Has Martial Raysse been influenced by the Pop artists? Apparently less then Piero del Pollaiolo…
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- Martial Raysse, Portrait of an ancient friend, 1963; oil and collage on canvas, Pinault Collection.
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- Piero del Pollaiolo (?), Portrait of a woman, Gemaweldegalerie, Berlin
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- Piero del Pollaiolo, Portrait of a woman, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze
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- Piero del Pollaiolo, Portrait of a woman, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milano.
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- Piero del Pollaiolo, Portrait of a woman, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Five canvases picturing iconic paintings by old masters such as Dominique Ingres, Piero del Pollaiolo and Hans Memling are currently on show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Martial Raysse – to whom the museum is dedicating a fundamental retrospective – painted them between 1962 and 1965, under the influence of the Pop Art. The paintings are part of a series titled “Made in Japan” and could be read as a way to underline certain distortions operated by the mass culture. These paintings seem to be ironically addressing to cheap reproductions of the most famous old masters’ paintings circulating at that time.
We would like to draw your attention on Portrait of an ancient friend because in this case the artist, or the artists, who conceived the original painting, or paintings, appear to have gone beyond one the Pop Art’s most important characteristics: repetition. Probably not everybody knows that there are at least four different versions of the painting Raysse re-enacted in 1965. In this regard, on 7 November 2014, the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan is opening an extraordinary show gathering together for the first time ever the four paintings. Could you imagine something more Pop than this?
November 25, 2020
