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Léon-Arthur
Tutundjian
(Amassia,
Armenia, 1906-Paris, 1968)
French School |
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| Vision
Lunaire |
| ca.
1935 |
| Oil
on canvas |
44
1/8 x 57 1/8 in.
(112 x 145 cm.) |
Provenance:
The artist's estate sale, Palais Galliéra, Paris, Maître
Claude Robert, December 12, 1969, no. 5
Private collection, New York |
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| See
biographical notes & comments below the picture |
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BIOGRAPHICAL
NOTES
Leon Tutundjian settled in Paris in 1923 and over the next ten years experimented
with several avant-garde styles. He began painting in an expressionistic
mode. In 1925 he worked with collage and in 1927 developed a style of
geometric abstraction. By 1929 he was active in the short-lived Art Concret
movement associated with Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), Jean Helion (1904-1987)
and Otto Carlsund (1897-1948) and in the Abstraction-Creation Association
which followed. Three years later he entered his surrealistic period.
In 1933 figuration reappeared in Tutundjian's painting and for the next
twenty years Surrealism dominated his art. |
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COMMENTS
In this landscape Tutundjian combines the dream imagery of Surrealism
with a traditional device of Western painting, the picture within a picture.
Like many of the Surrealists, he juxtaposes the conventional, transforming
it into the unconventional and records his freely associated images with
meticulous detail. Seeing, se~ing beyond, seeing through and voyeurism
in its various forms were very important themes for the Surrealists. In
Tutundjian's landscape, the cameraman in one painting becomes the voyeur
looking through and beyond to the other painting as if to frame and record
another time and space-the naked women in the garden of whom we have a
glimpse. As viewers, we too become voyeurs through devices of Surrealism. |
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