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François Willi Wendt (Berlin, Germany 16 November 1909 - Châtillon, Hauts-de-Seine, died on 15th. May 1970, France) is a French non-figurative painter of German origin belonging to the new Ecole de Paris. Having decided to choose painting, in 1937 he arrived in France his future exile and adoption country; there, he will become “one of the best and most personal painters of his generation, an artist of great purity and strong culture. His self exactness, his unpretentiousness and his moral sense as well, have too long kept him away from the fame he should have deserved". In the collective exhibitions in which he was invited to participate, he was regularly associated with the most famous painters of the New Ecole de Paris, particularly Roger Bissière, André Lanskoy, Serge Poliakoff, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, but also with many other better known painters to-day.

Life
Born into a simple family, François Willi Wendt was awarded a scholarship and carried on his secondary studies at the Berlin high school “Zum Grauen Kloster” until his Abitur, obtained in 1928.

From 1928 to 1934, he studied philosophy (with Karl Jaspers & Martin Heidegger), English and German literature & history of arts at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg & Freiburg-im-Breisgau. In a parallel direction he started drawing and painting - his first abstract attempts date back to 1931 - and for some time, he frequented painter Julius Bissier’s studio.

His adhesion to the innovating ideas of abstract art found itself quite naturally associated to the perilous defence of democratic liberties, in particular to artistic freedom which Nazi tyranny was going to fly against. Close to the surroundings of opposition to Nazism, he was imprisoned, then watched by the police, while his friends knew the same fate or the earliest concentration camps. In 1934 for those reasons, he left the university at the doctorate level.

In 1936 he was allowed to travel in Italy in order to improve his knowledge in archaeology. He worked with painter Adolf Fleischmann who was staying there, and definitively chose painting.

In 1937 his opposition to the Hitlerian regime determined him to go into exile. He left Germany for France (Paris) - where he arrived in September with his friend painter Greta Saur/Sauer: for a while he frequented Fernand Léger’s studio and was introduced to Wassili Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, Otto Freundlich & Serge Poliakoff; he took part in exhibition groups and until the declaration of war, he also worked as a scenery painter, a language teacher & a journalist.

In 1938, interned at the La Santé Prison (Paris), as “undesirable alien” he was released on Robert Desnos’s intervention and with additional support from Robert Delaunay, he was allowed to stay in Paris with the status of political refugee.

From September 1939, he experienced the concentration camps for stateless persons first at Orléans and Cepoy (near Montargis), then at the Camp des Milles and then Nîmes from where he escaped with some friends in the course of summer 1940. He then took refuge in Marseille, and went underground. Considered as a “fugitive” from Germany he was again interned from October 1941 to March 1942 at the work camp of Aubagne where he was incorporated as an “prestataire” in the 829e GTRE from where, pronounced unfit, he was dismissed for health reasons. When the German extended to the south of France, at the end of 1942, he decided to take refuge clandestinely at Grenoble in the spring of 1943. He was again incarcerated for four weeks in September 1943 in the disciplinary prison of Chapoly in Lyon. Recommended by active members of the French Resistance to Professor Robert Minder of Grenoble University and P. Andry-Farcy, head curator at the Musée de Grenoble, his protection was ensured through the obtention of faked papers and an assistantship. He was living at Grenoble and La Tronche, later at Monestier-de-Clermont until the end of the war under the name of “François Aymon”.

At that time, at the villa Brise des Neiges (La Tronche) where his friend Greta Saur/Sauer had found an asylum after her internment in the Gurs internment camp, he met a refugee from Alsace, Charlotte Greiner, whom he will marry after the war, as soon as he was back to Paris in 1945.

He continued his pictural research directed to the pre-war field of abstract art and rapidly registered into the artistic movement which reconstituted itself. He took part in the tradition of the Salon des Surindépendants and from its foundation in 1946 in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles: in the latter he was active hand in the welcoming of the German painters who, after being stigmatized, and even persecuted by the nazi regime, had continued their creative activity.

In 1949, he began a friendship with Roger Van Gindertael, co-founder and former editor of the review Cimaise, as well as of the parisian pages of “Beaux Arts”(Bruxelles) and art critic of the newspaper Combat. Then in still precarious conditions - statute of stateless person, temporary permissions of stay, precarity of resources - the first group & personal group exhibitions take place, as well as a lightning ascension and the recognition of his peers. Painter Karskaya remembers; “... he was the most authentic, the most true to himself among painters. He did not need to sign his pictures, having one of them before one’s to find them without looking for his signature, in those babylonian salons...”

He moved to G. Péri Street, still at Châtillon. There, as well as in his Hoche Street’s studio, he would pursue the realization of his work, strictly anonymous, but under the wonderstruck look of some faithful friends and of his wife Charlotte who will support him his whole life long. In 1968, he finally obtained French nationality. Since his arrival in France, thirty years before, he already belonged to it in his heart. He owned his naturalization to the intervention, support and testimonies of Robert Minder, Professor at the College de France, Bernard Dorival, Head Curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, of Roger Van Gindertael, art critic, and of Painters Olivier Debré, Roger Bissière and Pierre Soulages.

He suddenly died at his home, on 15 May 1970.

Group exhibitions

 * 1938 “Point 38 by young ones” at the Galerie L’Equipe, dir.: J.Lacasse (Paris - France)
 * 1943 “3e Salon de printemps at Monte-Carlo, he exposes under the name of ‘’François Aymon’’ (organization: P.André Farcy, keeper of Grenoble Museum, France).
 * 1945 & 1946 Salon des Surindépendants (Paris - France)
 * 1946 to 1970 Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (Paris - France)
 * 1949 “Les Réalités Nouvelles” at the Chapelle of Ampere Highschool in Lyon, France.
 * 1949 & 1950 “Hostudsillingen” at Copenhagen and Arhus (Denmark)
 * 1952 & 1953 Salon d’octobre, (Paris - France)
 * 1954 Invited to the Salon de Mai, (Paris - France)
 * 1954 “Divergences” at the Galerie Arnaud, (Paris - France), organization: R. Van Gindertael.
 * 1955 Studio Paul Fachetti : Appel, Benrath, Boille, Calcagno, Debré, Downing, Goldfarb, Graziani, Ionesco, Jaffe, Kaiser, Laubies, Levée, Signori, Ting, Tsingos, Van Haardt, Wendt, (Paris - France)
 * 1955 “Phases of contemporary art” at the Galerie R. Creuze ( Paris – France), organisation : E. Jaguer
 * 1955 “Emigrated painters” (Ausgewanderten Maler) at the Städtische Museum of Leverkusen, Museum Morsbroich (Germany) with Jankel Adler, Lou Albert-Lasard, Eduard Bargheer, Max Beckmann, Francis Bott, Heinrich Campendonk, Henri Davring, Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich, Johnny Friedlaender, Hans Hartung, Paul Klee, Moise Kogan, Jeanne Kosnik-Freundlich, Rudolph Levy, Rolf Nesch, Max Peiffer Watenphul, Hans Purrmann, Joseph Sharl, Kurt Schwitters, Ferdinand Springer, Emma Stern, François Willi Wendt and Wols
 * 1955 “Six contemporary painters” at the Galerie Craven, (Paris - France): Istrati, Sigismond Kolos-Vary, Wilfrid Moser, Louis Nallard, Gérard Vulliamy and François W.Wendt (organisation: R.Van Gindertael)
 * 1956/1957 “Pentagone” at the Galerie Arnaud  (Paris - France) (artists selected by Michel Ragon, Pierre Restany, Roger Van Gindertael, Herta Wescher and Julien Alvard).
 * 1957 Invited at the Prix Lissone (Italy)
 * 1957 “50 years of abstract Painting ” at the Galerie Greuze, (Paris - France) on the occasion of the publication of “Dictionairy of  abstract Painting ” by Michel Seuphor (Publisher Fernand Hazan)
 * 1958 “Ecole de Paris”, Französische Malerei des Gegenwart/ French Painting ” at the Kunsthalle of Mannheim – Germany, (organisation: Pr.G.Fuchs and R. Van Gindertael)
 * 1959 “Neues aus der neuen Malerei” at the Städtisches Museum of Leverkusen, Museum Morsbroich (Germany) - Group of the studio Paul Fachetti, (organization : C. Schweicher)
 * 1960 “Permanence and actuality of painting” with Chafic Abboud, Bissière, Camille Bryen, Youla Chapoval, Oscar Gauthier, Istrati, Lanskoy, Jean Milo, Wifrid Moser, Louis Nallard, Pougny, Soulages, de Staël, Gérard Vulliamy and François W. Wendt at the Galerie Raymonde Cazenave, Paris-France, (organisation: R. Van Gindertael)
 * 1961 ”Artistes du 16ème Salon des Réalités Nouvelles” at the Drian Gallery (London - Great Britain)
 * 1961, 1962 & 1963 “Montrouge Salon”, group “Line 4”, “La Vache noire” (Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, France)
 * 2006 “Réalités Nouvelles 1948-1955” at the Galerie Drouart (Paris - France)

Personal exhibitions

 * 1951 Paris, Galerie Colette Allendy (France)
 * 1954 Wuppertal, Galerie Parnasse - dir. Rolf Jährling (Germany)
 * 1955 Düsseldorf, Center of French studies (Germany)
 * 1955 Lausanne, Galerie L’Entracte - dir. Ernest Genton (Switzerland)
 * 1955 Ascona, Galerie La Citadella - dir. Gisèle Real  (Switzerland).
 * 1959 Paris, Galerie Paul Fachetti (France)
 * 1963 Trier, with Greta Saur. Städtisches Museum Trier - dir. Curt Schweicher (Germany)
 * 1964 Frankfurt-am-Main, Galerie Dorothea Loehr (Germany).
 * 1971 Châtillon, Hauts-de-Seine, retrospective exhibition (France).
 * 1972 Paris, Foyer International d’Accueil de Paris Jean Monnet (FIAP) (France), retrospective exhibition (France).

Work
“What do we want? The transformation of our experiences into a whirldwind of colours and forms. Our technique? Let us call it another phoenix, ever renewed from past to the present. Our subject? There is only one, the future.” With these brief notes published in 1947 in the first album of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, François Willi Wendt had allowed to foresee the indomitable dynamism of his evolution.

But he did so reservedly because as he set at defiance the systematisation of geometric abstraction, at times he resists as well the temptation of the subjectivity of lyrical abstraction.

“For fifteen years (1938-1953), I have been dependent on graphism. From the beginning, I have been seeking the objective. Through this quest, I have discovered structure.” In this structure, François W. Wendt could see the constituting elements of the pictural space, with tension and density as attributes.

In a parallel direction, it had been clearly specified that the new research of the aesthetic activity liberated from the servitudes of figuration, required a deeper coincidence of the substance and form: “We must reach a synthesis where neither colour nor form nor content is absent. Finally I say: content though the basis of the banal, the worldly and the magic vanished.” And he would wonder: “Or shall we be for ever looking for new recipies to divide up plans, break surfaces, or pile on the paint? I wonder. Or is it not rather a question of: If you want to be a painter, paint?”

This last question implied an affirmative answer and a choice. From this very moment, François W. Wendt had recognized the primacy of the act of painting, the supremacy of the making over the concept for the accomplishment of being in situation in time and dependant on the constants of the human condition. This is the way we must understand the artist’s thought when jotting down these remarks: “painting is not an end in itself, but a means, like music and poetry; the choice of the pictural means is minor and depends on each one’s inclinations. It may be a matter of expressing, through suitable pictural means, not only our epoch in its most intimate structure, but also in what it overtops. Our blindness, our differences, our bondages infallibly express themselves in our painting. The forces which govern us, interior as well as exterior, may not always be definable. Without exception we are confined in life like all our fellowmen: this is our ivory tower and, perhaps, our only virtue.” And if he had been asked what principal efficiency factor appeared in the art of our time, he would have referred to the notion of intensity and his development has really constantly strained towards a greater intensity; the exceptional capacity of animation which he then expresses fully marks his very direct and varied pictural writing whose modalities he sometimes reduces to a tight texture and a measured structure in order to reconcile it with the spacial unit which does seem to have been his ultimate objective.

“It is clear that it is through the development of a dense rythmic structure with a coherence which meets that of substance, that F.W.Wendt has constantly reconciled the living reality of painting with that of nature. Yet, never did he allow his pictural activity to depend on an impulse received from the external world or, at least never consciously. Never, in his picture did he intend to consciously blend painting and natural phenomena or the perception he had of these phenomena. If nature is nevertheless present in his work, or if the spectator looking at his pictures believes he discovers it there, it will be less in so far as they derive from nature, than because a common order determines the physical milieu and the person’s mental space. Thus the temporal unity of the human being with the universe is revealed by the single act of painting. The eye and the mind remain wide open on an immeasurable space, one which is characteristically “his vital space” before becoming, on the canvas, a vibrating natural space for the spectator. F.W.Wendt displayed extreme sensitivity (thanks to the tension of his tight structuration that at times sight makes pictural nearly imponderable) the intensity of his accomplishment and clearness of conscience. Through his work (displayed as such, without other justification than his objective evidence and his admirable intrinsic qualities) F. Wendt has given an account of his presence in the world.”

Literature about François Willi Wendt

 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “Abstract painting, new situation” in “Premier Bilan de l’art actuel”,  “Le Soleil Noir, n°3&4 (1953)”
 * Wescher, Herta. “Hartung, Davring, Wendt, Leppien, Sauer/Saur & Wols” in “Art d’aujourd’hui, Série 4, n°6 (August 1953)”
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. Twelwe lithographs of the painter Callyannis, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Carrey, Natalia Dumitresco, Hilton, Poliakoff, Istrati, Gilbert, Greta Sauer, Pons, Selim Turan and Wendt,
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “Wendt” in “Cimaise n°5 (April 1954)”
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “Remarks about the current painting / Propos sur la peinture actuelle” Paris (1955)
 * Seuphor, Michel. A Dictionary of Abstract painting,  Editions Hazan (1957).
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “Painters of German origin in France : Francis Bott, Leo Breuer, Henri Davring, Max Ernst, Adolf Fleischmann, Albert Flocon, Johnny Friedlaender, Hans Hartung, Jean Leppien, Hans Reichel, Greta Saur/Sauer, Ferdinand Springer, Wols and François Willi Wendt”  in “Allemagne d’aujourd’hui, n°4&5 (1957)”
 * Wescher, Herta. “Wendt” in “Cimaise n°VI/5, (1959)”
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “The choice of an art critic/Le choix d’un critique: Moser, Nallard and Wendt » in “L’Oeil n°55/56 (1959)”
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “ Permanence and topicality of painting / Permanence et actualité de la peinture” (1960)”
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “Réflexions sur l’Ecole de Paris” in “Quadrum n°9 (1960)”
 * Catalog of the exhibition (with Greta Saur/Sauer) of the “Städtisches Museum of Trier” (Germany) (1963)
 * Rousseau, Madeleine. “The artists in their studio /Les artistes dans leur atelier : “Wendt” in “Le Musée vivant n°17 (1° and 2° quarter 1963)”
 * Van Gindertael, Roger. “François Willi Wendt n’est plus” in “Les Lettres Françaises n°1336 (27 May 1970)”
 * “Catalog of the retrospective exhibition" organised by Châtillon-des-Arts and the commune of Châtillon (France): - Moulin, Raoul-Jean : “François W. Wendt, the invitation to life” - Van Gindertael, Roger : “François W. Wendt, the man and the work”  - Testimonies of Minder, Robert, Professeur in the Collège de France, Fontené, Robert and Lipsi, Morice chairman and deputy-chairman of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Herta Wescher, critic and art historian and  Karskaya, painter, 1971
 * Almuró, André. “Peinture, musique : François Willi Wendt”  in France Culture – Radioprogramm,  the 15th mai 1972
 * Ragon, Michel and Seuphor, Michel. “L'art abstrait, 1945 - 1970 (Volume 4)”, Maeght Editeur, 1974
 * Baltzer, Walter und Biermann, A. W. “Treffpunkt Parnass Wuppertal 1949-1965”, Kunst- und Museumsvereins Wuppertal, Von der Heidt-Museum, (Köln : Rheinland-Verlag) – Germany (1980)
 * Zu Salm-Salm, Marie-Amélie. “Echanges artistiques franco-allemands et renaissance de la peinture abstraite dans les pays germaniques après 1945” - Edition L'Harmattan (2004)
 * Schieder, Martin. “Im Blick des Anderen, die deutsch-französischen Kunstbeziehungen 1945-1959” (Passages - Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art - Akademie Verlag) (2005)
 * Arthur Cavanna, Daniel Shidlower, Domitille d'Orgeval. Catalog of the exhibition  “Réalités nouvelles 1948-1955” organised by the Galerie Drouart - Paris (2006)