Interview With François Morellet by Bernard Marcadé (2011)

B. M.: Parallel to “Réinstallations”, your exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, we’ve managed – carrément, as we say over here – to put on this Kazimir Malevich-François Morellet event at Kamel Mennour…

F. M.: “Carrément”: there’s something naive and almost square about that adverb. Do people still say that, in fact?

B. M.: They do, to indicate a degree of daring – that they’re squaring up. But maybe young people would also say “a Malevich-Morellet show, ça assure grave!” Wicked stuff. (I see that my unconscious is giving me the nod here: in 1960 you were a founder member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel – GRAV, for short!)

F. M.: Summing up, we shouldn’t overstate the gravity of the situation. But regarding the principle of this exhibition, as you know, it was Kamel Mennour who had this very nice idea…

B. M.: So it’s all about K.M then! Unlikely as it may be, this coming together is interesting, especially as you have referred to the inventor of Suprematism several times in your work, as we’ll see. But to keep with the title, I remember a fiction by Christian Besson¹ describing the end of a festive soirée at your place when Danielle, seeing you stagger up the stairs to your bedroom, called out “T’es carrément rond !”

F.M.: Squarely round and plastered, yes, and my latest work, which hasn’t been exhibited yet, is half-square and half-round, and its title reminds me of a bawdy song from my youth: “It’s not round and it’s not pointed and it’s not square, my asshole is oval.” The rest I leave to other survivors and initiates from our Belle époque.

B. M.: Well, that’s the least we could expect from someone who claims to descend from “the prestigious line of enemies of the square.” You also indicate this allegiance in a text you wrote for the book we published in relation to your exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1990, Le Ballet des Beaux-Arts. In this text you drolly describe your relation to Malevich’s squares. Allow me to read a few lines 2: 

         “The square

         In my youth, I believed – like many people – that Malevich had found in squares a particular charm, using them to make several “portraits” (as Strzeminski so aptly put it).

         The truth is altogether different. The daring Malevich tackled the square for other reasons entirely. First of all, we should remember that his satirical quadrilateral portraits cover but a brief period, itself preceded and followed by regular paintings.

         What humour, what ferocity there Is In these mutilated squares!”

You couldn’t have put it better! In the exhibition we have drawings from the same year as the famous Red Square and Black Square,showing Malevich’s more comical side. The artist’s Suprematist period is in effect preceded by his alogical, trans-mental period, also known as zaum. The Red Square itself is titled Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions; Black Square and Red Square(from the same year), Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack.These titles mean something. Even if Kazimir Malevich’s work soon took on a spiritualist, not to say mystical cast, the fact remains that his first Suprematist efforts were marked by a sense of the absurd. And so I like to suppose that the development of your art followed a symmetrically inverse path to Malevich’s. Fairly quickly, the “seriousness” of your art turned into “frivolity,” whereas the humorous side of Malevich’s work changed into a form of aesthetic absolute.

F. M.: When I wrote that text, more than twenty years ago, I didn’t know about Malevich’s astonishing, light and ironic zaum period, which is illustrated by a few of the drawings exhibited here. But he quickly – and mistakenly – came round to the view that he had to make serious art to be properly in synch with the revolutionary ideal of his times. He was so sincere, so confident of the revolutionary virtues of his art. And yet he was violently rejected by the artistic agents of Communist power.

B. M.: It’s true that the revolutionary ideal often leans towards transcendence and even religiosity.

F. M.: He might have thought that there was a moral obligation to stop joking around with art. When, after his Suprematist period, he made his series of very stiff, very stylised peasants, he was in a sense going back to the works of his youth. If that had been successful, it might have seemed like an opportunistic regression. But, as you know, the success he enjoyed during his lifetime could hardly have been more modest. He had the violent experience of a clash with the imbecile aesthetic ideology of Zhdanov. Consequently, these last works are more tragic than opportunist. But let’s get back to the period of Malevich’s work that was (and still is) authoritative for modern and contemporary art. When I started making my “geometrical” paintings (I was in the provinces and didn’t want to go to art school), people didn’t say, “That’s shocking,” but more, “Ah, but they did that before the war,nobody talks about that nowadays!” So, it wasn’t very encouraging, but as of 1952 I took an enthusiastically and radically anti-“School of Paris” and, in general, anti-“inspired art” stance, and Malevich’s Suprematist works were a little bit too transcendent for me. I was much more influenced, for example, by the “duo collages” made in 1918 by Jean Arp (the anarchist deserter) together with Sophie Taeuber (the Art Deco young girl), that alliance of Dada and “precise lightness.” One of them cut out squares and rectangles with the guillotine and the other stuck them randomly on a piece of cardboard as they went along. I was also fascinated, of course, by the activities of the painter Van Doesburg, who was one of the founders of Concrete Art while working as a Dada poet under the name I.K. Bonset. In fact, what really upset me is that Malevich’s squares are not square.

B. M.: Which indeed is what you write, with mild irony, in your Ballet des Beaux-Arts:

           “I have spent many hours in prestigious museums, a tape measure in my pocket, waiting for the attendant to nod off so I could unmask these monstrous quadrilaterals.

           Of course, I did once find a square, square. But it was a trick – a fake,or more likely the work of amalicious pupil.

           No, Malevich did not like squares. Zhdanov, who apparently did not share this loathing, could not convince him, to the extent that Malevich chose to abandon geometry rather than be obliged to paint regular squares.”

F. M.: That has to be taken with at least four pinches of salt. I’ve always been fascinated by works of art that use systems and that are spread “all over,” without “composition”, like for example the walls of the Alhambra in Granada. In that text I was poking a bit of fun at a giant, an unshakeable monument.

B. M.: Still, you have paid him two “homages” in the form of integrations, an architectural one (in Chambery) in 1982 (Le Fantôme de Malévitch), and one in a natural setting (beside the lake at Kerguéhennec) in 1990 (Le Naufrage de Malévitch).

F. M.: In Chambéry they asked me to do an intervention on the façade of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. On that façade there were three empty niches around the entrance. I played with the idea that there was a square hidden behind the façade, three corners of which were just behind the three niches, while the fourth one was down on the ground, in front of the door. It amused me to make a joke with a square, and of course, the artist who personifies the “universal pure artistic square” is Malevich! It wasn’t very serious and just a little bit mischievous. For me, Malevich is above all the Black Square, and so I liked the idea of conjuring up its ghost, fittingly, in white.

In Kerguéhennec, too, I imagined a square, a very big one this time, that had sunk in the water, leaving only its corners visible. This big square was on the bottom of the lake – at least virtually it was: whereas three of its corners were coming out on to the shore, the fourth corner was supposed to be in the water. Hence the idea of the “wreck” which should, historically, come before the “ghost.” For art lovers, Malevich is almost a common noun synonymous with square. And, once again, since I felt rather far away from this square, this emblem of transcendence, once again I enjoyed teasing it. As you know, we only tease people we like.

B.M.: We find this idea of the ghost in the three “sub-prematist” pieces in the show. Playing on the relief of neon tubes you make Malevich’s three big “icons” (the square, circle and cross) surge forth in a ghostly way. We can identify their forms perfectly, without them being explicitly represented. 

F.M.: Yes, it’s true. My square, my circle and my cross seem to belong more to the world of ghosts or illusions than to that of Malevich’s heavy black Suprematist forms. Those are perhaps the two extreme ways of representing geometric forms. They should, I think, be used with moderation.

B. M.: You have teased Mondrian in the same way… Malevich and Mondrian have often been identified as belonging to a genealogy of “pure and sublime” painting. Perhaps this exhibition is a chance to mess around with aesthetic categories a bit?

F. M.: Of course, you have familiarised me with the humorous aspect of Malevich, for my ignorance of which lack of culture is no excuse.

B. M.: I think that you sensed that, nevertheless. When you described those famous squares of Malevich’s as “satiric portraits,” you put it perfectly.

F. M.: The Malevich drawings exhibited here are light and subtle, not to mention the ones that are frankly humorous. They’re very close to what I would have liked to do at one point. They’re so much finer and more delicate than Kandinsky’s, say. In fact, I felt deliciously ashamed to be meddling in all this…

B. M.: Ultimately, this rather far-fetched idea of bringing the two of you together may make it possible to look at your respective bodies of work in a different way?

F. M.: My own works can make me look much more “serious” than Malevich’s drawings. So, that’s 15 all.

B. M.: Equal, like in tennis…

F. M.: That’s the only sport I did, and I wasn’t much good.

B. M.: Your exhibition is wholly dedicated to the square, in every possible state.

F. M.: Yes, but the square also got me into a terrible state. As of 1952, when I decided to reduce subjective decisions in my work, I eliminated the rectangle, because it implies twice as many subjective decisions as the square, which has only one. There was one other geometric figure that was also defined by a single dimension, which is the circle. But to me the circle seemed less abstract at the time than the square, since it evoked more natural forms. In the end I stayed and, with one or two infidelities, have remained faithful to my good old squares.

B. M. : The oldest piece in the exhibition, 3 carrés inclinés à 90°, 75°, 60° avec leurs côtés supérieurs rectilignes is from 1979. For all its formal rigour, it’s still quite droll.

F. M.: Because the squares are of different sizes (the lowest is 1.5 metres and the highest is 1.75 metres), and as the idea, for one thing, is to place the base of each of the three canvases on the floor and, for another, to align their tips, you logically end up with two squares that are ridiculously askew.

B. M.: That reminds me of the exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1990, which you entitled Le Ballet des Beaux-Arts. There is something about that piece which moves between burlesque and choreography. 

F. M.: Yes, I imagined this ridiculous ballet in which big squares were doing pointes, skipping from one page to another, with the movement being indicated simply by the classic comix ideogram, the comma shape.

B. M.: Staying in the same register, I can’t not mention number one in your famous series Géométrie, figures hâtives, for which you fairly and squarely (quite literally) put in your own anatomy. In the exhibition with Kamel you have been more restrained, by more modestly putting black squares together with neon tubes. 

F. M.: I’m glad you mentioned Géométrie, figures hâtives,in which the square was represented by four marks that I wouldn’t be able to make today. In a very different way, I made a series of works under the generic title Steel Life (a pun on “still life”). In a reference to the traditional framing (with flat irons) of paintings, it consisted of white squares whose surroundings were taking a holiday and starting to peel away from the tableau. Recently, and for this exhibition in particular, I made negative versions of these works: the white one became black and the flat iron surrounding it became a neon. I hope to have many years yet to mutilate and torture the dear old square!

1 « Carrément rond », in Quelques courbes en hommage à Lamour, Musée des Beaux-Arts, de Nancy/RMN, 2003
2 François Morellet in LeBallet desBeaux-Arts.Imschoot, Uitgevers, 1990