Pierre Alechinsky

Biography

At the Decroly school, the young Pierre was trained out of writing with his left hand: he was made to write with his right, and the left was kept for “minor” work, for drawing. He recalled this later, and critics like to return to the detail.

He was born on 19 October 1927 in Brussels. Sources give the place of birth differently: Saint-Gilles or Schaerbeek, two Brussels communes. His father was a Russian of Jewish family, his mother a Belgian of Walloon origin; according to some sources, both parents were doctors.

From 1944 to 1948 he studied at La Cambre in Brussels, the national school of architecture and decorative arts: book illustration, typography, printing techniques, photography. In 1945 he discovered Henri Michaux and Jean Dubuffet, and at the same time became friends with the critic Jacques Putman, who later devoted many texts to his work. He began painting in oils in 1947 and joined the circle of “Jeune Peinture Belge” (Young Belgian Painting). Together with the sculptors Olivier Strebelle and Michel Olyff he set up a communal house and studio, Les Ateliers du Marais. In 1949, after meeting the poet Christian Dotremont, Alechinsky joined COBRA, whose members included Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille, Jan Nieuwenhuys and Asger Jorn. He took part in the group’s first international exhibition in Amsterdam and himself organised the second, in Liège in 1951. He also worked on the journal. By the accounts of his biographers, there was almost no time left for his own work, and it got going in earnest only after the group broke up. Later he said of COBRA: “It is my school.”

In 1951 he settled in Paris. At Atelier 17, run by Stanley William Hayter, he learned engraving; he moved close to the Surrealist circle and got to know Alberto Giacometti, Bram van Velde and Victor Brauner. From 1952 he corresponded with the Japanese calligrapher Shiryū Morita. In 1954 his first solo exhibition was held at the Nina Dausset gallery in Paris, and in the same year he met the Chinese painter Walasse Ting, whose influence on his manner proved strong.

In 1955 his first major exhibition opened at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. That year he went to Japan and in Kyoto made the documentary “Japanese Calligraphy” (edited in 1958): the commentary was written by Dotremont, the music by André Souris. He remembered the posture of the calligraphers at work; from then on he often laid paper or canvas on the floor and worked bending over it. Gradually he gave up oil for ink and other fast, fluid materials. Exhibitions followed one after another: London (1958), Bern (1959), and the 1960 Venice Biennale, where he showed in the Belgian pavilion.

In the 1960s he often visited New York, and in 1965 Ting introduced him to acrylic paints. That year came “Central Park”, his best-known work: an image in the centre, and on all four sides rows of small drawings, as in a comic strip, adding to the meaning. These “marginal remarks” became his signature device, and it seems to me that sometimes his border is more interesting than the main subject. In the same year, 1965, André Breton invited him to the international Surrealist exhibition “L’Écart absolu”.

He worked with books too. In 1989 he illustrated Balzac’s “Treatise on Modern Stimulants”, with an afterword by Michel Butor. In 1975 the French Ministry of Culture commissioned a dinner service from him, which he made with the Sèvres manufactory. In 1980–1983, with the Mexican artist Alberto Gironella, he made the series “Al Alimón”, twelve works. In 1992 he was entrusted with painting the rotunda of the Hôtel de Lassay at the National Assembly.

Since 1983 he has been professor of painting at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1994 he received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels, in 2006 he became a knight of the Legion of Honour, and in 2018 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale of the Japan Art Association. In 2007–2008, for his eightieth birthday, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels showed a large retrospective.