Emanuel Proweller at Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois

Emanuel Proweller (1918-1981) paid for the freedom and singularity of his work with an oversight that almost became permanent. Born in Poland, survivor of the Shoah, he arrived in Paris in 1948 with his wife and their daughter, not speaking French, having no other resource than his painting, which was then abstract and geometric. But it is already in such a particular way that it quickly interests Gabriële Buffet-Picabia and Francis Picabia and Alberto Magnelli.

What is revealed here is distinguished by constructions which seem unstable, crossed by obliques or curves, asymmetrical, difficult to describe. Many artists would have stopped there, especially since a certain success was on the horizon. But Proweller, in the mid-1950s, introduced human figures and objects, schematized but visible. The followers of the abstract abandon it. It nevertheless continues: a bather in a bikini, a symbolic hanged man, a self-portrait.

The drawing is clear and sharp, the colors are intense. He thus invents a form of pop art, a notion that does not yet exist. Briefly, around 1960, he returned to geometry, the time of ironic variations on the circle and the square. Then returns to reality, treated by juxtaposed flat areas. He only keeps the essentials of a gesture or an anatomy, with a very acute sense of abbreviation. It is urgent to reintegrate it into the history of the second half of the 20th century^e century, because his work proves that abstraction and figuration are not incompatible, but complementary.