JACQUES HÉROLD (1910-1987) MAN ALONE, 1932 Oil... Lot 2

JACQUES HÉROLD (1910-1987) MAN ALONE, 1932 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower left Inked stamp 'Collection Henoch Zwirblanski' on the stretcher Oil on canvas; indistinctly signed and dated lower left; inked stamp 'Collection Henoch Zwirblanski' on the stretcher 50 X 61 CM - 19 ¾ X 24 IN. In 1932, Hérold returned to Paris and took up residence at 14 cité Falguière. His stay in the provinces as a farm worker to obtain a residence permit was a failure. Herold Blumer, an illegal immigrant, presented himself as Jack Hérold or Jacques Hérold to avoid police controls and anti-Semitic prejudices. The only notable breakthrough: after meeting Victor Brauner, he met a new painter friend - Yves Tanguy - who was also in "terrible trouble". A lonely man However, an obsession is found in most of the young painter's work: a man alone. Hérold would evoke two levels of interpretation for this recurring feature: "One could also say that this lone figure (...) represents my life at that moment. Or that it is a dreamlike image. At that time, the Surrealists were talking a lot about dreams. Probably all that at the same time. I was imagining. But at the same time, there was this reality that I was living. The daily material difficulty, without hope. And strangely enough, the characters I was painting at the time were very much tied to the ground." Herold continues his fine analysis, "If you like, you can interpret this theme, of the fixed, the frozen, as expressing the desire to establish myself, but especially the desire to establish myself on the level of expression." In Homme seul, the character is clad in a long cape, asexual, anonymous and solitary. At the end of the day, his shoulders hunched over, he seems to be observing a precipice. On the horizon, a gently sloping hill from which a few sparse trunks emerge. The canopy above them continues beyond the vanishing lines of the canvas... Behind the man, a pipe-trunk with obscure desires stretches towards the curve that faces him. These vegetal-erotic subjects are completed in the foreground by an octopus-plant that walks resolutely. It brings together the play of the four planes: plant-female, animal-masculine and the theme of unfulfilled desire. Herold paints a work around his conscious will to establish himself and the repressed desire that populates his dreams. Forty-six years later, he commented on these early paintings as follows: "They are breaks in the terrain, precipices, geological silhouettes. But at the same time, if you look a little differently, you discover a slightly erotic landscape. Shapes that can fit into each other. Here a feminine form, there a phallic form." A surviving work Homme seul is one of the first paintings from Jacques Hérold's Surrealist period (1931-1956). It came from the collection of Henoch Zwirblanski (1907-1989), a Jew from Vilnius who moved to Paris in the 1930s. An activist, he was under surveillance by the Sûreté de l'Etat from 1936 to 1938. At the beginning of the war, he enlisted as a foreign volunteer in the French Army. After the defeat, he joined the Resistance. Arrested in September 1943 in Borgo San Dalmazzo in Italy, he was imprisoned in France, in Provence, and passed through the Drancy camp before being deported to Auschwitz in December. He survived and returned to France after the liberation of the camp. Other works in the Henoch Zwirblanski collection demonstrate his very good taste, such as La Femme à la lecture (c. 1927) by Juan Gris. Almost ninety years after its conception, Homme seul resurfaces, a survivor of History with a capital H. A painting that seems, like those of Yves Tanguy, "to contain great secrets and great powers" and which, following the Shadows, seeks to make the essence of beings visible. Rose-Hélène Iché, art historian and specialist of Jacques Hérold.