Jacqueline Lamba

Jacqueline Lamba, Jacqueline Lamba also Breton ( born November 17, 1910 in Saint- Mandé, † July 20, 1993 in Rochecorbon ) was a French painter. Lamba was known as the second wife and muse of André Breton; 1934-1947 she was an active participant in the surrealist movement, which was led by Breton. In her second marriage, she married in 1946 in the United States, the American sculptor David Hare. After the separation in 1955, she returned to France, and she concentrated on her painting, which approached to the style of Abstract Expressionism.

• 2.1 Perception as an artist
• 2.2 Posthumous exhibitions
• 2.3 movie

Life and work

Childhood and education

Jacqueline Lamba was born as the second daughter of José Lamba, an agricultural engineer, and Jane Pinon in Saint- Mandé. 1912, the couple moved for professional reasons with her and her sister Huguette to Cairo. Two years later the father died in Heliopolis following a traffic accident, and the mother returned with her ​​daughters back to France. After attending school in Neuilly and Versailles, she studied art at the École nationale des arts Décoratifs and took courses at the painting school of André Lhote in Paris. Fellow student and lifelong friend was Theodora Markovitch, later known as Pablo Picasso's mistress Dora Maar. As an idealist Lamba new ideas of their time was required and joined leftist circles and communist students. Her nickname was " Quatorze Juillet " (14th July).

André Breton

In 1927, her mother died of tuberculosis. Lamba had to become self-employed and worked as a French teacher in Cardiff and in Greece. Back in Paris, she worked as a window dresser in a department store and at night as an underwater dancer at the Coliseum, a revue theater in the Paris Pigalle entertainment district. In May 1934, she was looking at the Café " Cyrano " at the Place Blanche in Paris acquaintance with André Breton, whose writings they had already been highly appreciated, for example, the novel Nadja. Both took a long walk through nocturnal Paris. In La nuit du Tournesol, Breton's poem from 1923, Breton had anticipated this encounter. The wedding took place on August 14th of the year. Witness the bride was the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, for Breton, the writer Paul Éluard, and the photographer was Man Ray. Lamba, who had already published experimental photographs in the magazine La Revue du Cinema, henceforth took part in exhibitions of the Surrealist group. Breton is they represent in his works L' Amour fou, L' Air de l' eau and mirage. So he described in the 1937 published work L' Amour fou the time of their first meeting:

" The young woman who just came in was from a touch - fire dressed? - Surrounded, all discolored, icy before this complexion like a dream from rust and green. [ ...] I must say that probably - at this point, on May 29, 1934 -. , This woman was scandalously beautiful "

On December 20, 1935, the daughter Aube was born. In 1938, she took with her husband on a lecture tour in Mexico in part and met Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, with whom she developed a close friendship. As Breton in 1939 was drafted into the military, she lived for a short time at Dora Maar and Picasso in Antibes. In Picasso's painting of August of the year Pêche de nuit à Antibes she appears as a character and her friend Dora.

Emigration to the United States

Link to image ( Please note copyrights )

1940 Breton was discharged from the military service. In German-occupied France under Petain's Vichy government were artists who were sympathetic to leftist movements, to persecution. Varian Fry, who led the management of the charity Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille, supported the departure of the Breton family. Until their departure to the United States they lived in Bel Air Castle at Marseille and met willing to leave on artists such as Max Ernst, André Masson and Marcel Duchamp. In the summer of 1941 the family Breton arrived in New York after a stopover in Martinique. There was soon a group of emigre surrealist and interested American artists met in Breton or in Peggy Guggenheim's apartment. In 1942, the Surrealist magazine VVV was founded. Published by VVV was Breton in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and David Hare. She has been involved in four plants. A few surrealist works from this period - objects, collages and paintings - are obtained. There are usually geometric forms reminiscent example of the work of Óscar Domínguez and especially to Roberto Matta. In January 1943, she took the painting In Spite of Everything (1942 ) on Guggenheim's exhibition " Exhibition by 31 Women" in the gallery Art of This Century in part.

Separation of Breton and second marriage with Hare

Lamba separated in the fall of 1942 after an affair with David Hare by Breton and moved in the fall of 1944 with Hare Roxbury, Connecticut, where Alexander Calder and Yves Tanguy lived. In April of that year she had her first solo exhibition in New York Norlyst Gallery; On this occasion, she wrote the catalog text manifestos de peinture. The wedding with Hare took place in January 1946. After a ten-month stay in Mexico at Frida Kahlo, she traveled to the West of the United States, exploring the lifestyle of Indians. The following year she met Dora Maar and Picasso in France again; she took the last time participated in a Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and organized her first exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Pierre Loeb. In June 1948, her son Merlin was born in New York. This year she separated from the surrealist style and destroyed some of their works.

Separation of Hare and a change of style

Link to image ( Please note copyrights )

In 1955, Lamba separated by David Hare and returned to Paris, where they are exclusively devoted to painting. She experimented with different techniques and styles long. In Simiane- la -Rotonde in Provence, where she spent her summer, she found to her own painting, which had mainly landscapes to the subject: Your paintings and drawings, the American Abstract Expressionism similar to bring the freed from the unconscious to the surrealists expression. 1967 Picasso gave her an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Antibes.

Jacqueline Lamba lived since 1988 in a home in a very secluded Rochecorbon, where she worked on pastel paintings to her death. She died after a dementia disease on 20 July 1993. Their grave site can be found at Sache, Indre -et -Loire.

Reception

Perception as an artist

Lambas artist career has suffered from Breton's perception, they do not even recorded in the second edition of his work Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1945 ). In Mark Polizzottis biography of Breton Lamba is quoted as saying:

"Il me présentait à ses amis comme une parce qu'il naïade jugeait cela plus poétique que de me Presenter comme un peintre en quête de travail. Il en moi ce qu'il voyait voulait voir mais en fait il ne me pas voyait réellement. ( He introduced me to his friends as Naiad is because he was the more poetic, than to imagine an artist and their work. He saw in me what he wanted to see, but he did not see me really. ). "

Posthumous exhibitions

The Gallery 1900-2000 in Paris organized in 1998 Lambas first posthumous exhibition, which contained 37 works from the period 1946-1984. Followed in 2001 by a traveling exhibition in the towns of Santiago de Compostela, New York, Oakland, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in Saint Petersburg. 2007 there was a retrospective at the Château de Tours and in June 2008 exhibitions at Galerie La maison de Brian, as well as the Château de Simiane- la -Rotonde. Another exhibition Lambas took place at the Galerie 1900-2000 in the context of the art fair FIAC 2009. As part of the exhibition " elles @ centrepompidou " from the same year, which dealt only with the art of women, she was also represented. On the art market, however, the works of Jacqueline Lambas are little in circulation.

Film

Jacqueline Lambas daughter, Aube Breton Elléouët, has produced a film on DVD. In 2004, Fabrice Maze filmed the Paris studio Lambas on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle under the title Jacqueline Lamba, painter and documented their lives through photographs and interviews.