In 1954, Jean Guyard, a Frenchman working as a civil servant in the tax department of the French Republic, married my cousin Marion Michelle, who had settled permanently in Paris after the dissolution of her five-year affair with the famous left-wing documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. Jean had grown up in the Morvan, one of the poorer regions of France, and had not been blessed with a bourgeois family or upbringing. However, he gravitated to Paris after World War Two, where he acquired an urban sheen and enjoyed the occasional stint as a radio actor. He’d had little exposure to the visual arts and had shown no indication that he would go down that road.
Marion, however, had always been with men who were artists (her first husband, Joseph Vogel, studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and launched a modestly successful career through the auspices of the Federal Arts Project, a New Deal program). Under Marion’s influence, Jean discovered his vocation as a painter and pursued it with passion for the rest of his life. He was 37 when he picked up his palette.
“Well Gauguin was 35 when he quit his job as a stockbroker to devote himself full time to his art (with a wife and five children),” you might reply. Yes, but even though painting entered Gauguin’s life as a hobby, he rubbed shoulders with the Impressionists and studied under Camille Pissaro.
Jean Guyard, though personable, remained a loner in the art world and never took a lesson in his life. Everything came from within. What emerged on canvas were colorful shapes transmogrifying, some vaguely anthropomorphic, meltingly contiguous – all resolutely non-representational. Since Jean had emerged with no knowledge of or interest in art history nor any style that was immediately recognizable, I could not see any movement or development in the hundreds of paintings he produced in a span of almost six decades.
I met Jean in 1961 when I was eleven years old, and my family relocated to Paris for two years. Marion had apprehensively invited the Philipson brood to her apartment in the 7th arrondissement, where my mother had to stanch the flow of childish derision triggered by the stacks of (to us) incomprehensible paintings that took up half the living room. Thereafter I was a frequent visitor (and sometimes sojourner) to Paris and knew Jean until his death. I can’t say we were close. Jean was as uninterested in our family as we were in his art. He adored Marion, however, and Marion adored her cousin, my mother. I benefited from that and felt that Jean and Marion were family in the fullest sense. Once I had grown up and had mastered French sufficiently enough to listen to his rants about the craven machinations of the French left, a grudging tendril of acceptance entered his heart. But we never talked about art. He painted alone and mostly on the weekends.
Occasionally he would retail his near-misses with the art world. Apparently, a potentially major one-man show was planned for a gallery in Beirut when Lebanon was called “the Switzerland of the Middle East” (gone are the days!), but political unrest disrupted those plans. And I remember another exhibition in a left-bank gallery that produced a nice poster, a small catalog, and no sales. To my knowledge, Jean never sold a painting in his life. He wasn’t interested in marketing or working in the art scene; he just wanted to paint.
As Jean entered the precincts of what the French call “le troisième age,” he came to terms with the probability that he would not become famous in his lifetime. Then, his hopes rested on posthumous discovery. In one sad exchange during the early aughts when Marion was dying and my visits to Paris were frequent, he asked me if I would be his artistic executor. He had a painting gifted to him by Édouard Pignon that he was sure would cover whatever costs were involved. I was able to refuse without hurting his feelings by explaining that it was not a practical undertaking, given that I was an American citizen living almost halfway around the world.
Jean Guyard died in 2010. His one living relative, a schoolteacher niece, inherited the trove; God knows how she faired with that! Jean’s passion of 58 years disappeared without a trace.
Non-commercial art has been defined as unmotivated or disinterested activity. We don’t do it for practical reasons. We do it because we want to “express ourselves.” Most of us, like Jean, are Sunday painters. Like Jean, our ambition and desire for recognition outrun our talent. (I include myself here.) Jean would have been happier had he not felt the need for outside validation. Producing art is not enough. It rarely is. To riff on Pascal’s famous quote, all of your problems stem from your inability to create quietly in your room alone. Expect no recognition and you will not be disappointed.
But undermining the bitter wisdom of the artiste manqué, we believe in our inmost hearts that our genius must eventually announce itself to the world. Look at Vincent Van Gogh! He sold only one painting while he was alive! Better not to look at Vincent, I say. His genius far exceeds yours. Paint your cats and take your pleasure there.
– Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Queer Harlem Renaissance and the Visual Arts: Richmond Barthé
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