Rudolf Hausner – { feuilleton }

Deux Personnages (1974).

Jan of JKK Fine Arts was in touch this week to inform me that the French artist Michel Henricot died in February, a month before the opening of an exhibition of his work organised by JKK Fine Arts for the International Cultural Centre in Cracow, Poland.

Le Voyageur IV (1996).

I first encountered Henricot’s work in the pages of OMNI magazine where he was one of several featured artists who can be grouped together as “fantastic realists”—Ernst Fuchs, Mati Klarwein, HR Giger, Robert Venosa, Rudolf Hausner, De Es Schwertberger—although the label wouldn’t have necessarily been agreed to by any of them apart from Fuchs and Hausner, both of whom were members of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism in the 1960s. Henricot’s sombre and obsessive figure studies were a good fit for the magazine, with the science fiction context lending his paintings suggestions of the futuristic or alien that might otherwise be absent in the empty space of an art gallery.

The artist photographed by Jan K. Kapera.

Despite such a high-profile showcase Henricot’s work has never been as visible as his more famous contemporaries so I’m grateful to Jan for supplying additional information, including the artist’s actual birth date, 8th July, 1936, rather than the erroneous dates found all over the internet. Henricot was friends with Leonor Fini, an artist whose work was also preoccupied with the human figure, often just as stylised and set against featureless monochrome backgrounds. Like Henricot, Fini’s art gets tagged as Surrealist even though her own obsessive paintings evolved away from any particular school. Henricot’s Les Promeneuses (1954) was definitely reaching for a Dalínean/Delvaux-like quality, but if his mature work belongs anywhere it’s with that small collection of French artists who don’t comprise any defined movement but who share a taste for the fantastic, the strange and the inexplicable: Sibylle Ruppert, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol, Jean-Pierre Ugarte, Gérard Trignac, Erik Desmazières, Jean-Paul Faccon, Pierre Clayette, Raymond Bertrand, Roland Cat, Gilles Rimbault, Jean-Michel Mathieux-Marie, and others. If I was given the opportunity to put together an art show for a French gallery (or even the Pompidou Centre…), these are some of the artists I’d choose.

Le Silence (1979).

Henricot will be running at the International Cultural Centre, Cracow, until the end of April.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Saint Sebastian in NYC
• The art of Michel Henricot

In the mid-1970s Dieter Brusberg and Siegfried E. Loch packaged a series of albums for the German division of Atlantic Records under the title The Art and Music Collection, a reissue scheme which paired each album with a print by a contemporary artist. This is an odd collection which I imagine was aimed at people like the father of one of my friends at school, the first person I met who owned a proper hi-fi system rather than a cheap stereogram. He liked to listen to progressive rock and jazz, and had a shelf of jazz records packaged in boxed editions that looked like they were ordered from an ad in a Sunday magazine.

New Orleans Blues by Wilbur De Paris & Jimmy Witherspoon. Art by Horst Antes.

The Art and Music Collection had lower production values than the boxed records but each album was housed in a heavy gatefold sleeve, some of which came with ribbons attached to the front and back covers. Inside the gatefold there was a picture of the piece of art chosen to complement the release, together with a note about the artist and a paragraph of text which I’m guessing attempted to draw a parallel between the picture and the music. With the exception of a lone Briton, Joe Tilson, all the artists were German or Austrian. The series managed eight numbered releases—collect the set!—with albums that might have been chosen at random from the Atlantic back catalogue, a curious mix of jazz, rock and blues. Each artist shares billing with the musicians (the artist names are also on the disc labels), which makes me wonder if the series troubled any musical egos. After album no. 6 someone at the record company must have realised they were giving the wrong impression by listing the artists first so they revised the name of the series to The Music and Art Collection. The artworks seem as randomly chosen as the music, unless the sleeve notes have convincing explanations for their selection. The paintings of Rudolf Hausner—an artist I’d never think to connect with The Doors—became a lot more visible a couple of years later when OMNI magazine used his art for a cover and a number of interior illustrations.

Hot Rats by Frank Zappa. Art by Bengt Böckman.

Continue reading “The Art and Music Collection, 1976–77”

Tag: Rudolf Hausner

Michel Henricot, 1936–2022

The Art and Music Collection, 1976–77