a break, to come and sit before my easel.

I admire and understand that a hare on a table, that the Bridge of Augustus, could be for Chardin as for Corot whole universes in which a life may be spent. My dream would be to transcribe all that the motif, just as it is, says, whispers, suggests, in the silence of attention and of the respect the painter owes it. In doing so, I sometimes feel that I belong, as people say today, to a minority. I am grateful to you for welcoming me, in the name of all those who do not despair of the dialogue with reality and who devote their strength and their faith to it.

From time to time I wonder whether I would not have liked, like others whom I admire and salute, to play freely with forms and colours. But what can I say? I am one of the few who still believe that this white turned cloud and this blue turned sky find, in that constraint, graces of their own. Your welcome is for me a source of infinite comfort. To be sure, we are not the officials, and that is our glory. You are, we are, a haven of freedom, a free land, where respect for others is the rule and where differences do not exclude one another.

It falls to us to make sure that the Republic of the arts sacrifices none of its provinces. Better still, it falls to us to encourage it to come to the aid of its weak, if not of its oppressed of the moment. Looking at this spring’s buds in the orchards of my Normandy, I thought of all those promises of flowers and fruit that must not be pruned and slashed thoughtlessly. I thought, since I am also a teacher, of those, women and men, who in the neighbouring École or elsewhere are ready to devote themselves to listening to reality, to transcribing its words, to painting the mysteries of the true. It is those we must think of; they are the ones who most need our encouragement, so harsh are the world and fashion towards them.

Gentlemen,

Félix Labisse loved encounters and the genealogies of the strange. To conclude, here is one, perfectly unusual, in which Vincent begets Prud’hon, who begets Bidauld, who begets Brascassat, who begets Cabat, who begets Benjamin Constant, who begets Ferdinand Humbert, who begets Émile Aubry, who begets Félix Labisse, who perpetrates Pierre Carron. You will have understood that this litany is that of the successive occupants of your second chair. I am pleased to find myself there with those great lovers of the female body, Prud’hon and Labisse; with those Davidian disciples of Claude Lorrain, Bidauld and Cabat; with that devotee of the strange Orient, Benjamin Constant; and with those upholders of classicism, Humbert and Aubry. I am ready, Gentlemen, to share with this nine-headed hydra, my own head included, the temporary portion of immortality that you are kind enough to grant me.

Notice on the life and work of Félix Labisse (1905-1982), read by Pierre Carron at his installation at the Académie des beaux-arts on 17 April 1991. English translation; read the original French text, established from the Académie’s publication (PDF). See also Pierre Carron at the Académie.