Lepetit (Patrick)

Early 2010 the association "La Poterne" organized an exposition in Villeneuve d'Ascq (France) in honour of Jean Smilowski.

On this occasion the association published a booklet about the artist, with a contribution by Patrick Lepetit, entitled: "Jean Smilowski, Pour l'amour de Ramona", a text which has been published also in the french art magazine La Nouvelle Revue Moderne, edited by Philippe Lemaire.

With friendly permission of the author and the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Moderne, I can present here a translation into english of this article. (Pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit)

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Patrick Lepetit,

Jean Smilowski : For the love of Ramona

Jean Smilowski, 1927-1989, son of Polish immigrants, lived from 1943 to1985 in a cabin built in the middle of allotments in Vieux Lille. There, unbeknownst to all, he created his own wonderful world.

Marginalized by a society that had precociously dismissed the son of Polish immigrants he was, Jean Smilowski all his life was in a very precarious situation, that he has somehow been able to overcome by the power of imagination and by a singular creation.

Dubuffet was the first in France to give a definition of art brut, in 1945, baptising with this formulation the basis of the field:

"... all kinds of products -drawings, paintings, embroidery, carved or molded figures, etc. - with a spontaneous and highly inventive character, that are as little as possible in debt to the usual art or to customary cultural cliches, and made by people who are obscure or foreign to professional artistic circles”.

Through this way of looking, with some reservations, one can approach the work of Jean Smilowski, this "modern primitive" from Lille, who created an own world in the cabin without water or electricity, that he had built and decorated on the borders of the city, on the urban wasteland, close to the citadel.

His palace

Smilowski was un unskilled worker, who was seriously injured at the age of 33, the age of Christ, a detail that was not irrelevant for him. He started painting - with Ripolin – in the early 50s, after a period during which he made embroidery. He painted on wood, on cloth and plywood, then covered it -thereby getting a shiny, probably unintentional effect- with thick layers of varnish to protect it against the harmful effects of humidity prevailing in what he called his "palace" or "ranch".

He has somewhat of the “habitant paysagiste” [1]. His house, surrounded by a curtain of dense trees and solid walls, is an enclosed area, fiercely protected and isolated from the outside by a door that is decorated with a Santa Rita, an item that was stolen on several occasions.

Large murals, on the inside of the enclosure, show scenes with types from the western, from popular songs -Tino Rossi - or from pictures in cheap magazines of that period like Sitting Bull and Ramona, a painting that displays the text "I made a wonderful dream", nowadays located in the lobby of the town hall of Vieux Lille, the “Halle au Sucre”.

Dreams

Dreams, often associated with the idea of "change", seem to play a very important role in Jean Smilowski’s creative process. On tapes that he recorded, and that after his death were found in his belongings, very often allusions are made to dreams, that he sometimes considers to be predictive and that might have been not without influence on his works.

In 1980, for example, he evokes dreams of trains, of travel, of Mexico, Italy and Japan, adding that this dispenses him of real travels.

He also claims to have interacted in a dream with Queen Elizabeth, to whom he was presented as “not having worked for three years”, and who has promised to look after him! But he interacted as well with all great men in history, which leads him to hypothesize that there is life after death, and even makes him explain to his interlocutor, his sister Marie, that he believes in reincarnation, believing that he must have lived in South Africa in a previous life, "brown skinned with chestnut colored eyes", preparing himself to spend the next life somewhere in the west of France ...

He also confesses dreaming about the “beyond”, a recurring theme in his conversations with his sister.

Here we are exactly at the heart of what constitutes his artistic activities, because it’s from his rich inner world that Smilowski could get the strength to live with his marginal status and to withstand the vicissitudes of reality.

In his "palace", being a creator who was fascinated by his own innerly developed mythology, without great technique with regard to reproduction and sometimes with regard to the construction of pictorial representations, he certainly stands at the crossroads of the representation of the military, of religious themes. of freedom and of love, which literally give rhythms at his oeuvre.

The military

The military, sometimes in a heroic form, often is recurring in the work of Jean Smilowski. One thinks of course immediately of the wonderful little figures, the airplanes, the horsemen or the armed combatants, but he also frequently painted young soldiers, some of whom look like family of him, or he paints entire armies, reproduces flags of many nations, regimental badges - often Polish - but also many scenes of the Second World War, British or German posters, portraits of political leaders and soldiers accompanied by slogans such as Churchill ( "Hold the Line "), Hitler (“Hitler, that means war") or De Gaulle, all culminating in the exaltation of the Battle of Stalingrad, and especially the colorful evocation of a flight of allied bombers, associated with the curious legend: "Must we part without hope, without hope of returning, to meet again one day, this is just an au-revoir my brothers - 1945 End of the Reich", the religious tone of which cannot be ignored.

Hell and paradise

The religious, and even the mystical, form the second line in the work of Smilowski, who in his dialogues with his sister, makes the distinction between belief and practice.

The remark "At 33 years he has suffered, me too" on a small crucifix placed above a photograph of the artist on a panel at the town hall of Vieux Lille, is emblematic of the approach that has led him to increase scenes or religious figures in a broad spirit of ecumenism, that displays Christ alongside Buddha, the Hindu gods neighbouring the Black Virgin of Czestochowa and also a St. Rita, adorned with the prayer “Santa Rita ora pro nobis”…

A prayer without excessive illusions about its effect, since we can read: "Life is a paradise for the rich. Life is hell for the poor"!

This does not bear witness of some subversive mind. Like his peers, Smilowski is rather an individualist, imbued with a desire for freedom, that is very clear in his oeuvre by what he borrowed from other types of creation, cinema, cartoons, comics, probably seen as staging a world that is more beautiful than the one in which he had to live.

The Aristocats and John Wayne, Asterix and Annie, Donald and Obelix, Laurel and Hardy, Rin Tin Tin, Tarzan, Lucky Luke or also Charlie Chaplin, they contribute a touch of innocence to this universe. A universe that is also inhabited by wild animals, which are copied from a series of stamps, these animals being gloriously predominated by Mayan warriors or well known figures of Indians from the plains, like Sitting Bull, who is sometimes in the company of a squaw called ... Ramona!

For the life of Smilowski, who for a long time almost only saw his sister and his mother, was that of a loner. With the complicity of Tino Rossi he has "invented" for himself a companion –perhaps Rose Marie- who haunts the whole oeuvre: frescoes, paintings, bags and books, alone or alongside the young artist, sometimes in the uniform of the Canadian mounted police, in a "dream of love" which, of course, would have no other ending than a happy one, as is suggested somewhere by the phrase (with an uncertain spelling in french): " ... and never did our lovers loved each other so tenderly”

His work is art without a message, without the intention to please or offend, that is to say it is the opposite of art as it is normally understood. The work of Smilowski, for whom painting was like breathing, is the result of a discussion with himself, that was meant to give life to a reality in the margin of the world he found himself banished from, he, who had written on a box: "I had only one desire/it was leaving/ stepping out/escaping/no more COMING BACK”.

This with the feeling to accomplish, despite everything, something unusual, like we can read on the inside of the same box: "He is not yet born / the one who will do / what I have done already ".

The oeuvre of Jean Smilowski, who created for himself the world that the world has declined him, is a cocoon. An oeuvre-world.

(added may 2010)

[1] Habitants-paysagiste s is a term (introduced by Bernard Lassus) that refers to residents (habitants) of urban areas who decorate their place of living with elements from the countryside (paysage), in this way sometimes producing very creative constructs at or around their homes