Goerg, Edouard

The place occupied by Goerg in contemporary art has certainly been recognized for a long time already, because of the power of expression and the pictorial qualities of his work. But it is only now, through the various aspects that the latter has taken, that one can deduce without confusion its actual importance and verify to what extent this language corresponds to the fundamental data of our time.

From now on the horizon that such a work discovers gives the measure of its extent of elocution and its imperious legitimacy. And its undeniable inner unity as its overwhelming emotive intensity alternately dramatic, prophetic or joyfully exalting, attest that it is not a succession of happy encounters with chance, a fortunate deliverance or a lyrical outpouring more or less free, but that it remains unceasingly a stern and meditated commitment to the whole being. It determines the profound meaning of this last quarter of a century; it gives the most valid and most definite definition. It presents itself as the very consciousness of our time which it assigns to history by marrying by its fluctuations all its hesitations and torments. It accuses it, and at the same time gives evidence for it by faithfully reflecting its remorse, its aspirations, its fears or its secret convictions. It sums up admirably each major event keeping only the essential, exceeding it in time and in its immediate scope. Thanks to it, the atmosphere of the first world war can be traced back to the second, that of the two post-war periods, as well as that of various world crises or incidents. In advance it situates them, limits them and prepares them for their outcome. It synthesizes the human adventure, reconstructs its inevitability and establishes the sovereign affirmation of the spirit in its triumphant conquests as in its renunciations or its most abject deeds.

If it imposes its reality with so much relief and naturalness, it is because it proceeds more from intuition than from intelligence. It marks the living relationship of a man with his time. And the satirical virulence or the apparent cruelty with which it is sometimes responsible, does not translate the position of an egotistical egoism, but on the contrary the presence of a vigilant altruism, concerned with the social fact. However, by natural generosity and independence of character, Goerg never obeys any partisan or preconceived reasoning. He instinctively attacks all that is the true negation of this life of which he eagerly seeks the most intense and profound forms of expression. The violence of his reactions only responds to his desire to defend her even in its most everyday aspects. And the trial he is bringing is aimed more at man than at civilization or the events that he uses only to raise his inner drama on the level of the universal. He claims for everyone the right to life and is indignant to see it scorned and mocked.

Thus, by the happiest conjunction, this work evokes on a spiritual level the salient facts of the time and goes beyond the latter, stands out from the moment, interpreting also the eternal tragedy of man, his loneliness, his metaphysical anxiety, the desires, the impotence or the despair that he carries in him. At once present and virtual, it is almost nothing more than a mere refuge, the very one that the individual lost in the middle of the crowd wishes to hide his dismay under the appearance of exasperation or defiance. . The invective, again, is only a form of pity, a latent desire for patient regeneration, because the painter is totally committed and is both judge and party. Precociously matured by the war of 1914 and painfully affected for four years by his spectacle of destruction and death, he kept a particular affectivity for human suffering that gives him this faculty of penetration and this astonishing clairvoyance in the face of upheavals and disasters. incessant convulsions of our world. His worried waiting allows him to discern them in their premises and to consider them in terms of the human consequences that will result.

Thanks to this dramatic tension of his mind, the canvases he makes, while reconnecting with the accidental proceed from an authentic inner justification. Emanations sentimental of the moment, they integrate so well with all its possible extensions, that they manage to define the most absolute generality and to impose without the slightest artifice like a true revelation. Creations purely subjective, they offer the double advantage of presenting oneself as the most authoritative document on society as well as on the individual himself, and of asserting himself as a pathetic message authoritatively authorizing the sovereign and immutable grandeur of the human.

However, we should not confine Goerg in this role of prophet or preacher. If his work is worthy of his desire to decipher human destiny, it has no less its place among the master artistic productions of this time. Historians, forgetting that the visionaries belong to a secular family, are only too much inclined to underestimate their influence or to neglect their contribution under the vain pretext that they never know to which contemporary current they belong. Our painter did not escape this common law and the label of expressionist which was attached to him, especially caused the worst confusions. Another fact also played against him, it is the stupid habit taken today to measure the importance of an artist among his imitators.

By the character of his work, as well as by his own individualism, which set him up from his youth against the family, he personifies the very type of the independent. His radiant spirituality as well as his imperious demands on time condemn him, like Daumier or Rouault, to live apparently in recluse and alone among his contemporaries. His relations with them result in the fact that he belongs to a generation that has paid a heavy tribute to the war and whose survivors overwhelmed by his memory, such as La Fresnaye, La Patellière or Alix, Malfray or Gromaire, share with him the same feelings of lost greatness and painful helplessness for today's man. Circumstances rather than art in themselves bring them closer to each other and lead them to adopt an almost identical attitude. But this sense of tragedy, this respect for fatality, this taste for the mysterious, this seriousness of the commitment that they may have in common, is reflected in them in a way that is too different for us to claim to group them together. together as we have tried so often. The spirit of revolt of a Yves Alix or the powerful exaltation of a Gromaire are more opposed than they are to the subjective violence of Goerg. And the parallel that we wanted to trace to their beginnings between the last two and Le Fauconnier is just as inaccurate as the importance given to their so-called Nordic ancestry - Goerg's mother was English - when we consider their subsequent evolution.

Except in a few paintings executed immediately after the war, our painter, unlike his comrades, has always remained away from cubist disciplines, not out of disdain of problems of form or concerns of the plastic, but by a constant desire to escape all possible recruitment as much as by an instinctive need to end up with an immediate emotional transcript. His hypersensitivity pushes him to deliver himself with force from his anguish, to materialize it in a world entirely recreated in this design and which he composes with meticulous care. In the same way, his relations with Gromaire have been too much mentioned for his art, while obviously their respective paths now appear to us so divergent. Besides, was he not, from 1923-1924, in full possession of his means and already master of a world of his own, before meeting the next year at Berthe Weill, those who would become his comrades of exhibition and his friends: Pascin, Gromaire, Per Krogh, etc. The affinities which are soon established between them are more on the moral plane. They will never form a real group; they are gathered together because of the limited number of artists from this generation decimated by the war. And it was not until much later, in 1934-1935, that Goerg, as he admitted, became aware of the surrealists that he actually belonged to a generation.

Quand on veut comparer son attitude à celle des expressionistes étrangers des difficultés semblables surgissent. Le degré d'élévation et de finesse de sa satire, l'éloquente prédominance de son sentiment de l'étrange, la variété de son pouvoir d'affabulation, la subtile simplicité de ses moyens, n'ont guère de points communs avec l'exaspération dramatique et les déformations plastiques des Allemands ou avec la lourdeur terrienne des Flamands. Sa retenue, son univers de stabilité et par instant presque de silence, son art riche d'allusions discrètes, sa constante défiance vis-à-vis d'un inutile emportement, de l'improvisation ou du lyrisme gratuit, l'éloignent aussi bien des uns et des autres. Qu'il se rencontre parfois avec la verve pamphlétaire et altière d'Ensor ou avec la spontanéité primesautière de Tytgat ne présume en rien de sa situation particulière. Ce sont là correspondances d'époque plus que de fait. La meilleure preuve nous en est sans doute fornie par Chagall dont l'accent de rêve et de fantaisie s'apparente au sien, mais qu'il contredit par la densité et la gravité, je dirais presque la rigueur pascalienne, de son message.

Expressioniste, Goerg ne l'est donc pas tant vis-à-vis de ses contemporains que principalement à l'égard des siècles précédents, dans le sens où le mot désigne non une appartenance à une école, mais une qualité permanente de la peinture : la possibilité pour celle-ci d'atteindre à la force d'expansion d'un langage immédiat et de posséder sa plus totale signification humaine. Dans la mesure où son art accède en partie à cette vertu qu'un Goya ou un Daumier ont définie magistralement, il échappe à toute classification arbitraire du moment et se rapproche davantage de tous ceux qui l'ont précédé.

Mais en même temps, on peut également admettre que, par son amour du surnaturel, par ses remarquables prédispositions pour acclimater ses rêves au sein de la réalité et de les accréditer d'une manière aussi absolue, il n'est pas étranger aux préoccupations des surréalistes, sans toutefois qu'il y ait là encore, un quelconque échange entre les uns et les autres. Tant il est vrai qu'une oeuvre bien vivante déborde des cadres dans lesquels on voudrait l'enfermer et garde sa valeur propre sous la pression même de tout ce qui l'entoure et la nourrit. Ainsi l'art de Goerg se suffit-il à lui-même par ses seuls caractères.