Seeing beyond life: Marcel Brient

Guided by instinct, impulse, and a desire to move beyond the limits of vision, renowned French collector Marcel Brient has, over the decades, built one of the most important and illuminating collections of contemporary art and design. Including works by some of the defining artists of the 20th century, this inspired collection surprises and delights in the unexpected connections that it draws between artists working across different mediums, stylistic movements, and geographic or historically specific locales. Starting his collection with very little financial means, Marcel’s extraordinary eye and exceptional talent for seeing the potential of an artist - even at an early stage in their career

- has served him well. Guided by a keen instinct and intuition, he would never falter in front of a painting that he believed in, and as the younger, unknown artists in his collection gradually matured into leading figures of contemporary art, he was able from time to time to sell a work that he had acquired early for tremendous sums, allowing him to continue to grow his collection and expand it to include the work of established masters. A fascinating case study in the thrilling art of collecting itself, Marcel’s collection also speaks to his deep appreciation for art’s place in history or, rather, its ability to speak profoundly to its own historic moment and beyond.

This March, Phillips is thrilled to be bringing two spectacular examples of late 20th century abstraction from this exceptional collection to auction for the first time: two works created within a year of each other which in their scale, ambition, and bravura execution not only exemplify the painterly questions posed by the artists at a specific moment in their respective careers but tell a compelling story about the history of abstraction itself.

For the older de Kooning, the 1980s represented a triumphant return to painting after a protracted period of poor health. Distilling his painterly vocabulary down to the essentials of supple line and concentrated colour, these airy, light-filled canvases bear the subtlest traces of bodies and snatches of the East Hampton landscape – intuitive, emotionally charged motifs and forms that record the painter’s commitment to a mode of Abstract Expressionism that privileged a kind of gestural, intuitive mark making, and the emotionally expressive power of colour. Deeply meditative, the human scale of the canvas carries viewers into a sparse and sublime space, it’s calm serenity and lightness of touch highly evocative of the kind of quiet contemplation with which we might look back upon a life well-lived.

A period of intense artistic innovation during which established definitions of abstraction were being renegotiated along radically new conceptual and technical lines, the 1980s proved to be hugely significant for establishing the terms with which we discuss abstract art today.

Superlative examples of the working methods and approaches of these two artists during these pivotal years, [no title] and Mathis both exemplify the depth and scope of the dialogue that de Kooning and Richter pursued with abstraction, and underline how significantly they moved this conversation along in the last decades of the 20th century.

As the eighty-year-old de Kooning worked with renewed clarity, pushing the language of abstraction into new, ethereal territory in this late cycle of works from his studio on America’s east coast, the early 1980s also proved to be absolutely critical for the younger artist Gerhard Richter and the maturation of a robust, abstract vernacular deeply rooted in the socio-political contexts of post-war Germany. In a hugely significant shift, Richter moved away from the monochromatic photorealist painting that had defined his production in the 1960s, embracing improvisation, acid colour, and the interplay of more complex surface textures as he began to experiment with new techniques, such as the squeegee that would come to define his painting in subsequent years. Although Richter moved towards the vibrant colours, improvisational impetus, and gestural verve associated with mid-century Abstract Expressionism during this important decade, his work diverges from this legacy in its emotive and expressive effects.

Although when placed side by side it might be tempting to read these two paintings against each other as embodying the bold, youthful exuberance of one ascending artist on the one hand, and the more elegiac or quietly poetic meditations of an artist approaching the end of his life on the other, the closer we look, the more complex these connections become. Occupying a fluid space between figuration and abstraction, de Kooning’s paintings generate momentary shifts in vision that allowed the artist to move beyond representational reality into more emotionally expressive territory. For Richter too, the question of the image, reality, and our relationship to both is of central importance, ensuring that he too never fully abandoned the representational, even as he critiqued our cultural reliance on it.

In this way both artists attempted to fix their vision beyond the purely visible, to develop radically new ways of seeing and being in the world that resonate too with Brient’s own poetic approach to art and collecting. Writing in 1982 in a now-famous statement ahead of his presentation at documenta VII, Richter’s definition of the utopian possibilities of abstraction as allowing us to ‘visualise a reality which we can neither see nor describe’ strikes at the heart of the long legacy of abstraction to which both artists have contributed immeasurably, and of one collector’s vision and commitment to ‘going further’ in both art and life.