GUILBAUT Gaulois V Cowboys

1955: The Year the Gaulois Fought the Cowboy
Author(s): Serge Guilbaut

Source: Yale French Studies, No. 98, The French Fifties (2000), pp. 167-181
Published by: Yale University Press
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SERGE GUILBAUT
1955: The Year the Gaulois

Fought the Cowboy
Let me start with a letter written on 8 March 1957 by Jean Cassou, a

celebrated French poet, renowned Resistance fighter, leftist, friend of
America, and Director of the National Museum of Modern Art in
Paris-a letter addressed to the general director of arts and letters of the
French government. It seems from its tone that this letter was written
to attract extra funding for a cash-strapped museum, yet it should also
be read as a serious evaluation of the declining French art scene at the
end of the 1950s that unveiled mounting fears shared by many in Paris.
It is a frantic, somewhat hysterical and desperate document that, ad-
dressing the highest sphere of French power, describes the massive on-
slaught its author feared at work against French contemporary culture.
These attacks were mounted, according to Cassou, by many forces,
gathered quite simply to rebuff the last illusions of grandeur Paris still
managed to preserve around painting. He speaks of an elaborate inter-
national conspiracy against Paris directed at producing a massive loss
of prestige for French art around the world. What seemed clear to him
was that for several years the type of art that had given rise to the great
tradition of modern art through Gauguin and Cezanne was slowly be-
ing replaced by another, parallel one, this time originating, as he saw it,
from the old enemy: Germany! The new argument, as Cassou under-
stood it, unfolded like this: "Modern history had not been made in
Paris, but passed through Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Weimar, Dassau. I
add," he continued, "that the importance of the School of Paris is vio-
lently denied." 1 In discussions with his colleagues preparing the huge
exhibition for the Brussels international fair of 1958, it became clear to
1. Papiers Jean Cassou, Musee du Louvre, 7-page letter dated 8 March 195 7. Here and
throughout, translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
YFS 98, The French Fifties, ed. Susan Weiner, (C 2000 by Yale University.
167
168 Yale French Studies
him that Paris was being constantly denigrated so as to demonstrate

that "abstract art, which, at the moment, experiences on both conti-
nents an uncontested success, has no roots whatsoever in France."
Confronted with a wave of expressionistic abstraction based on au-
tomatism, Cassou had difficulty understanding why the traditionally
accepted qualities of Parisian art until then-universal traits like bal-
ance and hedonism-were now being rejected, if not laughed at. He still
had difficulties understanding how a classical canon with such a glori-
ous history could be dumped for values he considered close to raw bar-
barian impulses.
If one has to accept the fact that abstract art is the style that right now
triumphs the world over and responds to the aspirations of a world
turned upside down by new philosophies, new scientific conceptions of
the universe, astonishing technical progress, -indeed, if one has to talk
about abstract art, one has to recognize that this so-called abstract art
is cultivated in France with that powerful sense of invention, that con-
fident taste, and that flair for quality that are specifically tied to the
French spirit. One has to recognize then that, if abstract art is produced
in Denmark or in Argentina, it is still done better in France. [Cassou]
The problem was, however, that fewer and fewer people were ready
to believe Cassou's value system; a canon that did not seem to fit what-
soever with new postwar conditions and aspirations was in fact fast be-
ing relegated to the past.2 The fragmentation and dissemination of the
postwar modern art scene with the advent of art forms incorporating
new subjective and pessimistic qualities gave some reason to see an in-
ternational conspiracy against Parisian creativity and its fading influ-
ence, even as late as 1957. "The creation of new art markets in the
world, in particular in the U.S., shows us that this denigration of French
art is not only the result of bad temper, but of a conscious and system-
atic campaign that has its effect on political and economical realities"
(Cassou).
The cat was out of the bag. Cassou saw this esthetic alternative as
being extremely detrimental to the position of France at a dangerous
2. In fact, the exhibitions produced by his Mus6e d'art moderne during the 1957-58
season were not very inspiring. The museum indeed was incapable of showing contem-
porary French art, unable to present the abstract art of the new generation because it
could not fit into Cassou's traditional Parisian system of value. Instead Cassou presented
Ivan Itchen and Lynn Chadwick, Robert Delaunay, Rick Wouters, Wassily Kandinsky
from the Guggenheim Museum collection, Pougny, Dutch art after Van Gogh, Kupka,
Lurcat, and Andre Lhote.
SERGE GUILBAUT 169
juncture when, after a long political decline, the country seemed on the
verge of civil war while it awaited a political messiah of De Gaulle's
stature to sort out the Algerian mess. This latest rapid loss of symbolic
power seemed to be the closing chapter of a long hegemonic history.
What is fascinating in all this, is that while Cassou is correct to see a
real transformation in the way the art world was constructing modern
qualities and paradigms, he was nevertheless barking up the wrong ge-
nealogical tree. In his anti-Stalinist Titoism,3 Cassou was in fact invit-
ing American art into his famous museum, simultaneously reactivat-
ing an old cliche that had been repeated over the years by many of his
art historian colleagues: the destructive effect of German habits on the
French soul. Still lodged in Paris academic circles was the idea that the
world of art was divided in two stylistic options locked in a deadly
struggle. The French Cartesian mind and its rational, balanced vision
of the world, was always pitted against its traditional opposite: the
dark, tortured, unbalanced, and psychologically sick German spirit.
He, like Pierre Francastel before him in 1945, saw a manipulative evil
coming from the traditional adversary to the point that even France's
American allies had fallen for it.4 Some Americans, despite their sym-
pathies for France's cultural past, had, in Cassou's reading, been ma-
nipulated to such an extent that they too now believed the infamous
heresy. "France has become essentially an academic, regressive and
decadent country. Its artists are now something like what the Graeculi
were during the Roman Empire" (Cassou). This, Cassou said, was re-
grettably the new line of reasoning in the West.
This was all too true, but also misdirected and a bit too late a dis-
covery. The question which Cassou was still debating in 1957, had-
as we shall see-already been tackled by Andre Breton and Charles Esti-
enne in 1955, in a more informed and active way. Cassou's reaction
shows nevertheless how deep and pervasive this nationalist problem
was for French intellectuals confronted with a crucial but unbearable
shift in world cultural power.
What was actually happening-and what Breton and Estienne had
3. Jean Cassou broke with the Communist Party in 1948 and defended Tito's exper-
iment. He discussed his position in a long article, "Il ne faut pas tromper le peuple," in
Esprit (December 1949). See his explanation in his memoirs Une vie pourla libert6 (Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1981), 245-59.
4. See Serge Guilbaut and Carol Knicely, "La cruzada de los Medievalistas. Meyer
Schapiro y Pierre Francastel," in Sobre la desaparicion de ciertas obras de arte (Mexico
City: Curare/Fonca, 1995) 147-235.
understood-was that it was not at all a German virus that was at-
tacking the Parisian tradition,5 but rather a cataclysmic cultural shift
that was transforming the French capital into a cultural Cold-War bat-
tlefield where the United States and the Soviet Union were competing
for the heart and soul of France, and, by the same token, eating away at
what was left of a conscious French identity.
Noticing the growing success of Russian cultural propaganda (bal-
let was a big hit with Parisians), the United States finally managed to
understand the crucial importance of the representation of American
culture abroad and decided to launch a heavy counterattack.6 It all
started on a grand scale in 1952 when cultural battles engulfed the
French capital. This was the beginning of a continuous display of Amer-
ican cultural artifacts in the capital. Indeed, every year, Paris saw an ar-
mada of exhibitions covering the entire spectrum of American cultural
life, from popular culture to high art. This offensive was taking place
while art styles in Paris were hotly debated, politicized, and squarely
placed in the larger Cold War context, destabilizing an already weak
and divided Parisian art scene. It is under this type of pressure that Cas-
sou-misreading and underplaying the force of the American move-
saw worldwide attacks on Parisian traditional leadership as a direct
threat to the heart of Western civilization leading inexorably to chaos.
For Cassou, no salvation seemed possible outside of the civilizing in-
fluence of Paris. And that was that.7
5. German artists were in fact in awe of the young generation of French painters. See
Yule F. Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany,
1945-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
6. Several voices spoke of the importance of cultural propaganda. See, in particular:
Aline B. Louchheim, "Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect," The New York Times
Magazine (3 January 1954): 16, 36; "Ike Likes the Arts, So U.S. May Import Culture,"
U.S. News and World Report 38/4 (28 January 1955): 68, 70; Harrison Smith, "American
Culture for Export," The Saturday Review38/31 (30 July 1955): 22.
7. But this shrill confidence was also being vociferously condemned by intellectuals
who ridiculed the short-sightedness of the Parisian establishment. Not surprisingly, one
of the strongest critiques came from a dissident Surrealist, anarchist, and poetic voice
from Egypt: that of Georges Henein. He not only criticized Surrealism's fall into acade-
micism, but also the authoritarianism and arrogance, if not naivete, of Parisian culture
at large. In his notebooks, written in the mid- 1950s, Henein gives us a sense of the deep
malaise infiltrating those intellectual quarters confronted with the citadel mentality pre-
served by the Musee d'art moderne de Paris: "Less and less do I believe that Paris could
be a possible place to settle. I refuse to be interested in or to associate myself with these
vain Parisians, these forever scratched microgrooves of intelligence, these fanatics of
spoiled meat who take their colics for world-shattering convulsions." (Georges Henein,
L'esprit frappeur. Carnets, 1940-1973 [Paris: Encre, 1980]; cited in Hommage a Georges
Henein, Lepont de lepee 71-72 [1981], 132.)
SERGE GUILBAUT 171
The counter attack launched in 1955 by Andre Breton and Charles

Estienne against still hegemonic traditional tendencies in Paris like
"1geometric abstraction," "post-cubism" and all kinds of "realism,"
had roots similar to those defined by Cassou, but was directed by a more
judicious understanding of the threat. The Breton-Estienne offensive
was specifically geared against all types of realism and traditions in
Paris, as well as against the preposterous idea, propagated by some, that
the now successful Abstract Expressionist painting was born in New
York or, as the Magazine Cimaise in 1954 had proclaimed, on the Amer-
ican Pacific coast.8 The Breton/Estienne tandem was in fact trying, af-
ter many years of torpor, to reclaim the origin of intuitive abstraction
for Paris, where it supposedly belonged. This was not going to be an easy
thing to achieve due to the acrimonious esthetic and political division
affecting the Parisian art world.
Nevertheless, this reaction was important and understandable not
only because Parisian hegemony seemed to them to be fast disappear-
ing under the heavy pounding of American and Soviet cultural propa-
ganda, but also because French modern identity seemed to be erased by
the development of a disquieting internationalism proposed and un-
critically accepted by another active Parisian art critic, Michel Tapie.
Tapie was devising an ambitious grouping of international artists so as
to launch from Paris a universal artistic front sown together by an ob-
tuse if not pataphysical discourse about contemporary artistic freedom.
The problem with this scintillating international academy of Avant-
Gardism was that it was all "image," surface, international tics with-
out roots in the great Parisian tradition. Tapie, in the mind of Estienne
and Breton, seemed totally enfeoffed to other countries (the U.S., Italy,
Japan) rather than involved in developing and continuing Parisian mod-
ern traditions. Tapie was going with the new aggressive liberal flow, us-
ing the international market to defend an idea of universal freedom he
himself defined out of his Dadaist past. The important question for a
portion of the Parisian intelligentsia was how to forge a new modern
art, in touch with the upcoming sensibility, without succumbing to
8. This was described as a sort of alternative to the machismo of New York action
painters. The group was spearheaded by Jon Koenig, Robert Arnaud, and Michel Tapi6
representing the softer, lyrical, oriental abstraction of Marc Tobey, Callahan, Moris
Graves, Clyfford Still, and others. See the confused and contradictory discussion in
Cimaise (June 1954): Kenneth Sawyer, "L'expressionnisme abstrait. La phase du Paci-
fique" (3-5); "L'ecole du Pacifique," a discussion between Michel Tapie, Fitz Simmons,
Julien Alvard, Claire Falkenstein, and Sam Francis (6-9).
external propaganda, without accepting the diktat of other cultural

canons that were invading a bit more each year the spaces of the French
capital.
From 1952 on, the Museum of Modern Art's international program
and the Congress for Cultural Freedom promoted a growing series of
shows and events housed in some of the most prestigious spaces in
France (for example, the Musee d'Art Moderne). This activity, which
alarmed Breton and Estienne, on the other hand pleased the American
government,9 because it was finally answering an old cry heard from
several government agencies (such as USIA) calling for a more aggres-
sive participation in the field of cultural propaganda.
An unclassified document from 1955 kept at the United States Na-
tional Archives explains quite bluntly the purpose of all this cultural
flurry. American propaganda had to move more aggressively in the pro-
motion of culture for the simple reason that the French were overall
unable to understand the greatness of the American free enterprise sys-
tem; they did not understand that America was not only a land of sci-
ence and business, but also one of other cherished cultural values
shared by the French.10 What was fascinating indeed was that a poll
conducted by the American embassy in 1955 found a clear correlation
between the view held by the French that the United States had a
mediocre culture and the related belief that American international re-
lations were immature and crass.
In such a tense and urgent political situation as that of the mid-
fifties, exhibitions sent to Paris certainly had to provide entertainment
but, more importantly, they had to offer a sense of urgency, a feeling of
exhilarating freedom, as if for a second time the United States were
9. In 1952, Jackson Pollock had a one-man show at the Studio Facchetti; this was fol-
lowed by "12 American Painters and Sculptors" in 1953; "Contemporary American
Drawing" in 1954; "50 Years of American Art" (from MoMA) in 1955, as well a major
multidisciplinary display of art and culture in a program called "A Tribute to France,"
also in 1955. Almost all of these shows were presented at the Musee d'Art Moderne di-
rected by Cassou, while, adding to the ambient anti-Americanism, French contemporary
artists had no access to that prestigious institution.
10. The goal of the new United States Information Agency was "to submit evidence
to peoples of other nations by means of communication techniques that the objectives
and policies of the United States are in harmony with and will advance their legitimate
aspirations for freedom, progress and peace" (Unclassified documents, USIA file 000 200
and 201, 1955, US National Archives). This supple but aggressive new goal, criticized by
many liberals in the U.S., nevertheless managed to produce an extraordinary amount of
activity in France during the period 1954-1956, fueling by the same token an endemic
anti-Americanism in French culture.
SERGE GUILBAUT 173
reaching European shores in order to save and protect a weak continent.

As always, America had to protect Europe not only from outside at-
tacks but also from its own destructive demons. These huge inter-
ventions were in many ways replaying the D-Day scenario. This was
indeed a new but crucial landing of a cultural dimension on the devas-
tated Parisian cultural space. Time got it right when the journalist in
charge of the cultural rubric used words with heavy military connota-
tions to describe this new invasion: "setting up an advance base in
Paris," "Modern American art stormed through Paris," "The advance
patrol of a U.S. culture parade," "nothing muffled about the opening
gun of the 'Salute to France"' etc. The French reaction was, as one could
have expected, quite strong and critical even if humorous at times. 11
The French Communist Party, in reaction, did not hesitate to plaster
its share of anti-American posters around town, and the "Neutralists"
accelerated their campaign against both sides.
These were indeed the most difficult years of the Cold War for
Franco-American relations and, interestingly and understandably
enough, the most active culturally in terms of international exchanges
between the two countries. What was crucial for the French in those
years was the need to keep a positive image of themselves, a certain in-
dependence as well as a sense of return to pre-World War II power. What
they found instead was a series of open conflicts with America, trig-
gered by a variety of issues and policies about the choice of their new
prime minister Mendes-France, about their heavy-handed approach to
colonialism, and the eventual failure of their colonial adventure in In-
dochina. But most importantly perhaps was the terrible scuffle follow-
ing the rejection by France of the projected EDC (European Defense
Community) that would have permitted not only the rearmament of
Germany, but also the creation of a supranational framework that was
anathema to the French, as they felt they would lose a large part of their
identity and specificity. The battle between Tapie and Estienne was
framed by these serious political concerns. These rows were so frequent
and so deep that often the American media lost patience with their tra-
ditional but uncompromising friend. Many articles appeared in the
press explaining how difficult the small country was becoming, how
ungrateful she was to America who, after all, liberated her from Na-
zism. The new towering strength of America was always described
11. See my "Post-War Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick, in Guilbaut, ed.,
Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945-1964, (Cam-
bridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1990) 30-85.
with masculine, virile attributes while French culture and politics

were in contrast constantly characterized as an irritating, unstable, and
slightly hysterical female. A journalist from Time reported that a top
Washington "policy-maker" expressed his frustration about France
this way: "One understands that a woman has nerves, that she makes
hysterical scenes, that she does not know what she wants. One under-
stands all this, but it doesn't make her any less unendurable." 12 France
was not only an aging muse, she had also become a hysterical partner
who could not be trusted. Paris was about love, sex, and frivolity. France
indeed needed a new revolution, as a 1954 article from Collier's made
clear, 13 but a revolution controlled by the United States, a revolution
designed to bring France into the American camp. The American press
had a field day playing with this scenario. Then, after so many years,
the old French muse indeed looked just like that: slightly ridiculous
with her old makeup, her unfashionable look, surrounded by her past
glory, covered with cobwebs, slightly senile. As Eleanor Rice told her
readership in the magazine Holiday: "And the French intellectual is,
all too often, like an old lady sitting in her ancient mansion, fingering
the jewels and laces of a glorious past to which she is no longer capable
of adding a glorious present." 14 The writer was also critical and tired of
another concept that was prevalent among French people: the barbar-
ian state of American culture, a cliche that had been actively propa-
gated by the Communist Party since 1948. For Rice, the time was ripe
to understand that the present was more important than the past and
the present was in the hands of America, not of France. She continued:
"If there is one thing Americans need to remember, it is that, whereas
a sense of the past is valuable cultural equipment, a sense of the pre-
sent is the only thing which can ever build a past worth remembering"
(Rice, 147).
And indeed the French present, according to American newspapers,
was not that exciting. Images coming from the cultural front through
popular magazines showed a surprisingly weak body of creators. Im-
ages published in the press showed the French painter Wols resting idle
and passive, and when Georges Mathieu was presented painting in his
ferociously spectacular ways, it was to ridicule his crazy artistic be-
12. "Report on France," Time (8 November 1954): 62.

13. Edgar Ansel Mowrer, "France Needs a New Revolution," Collier's (22 January
1954): 19-23.
14. Elinor Rice, Holiday (November 1953): 147.
SERGE GUILBAUT 175
havior at forty degrees over Pollock.15 Since 1951, Life magazine had
chosen to present Matisse, the great French master who died in No-
vember 1954, sick in bed, thereby cleverly signaling that Europe was
an old and breathless cultural place. 16 The fact that Matisse was lying
in bed playing with scissors cutting and pasting pieces of paper located
the French and European avant-garde in the sphere of decorative and
feminized craft while Jackson Pollock, who was just then being pho-
tographed by Hans Namuth, was presented swirling around his can-
vases laid on the floor with great energy. This very judicious mix of the
Wyoming cowboy playing with his lasso and the Navajo Indian prepar-
ing his sand painting announced the vitality of the new wild world. Pol-
lock's "drip" hurled with great force at large wall-size surfaces clearly
connoted the "grande peinture," the Dantesque and energetic battle
with tradition, with an unstable matter always in transformation but
which the American was able to master.17 While the Western world
was settling down into a Cold War, the message of this comparison was
clear: the brilliant star of yesterday was literally setting at the horizon
of modern art in order to give way to a more powerful one who was not
wasting time playing the banjo like Wols in Paris. Even Picasso, who
had always been a model of virility, had his edge blunted by his partic-
ipation in peace rallies and his alliance with the French Communist
Party. If that was not enough, one could learn more about the reorga-
nization of canonical plastic values when reading Clement Greenberg's
article in the Spring 1955 issue of Partisan Review entitled "American
Type Painting." This piece explained historically and in detail why
American painting had finally replaced French painting as modern
canonical standard. This dazzling if propagandistic tract was a long text
crafted in such a way as to show the relevance of several formal paint-
ing qualities, which Greenberg defined as American, for expressing the
authenticity and complexity of the age. All these were set in opposi-
tion to an exhausted and weak French tradition unable to stand tall
against those cold new perils threatening from the East. Even if Green-
15. See the letter Clyfford Still sent to Art News after an article by Michel Tapie ap-
peared in the famous series "Mathieu Paints a Picture" (February 1955).
16. See Life 37 (13 December 1954): 43-44.
17. See the article by B. H. Friedman, "Profile: Jackson Pollock," Art in America (De-
cember 1955): 49, 58, 59. The article is illustrated with a picture by Hans Namuth. Pol-
lock is presented as actively dripping on the canvas and described with words like "free-
dom," "energy and motion made visible," "complete honesty," "in complete opposition
to ... the Leger mural."
berg's intellectual gymnastics were close to those of a contortionist, his

formalist linear scheme demonstrating that American art was obvi-
ously at the apex of a glamorous and long historical pyramidal con-
struction, now even recognized by Paris, was strategically brilliant.
This move rendered the chatty and personal Parisian art criticism use-
less, childish, and egocentric, unable to address seriously the momen-
tous historical challenge posed by the Russian threat. New American
painting, in its freshness and roughness was all over the French, so to
speak. After such a blazing article, coming in the wake of Greenberg's
intervention in Art Digest in September 1953, in which he already an-
nounced the demise of Paris, "la cause etait entendue," American art,
even if not completely accepted at home, nevertheless was ruling the
new postwar world. The putsch seemed complete.18 In fact, 1955 was
the year Sidney Janis sold Pollock's Blue Poles to Fred Olsen, the im-
portant collector, for a record price of six thousand dollars.
No wonder Breton and Estienne, in February 1955, felt the need to
rejuvenate the faltering and vacillating Parisian artistic image. Their
alliance was, even if somewhat desperate, a powerful one because it
succeeded in rooting, at a vital moment, their argument deep in the
French cultural past, reaching all the way to the origin of their national
identity: the Gauls. This surprising point was made through an exhi-
bition that simultaneously presented Gallic coins and contemporary
automatic abstract paintings.
Several factors around 1954-55 had pushed both Breton and Esti-
enne to participate actively in a redefinition of Parisian avant-garde art.
They were, it is clear, reacting to the American cultural push, but also,
one should not forget, to the Parisian situation. What was sorely miss-
18. "Art Autre" and "Lyrical Abstraction" had some critical success in Paris due, in
part, to the support and explanations from art critics such as Michel Tapie and Charles
Estienne. The problem was that the discourse they articulated, their rationale for sup-
porting such an art, was a far too poetic discourse-when it was not purely an economic
one-to have a serious theoretical impact. Their writings and diatribes certainly shook
the sleepy Parisian art world, but without being able to give this art scene a sense of co-
herence, focus, and force similar to what New York could offer. Despite the local glow-
ing hegemony in Paris of "Art Autre," "Tachisme" or "Abstraction Lyrique," the vital-
ity, meaning, and importance of much of the new art was not really discussed seriously,
argued convincingly or, more importantly, presented internationally. Art criticism be-
came a lucrative, witty, poetic exercise where differences were not clearly perceived or
discussed. Rather, they were erased in order to fit them-not into a crisp, coherent ide-
ological structure as in America-but into amorphous, luxurious, market-oriented com-
modities. This, paradoxically, was to be Paris' downfall: the breakdown of the verb, the
incapacity to articulate, to mount a coherent, historically convincing cultural discourse,
the way it seemed to have been able to do for centuries.
SERGE GUILBAUT 177
ing in the Parisian abstraction they sought was an artistic discourse

concerned with the contemporary plight of the individual. The free-
dom of movement allowed by automatism, in sharp contrast to the aca-
demicization of geometrical abstraction codified by Alberto Magnelli
and Auguste Herbin, seemed to offer renewed possibilities and hopes.
What they also wanted was to revamp Surrealism as a critical and dis-
criminatory force, far from the all-inclusiveness of Tapie's "Art Autre. "
This was the perfect occasion for Breton and Estienne to strike several
targets at once. Breton, thanks to his argument, could rejoin the main-
stream of avant-gardism through a renewal of automatism. Thanks to
the emphasis on the local, Estienne could counter the international jet-
set's spectacular enterprise in which his enemy Tapie was involved
with his gimmicky "Art Autre, " while simultaneously correcting the
false idea that abstract expressionism was an American invention. Two
philosophies clashed to the delight of Combat's readers, who witnessed
for several months the fireworks produced by two antagonistic dis-
courses rooted in opposite visions of cultural politics. Tapie's, related
to the anarchistic and individualistic Dadaist tradition, was in fact his
call for the integration of Pollock. On his self-aggrandizing interna-
tional "Art Autre" front, Tapi6 was closely connected to American
avant-garde galleries and a privileged public through his involvement
with the abstract reactionary painter Mathieu who had created a bilin-
gual art magazine for a luxury Transatlantic Liner called The United
States Line Paris Review. The fact that the socialist-oriented Surreal-
ist accordion player, Charles Estienne, insisted on wearing fisherman's
clothes and cap from Brittany and preferred a small sail boat to the big
transatlantic liner, clearly and symbolically characterized the two
antagonistic worlds these two art critics inhabited and aggressively
promoted. The critique they mounted was not only directed against
geometric "utopian" abstraction, but also against bourgeois and com-
munist realism-and indirectly against what stood for the "Atlantic
Civilization," as the communist painter Andre Fougeron called it. The
importance given to authenticity, to the life of the mind, to interior and
poetic life, was in direct opposition to what was perceived in France as
a contemporary nascent consumerist culture symbolized by the
"American way of life."
For some skeptics from both the left and right political spectra in
France, authenticity seemed to be the best weapon against the Ameri-
can type of rampant commercialism. In the middle of the intense an-
tagonism between Tapie and Estienne, centered around the identity of
High Parisian Culture, luck, in typical Surrealist fashion, struck the

Surrealist poet Andre Breton. After reading the latest book by Lancelot
Lengyel called L'art gaulois dans les medailles published in 1954,
which analyzed stylistic differences between Greek and Celtic coins,
Breton realized he had stumbled on a very rich, perhaps even subversive
and liberating, moment of Western history. This moment, if properly
handled, could revamp the flagging Parisian contemporary art world.
The fact that Gallic/Celtic coins were, according to Lengyel, progres-
sively "deconstructing" Greek realism struck Breton as the key he
needed to reconnect with a critical past that had been forgotten by his
contemporaries. Breton saw the progressive unraveling and final de-
struction of Greek anthropomorphism displayed in the Gallic adapta-
tions of Greek coins as the very key to understanding and explaining
the recent resurgence, after so many centuries, of a lyrical stylistic
strain in contemporary abstraction. "Abstraction Lyrique" could then
be, after a long eclipse, the sign of a profoundly rooted subversive trait
of French culture. As Breton was saying with a certain glee, this was an
enchanted moment, when the old lock that had kept French art buried
in classicism for so long was bursting open, finally releasing a wave of
pleasure that could name feelings that Breton had been repressing for
so long, those feelings that could only be represented by a form of ex-
pressionistic abstraction. After all, he realized that this abstract lan-
guage had been what automatic Surrealism had been after all along, but
had been unable to deliver. Suddenly, all had become clear. After a cen-
tury of slow subterranean travel, Gallic revolt was again erupting
through the boring surfaces of convention in order to propose a new way
to live, feel, and act. From now on, Breton felt, abstraction would be Gal-
lic or would not be. This sudden resurgence was also of course closely
related to the realization that the momentum was oozing out of Paris.
Can one read this resurgence of Gallic ingenuity and underground re-
sistance as an attempt to counteract a strong push by American inter-
ests? I think one can, in particular when one knows that the article Bre-
ton published in Combat in February 1955 was called "Present des
Gaules. De Part gaulois 'a Part moderne ou l'histoire d'une resis-
tance. "/19 In any case, this is also the way Dore Ashton read it in her Sep-
tember 1955 article on the Parisian art scene in Art and Architecture.20
19. Andre Breton, "Le pr6sent des Gaules. De Part gaulois a Part moderne ou l'his-
toire d'une resistance," Combat (7 February 1955).
20. Dore Ashton, "The French Malaise: The State of French Polemics," Art and Ar-
chitecture (July 1955): 10 and 33.
SERGE GUILBAUT 179
In order to make their point tangible, Breton, Estienne, and Lengyel or-
ganized an exhibition that mixed Celtic coins and medals with con-
temporary paintings and sculptures, mainly by artists connected with
the Surrealist "Etoile Scellee" gallery. The juxtaposition was supposed
to sing, to be a proof that French abstract lyrical painters like Marcelle
Loubschansky, Jean Messagier, Rene Duvillier, and Jean Degottex were
able to continue intuitively the oppositional stance started years ago.
This juxtaposition was supposed to produce, as Charles Estienne ex-
plained in the same issue of Combat, in an article entitled "Aux orig-
ines de l'esprit moderne," "a vision that is finally able to be extracted
out of the fog, along with a juxtaposition of the imaginary and the
real ... a Celtic culture repressed and buried under two thousand years
of spiritual Greco-Roman oppression." The opposition between the
Nordic Celts and the Mediteranean Greeks is important here as it sig-
nals the end of the Picasso/Matisse/Mediteranean pleasure connection.
The times were bitterly dangerous and the atmosphere so depressing
during the Cold War that it seemed inconceivable that artists should
revel in the pleasures of light and sea. The Celtic experiment, then, was
not considered as a decadent copy of Greco-Roman originals, but rather
as the production of a very creative invention producing a devastating
critique of realism, of traditional narrative representation. In one stroke
of a genius pen, Breton and Estienne deflated forever the seriousness of
bourgeois and communist realism. This became, by the same token, a
radical subversive underground critique of the invader, of the occupant.
This discovery and reconnection with the Celtic past was even able to
explain the fact that Romanesque art, Gothic art, and even some types
of French Renaissance art, in their strangeness, originality, and par-
ticularity had been dealing with internal psychological issues rather
than the representation of outside forms. Estienne continued: "Greco-
Roman humanism has imposed its system of forms: the Celto-French
artist has apparently bowed to this law, but the final expression is very
different, totally 'introverted,' to use a pedantic word."'21 In fact, what
Estienne saw in this new order of things was that the Celts had actu-
ally been dealing all along with other types of thinking, and in particu-
lar with Asian cultures during the Hallstat period. This opened up the
idea that contemporary abstract art, the one that rejects decoration for
deep poetical content, had roots outside of the West, allowing new con-
cepts to spring up against the all-powerful Hellenistic humanism. Asia
21. Charles Estienne, "Aux origines de l'esprit moderne," Combat (7 February 1955).
was correcting, softening, and deepening the academic Hellenistic an-

thropomorphic humanism. Marc Tobey, with his Pacific connection,
became for the French the epitome of this new salutary trend. What was
reinjected in Western culture was specifically a new and necessary
from of spirituality in an age of dry materialism and humanism too sub-
servient to the authority of realism, a humanism which, according to
Breton, the Celt invader Brunnus laughed at during his ransacking of
Delphi when he came across human-looking Greek gods. The avant-
garde, in this sketch, was returning to the "primitive" (national origins)
in order to revive a lost and apathetic society, in order to rediscover the
symbolic. Estienne, in a review of Lancelot Lengyel's book, emphasized
this particular point: "What one has to notice right away as a crucial
factor is that Celt abstraction is not satisfied by itself as is traditional
abstraction (read here Geometric Abstraction). It is a symbolic lan-
guage, apparently abstract, but whose role is to give form to a cos-
mogony, to a ritual and poetical system of the world" (Estienne, 5). This
is what Celt abstraction shared with the new brand of paintings Esti-
enne was defending: a symbolic representation of modern anxieties and
feelings. If Barnett Newman had discovered the Aztec and Coastal
Northwest native cultures for the development of the sources of his
own art in America, Breton responded with an avant-garde firmly
rooted in his own Gallic soil. He discovered roots not only deeply
buried in French history and the French psyche, but also deeply rooted
in a defiant, resisting mind. It is clear that French art, having rediscov-
ered its subversive past, could learn a few things from it in order to re-
sist modern cultural invasions from wherever they came: "There is a
prodigious richness of solutions proposed in those coins. One does not
think, without enormous nostalgia, about the inventiveness shown
there, as well as about everything that Roman conquest has plundered"
(Breton, 5). The Celts, fighting the damage done by the Romans and
their ersatz culture, became in Breton's text the example to follow in
order to survive under the inauthentic consumerist contemporary
world represented so vividly by the United States in leftist quarters in
France.
Breton's call for cultural resistance was exactly that, the acknowl-
edgment that he had lost the war, and that he would continue an un-
derground battle trying to revamp the Parisian spirit of the Resistance
he did not fully experience during the war. Breton's gallery, "L'Etoile
Scellee," was this free space where stubborn resistance could be
mounted against relentless waves of normalization. But, as the reader
SERGE GUILBAUT 181
has no doubt surmised, the space was like an entrenched camp and the
critics Breton and Estienne were a kind of Asterix/Obelix couple avant
la lettre, defending the last bastion of a deep and complex culture
against the unfurling hordes of consumerists of all sorts. They did not
lose that particular battle: some of the artists they defended became
part of the postwar French canon. But they certainly lost the war as this
particular branch of abstraction became only a footnote in French art
history. Still, the Breton/Estienne critique of consumerist society and
American culture hit hard. It was continued through other, more dras-
tic means by the Si tuationists who, often coming from the ranks of
Surrealism itself, lacked the reverence for art that Surrealism still nur-
tured. Les levees nues, the Surrealist-cum-Situationist Belgian maga-
zine of 1955, for example, continued the fight, transforming the Bre-
ton/Estienne resistance into modern urban cultural guerrillas. These
guerrillas were not merely some resisting Gallic Asterixes, but Inter-
national Situationists, invading subversive Cowboys, modern Trojan
horses spilling their hordes of cultural skeptics in the heart of cities
with devastating effect. Today, it is interesting to note, Situationists
have even succeeded in invading America, to some degree-not the
streets perhaps, but the halls of academia. And this is a revenge of sorts
for the French who always recognize their strength only after the en-
tire world has pointed it out to them.
At the end of the war, then, Paris, contrary to what Jean Cassou
feared, was able to give birth to a new critical culture, one not recog-
nized by the establishment, but a ferocious one nonetheless, disman-
tling old myths, proposing new strategies of opposition prompted by
the last failure of Breton's Asterix syndrome. This failure to understand
the new worldwide cultural reorganization brought about new cri-
tiques, some even springing from the heart of Surrealism itself. For ex-
ample, the Surrealist Egyptian poet Georges Henein expressed the fol-
lowing frustration: "Parisians are flat and decerebrated. Any meteque
(foreigner) can take this city, make tons of money, and easily startle a
crowd that still lives on the reputation of a genius that the city does not
have" (Henein, 132). Paris, lost in personal squabbles or in self-con-
gratulations could not see, in the image of Jean Cassou, that modernity
was defining a new world that had a totally different outline. Some
Parisian artists managed timidly to whisper the news, and that was
their strength, but they got lost in the intense nationalist brouhaha.

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1955: The Year the Gaulois Fought the Cowboy

Author(s): Serge Guilbaut

1955: The Year the Gaulois

Let me start with a letter written on 8 March 1957 by Jean Cassou, a

him that Paris was being constantly denigrated so as to demonstrate

The counter attack launched in 1955 by Andre Breton and Charles

external propaganda, without accepting the diktat of other cultural

reaching European shores in order to save and protect a weak continent.

with masculine, virile attributes while French culture and politics

12. "Report on France," Time (8 November 1954): 62.

berg's intellectual gymnastics were close to those of a contortionist, his

ing in the Parisian abstraction they sought was an artistic discourse

High Parisian Culture, luck, in typical Surrealist fashion, struck the

was correcting, softening, and deepening the academic Hellenistic an-

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