The exhibition Eugène Gabritschevsky: The Theatre of Mutations begins a series of personal exhibitions at the Galerie Christophe Gaillard: a display of works by artists who were promoted by the late art dealer Daniel Cordier. This follows an initial collective presentation of selected works from the Daniel Cordier collection that the Galerie Christophe Gaillard acquired in spring 2022. Eugène Gabritschevsky: The Theatre of Mutations brings together around fifty works produced on paper from the start of the 1940s up to the 1960s. It immerses us in the prolific world of an artist whose story was both unique and remarkable.
Eugène Gabritschevsky was born in Moscow in December 1893. He spent his childhood in Russia. He was from an aristocratic Muscovite family and he had a cultivated upbringing. Gabritschevsky enjoyed a successful career as a biologist, but this was cut short when he descended into madness. His father was a bacteriologist who introduced Eugène to science. Gabritschevsky soon specialised in issues relating to heredity. He worked in the United States, then in Paris, France, at the Institut Pasteur. In his free time as a young man he would produce expressionist paintings in parallel to his scientific research.
His parents introduced him to theatre when he was very young. He discovered Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1910s at the Mariinsky Theatre in Moscow. A theatrical motif in his art was born of this formative experience – we find variations on this theatre-related theme in his works, through depictions of curtains, crowds and stage decor.
Gabritschevsky was confined in 1929 to a psychiatric hospital in Haar, near Munich, Germany, for schizophrenia. He therefore had to abandon his research in genetics. That was when the scientist’s story ended. But it was also when the story of a painter – isolated and tormented by illness – began. Gabritschevsky created a secret, visionary world during his fifty years in hospital – a world that other artists quickly admired. Among these admirers were Max Ernest and Jean Dubuffet. The latter developed and promoted the notion of outsider art. Other enthusiasts included art collectors and gallery owners, such as Alphonse Chave, who acquired around five thousand works from the family for his gallery in Vence, France, and sold over six hundred of these to Daniel Cordier.
‘I discovered Gabritschevsky in 1959 in the art brut collections,’ said Daniel Cordier in 1964 during a retrospective entitled 8 ans d’agitation that he organised when he closed his art gallery in that same year. ‘His oeuvre is remarkable as the artist was confined to a psychiatric hospital for thirty years. But he does not owe to his madness the qualities that he reveals. Through the four thousand gouache works he has left, he ranks alongside Klee by virtue of his variety of themes. In some ways, he is Klee’s pathological counterpart.
His depictions fluctuate between a reality that is rendered meticulously (for example, flowers, birds and fish), embellished surfaces that we can consider abstract, and a third aspect that is purely imaginary (for example, crazed faces, dense crowds and unreal landscapes). This wide range of motifs immerses the viewer in the artist’s frenzies. And transcribing and sharing these frenzies is where both the difficulty and spice of the paintings lie. The works were hastily produced with very few resources. Yet expressiveness pervades them through multiple intentions that endlessly breathe new life into the themes.’[1]
All the way up to his death in Haar in 1979, Eugène Gabritschevsky carried on mixing art and science and trying out different techniques in his works on paper. He produced these works of art in series and called them his ‘fantasies’. His portrayals included landscapes, plant variations, galleries of people, realistic and imaginary animals, theatre scenes, night scenes, monochrome explorations, crowds, and towns of inordinately designed buildings. He produced his creations on whatever everyday material he could find around him – for example, newspapers, calendar pages, magazine pages and administrative notes. He used a range of art techniques, from watercolour and gouache to crayon and ink, and tried out many methods – including dripping, staining, folding, scratching, stamping with rags, and splashing with toothbrushes – to randomly reveal mutated and hybrid forms, presented however his finds unveiled them. Gabritschevsky gave these forms anthropomorphic and entomological attributes with a degree of precision that recalled the scientific research he conducted in laboratories before he was confined to a psychiatric hospital. In this way, he created a mysterious – and often bizarre – world populated by strange, ghostly creatures.
His works are today conserved in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in the Pompidou Centre in Paris; in the Musée d'Art Moderne in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; in the Les Abattoirs museum in Toulouse; in the Abbaye de Beaulieu-en-Rouergue in the Tarn-et-Garonne department of France; in the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne; and in the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Some of Gabritschevsky’s works are also in several private collections, including those of Bruno Decharme and Antoine de Galbert.
[1] Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1964.