Léon Arthur TUTUNDJIAN (1905-1968) Lot n° 35

COMPOSITION, circa 1926 India ink on paper Monogrammed lower right 20.3 x 15 cm - 7.9 x 5.9 in. Signed with the artist's monogram on the lower right, India pen ink on paper Provenance - Sale of the artist's studio, 2002, n°21 - Private collection, Paris Léon Arthur TUTUNDJIAN (1905-1968) Between 1924 and the beginning of 1926, Tutundjian drew cubist still lifes in one stroke, as well as seated female nudes, on backgrounds previously washed or dabbed in watercolour with a sponge. Beyond tachism, the artist explores purely graphic techniques to unite the subject with the background space. Thus, in a drawing representing a crouching figure (1925) - whose face, monumentality and hairiness seem to have been borrowed from Kotchar - Tutundjian moves from the haloed, sometimes stamped, treatment of the background to tachism. At the same time, in series representing accumulated bottles in the manner of Morandi, or still lifes with fruit, he adopts a more expressionist way of drawing. His line is no longer full, but becomes feverish, shredded, frayed, causing cracks and fissures within the figures. Sometimes also a fragment of the representation is sketched by a cloud of dots, which, when tightened, give movement to the contours and scatter them. The result of this linear and spatial expressionism is a more or less soft, strange or aggressive climatic and psychic atmosphere. Thus, bottles and fruit appear to be acid-etched, attacked, ruined by space, which thus acquires a temporal dimension. In 1925, Tutundjian was able to see Klee's exhibitions in Paris and consult the graphic plates of the Esquisses pédagogiques, a work by the painter published in the Bauhaus collection of books. In an essay entitled The Credo of the Creator, Klee wrote: "The specific elements of graphic art are linear, plane and spatial points and energies." From the dead point, movement generates the line that expresses the psyche, it can be broken, artic