Gérard Garouste, madness at the tip of the brush

At 76, Gérard Garouste enjoys a retrospective at the Center Pompidou (the first took place in 1988), with nearly one hundred and forty paintings, installations and a few sculptures. Even though she is most figurative, to many her painting will come across as Hebrew. Indeed, it is.

Not at the beginning, however: the curator of the exhibition, Cécile Debray, having had the happy idea of ​​proceeding with a – very successful – chronological display, we note that her first inspirations derive from Greek myths. Which won’t be much easier for some. We remember a student who, very good in spelling, but nil in mythology, described the subject of a painting by Nicolas Poussin as Eurydice playing the lyre to his companion Orpheus…

Much of the history of art requires a good knowledge of the Bible, the apocryphal gospels, the lives of saints, but also Metamorphoses of Ovid and other great classical texts: Gerard Garouste adds the Talmud. He himself learned Hebrew and converted to Judaism in 2014.

His father died too early to attend the ceremony, which would probably not have delighted him: anti-Semite and convinced Petainist, he had taken advantage of the Vichy laws on the status of Jews to despoil the Levitan establishments of their property. He was, moreover, not an ideal father, if we judge by the table Cavedpainted in 2007, the representative beating his son on the ground… Gérard Garouste evoked this difficult childhood in an astonishing book published in 2009, L’Intranquille. Self-portrait of a son, a painter, a madman (with Judith Perrignon, L’Iconoclaste), where he mainly describes the mental disorders that she may have caused in him, sometimes forcing him to stay in hospital.

Taste for myths

Other moments of his childhood, with a Burgundian uncle and aunt, were more serene, but just as important in the formation of his taste for myths: “I grew up in Burgundy, a land of legends and fairy tales. It has always fascinated me”he said.

But his father quickly sends him to a severe college in Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines) specialized for difficult students, the Montcel school, where he befriends other dunces, Patrick Modiano, Michel Sardou and especially Jean Michel Ribes.

Gérard Garouste shares with Jean-Michel Ribes the love of the theater

He shares with the latter the love of the theater, evident from the entrance to the exhibition which evokes the foundation, in 1966, by the two friends of the Compagnie du Pallium, then the realization of several sets for plays that Jean- Michel Ribes stages in other places. He also happens to design costumes and go on stage. At the same time, he studied at the National School of Fine Arts.

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