Hommage à Pierre Daix

Waddington Custot is pleased to present Hommage à Pierre Daix, an exhibition paying tribute to Pierre Daix (1922–2014), the journalist, writer and art historian whose criticism, scholarship and decades-long friendships with artists made him one of the defining voices on modern art in France. Bringing together 20 works by six artists – Pablo Picasso, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Zao Wou-Ki, Antoni Clavé and Fabienne Verdier – the exhibition follows the incredible network of artists and friendships that shaped Daix throughout his life. Some grew to become profoundly important lifelong friends, while others, such as Verdier, entered his life through a single encounter late in his career.

Daix’s most consequential friendship began in November 1945, when Paul Éluard brought the young Mauthausen survivor to Picasso’s studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins. Picasso was then working on ‘The Charnel House’ (1944–45), his candid response to the atrocities of the war, and had wanted the painting to be seen by someone who had lived through them. Their friendship lasted until Picasso’s death in 1973, with Daix becoming one of Picasso’s closest confidants and most important interpreters. Two of the most significant examples are his 1964 monograph Picasso and, later, La Vie de peintre de Pablo Picasso (1977), followed by Le Journal du cubisme (1982) and Picasso créateur (1987). Through these writings, as well as his editorship at Les Lettres françaises, Daix continued to follow and advocate Picasso’s continual reinvention of the language of painting.

Through Picasso’s circle, Daix came to know Hans Hartung, and would follow his work closely for decades. In 1985, he described Hartung’s œuvre as "one of the great lyrical œuvres of our time," a view he would explore at length in his extensive 1991 monograph on the artist. The two paintings presented here, from 1947 and 1983, show how Hartung returned to gesture across four decades, from the precision of his early linear marks to the more expansive and visceral gestures of his later work. For Daix, this physical language was central to Hartung’s achievement. His writings played a crucial role in shaping the critical and cultural reception of both Hartung and his wife, Anna-Eva Bergman, helping to situate their work within the broader history of post-war European abstraction.

Daix’s relationship with Pierre Soulages began in 1949, when the French poet Eugène Guillevic brought him to Galerie Lydia Conti to see the work of a "little-known painter". At a time when the French art world remained deeply divided over abstraction, and when the Communist milieu to which Daix belonged was largely hostile to it, he was among the early critics to recognise the force of Soulages’s painting. He described Soulages’s œuvres as founded on "processes of deepening" and "processes of intensification concentrated in very condensed phases of creation." For Daix, black was never simply a colour, but a means of working with light, depth and movement. The two paintings in the exhibition, from 1948 and 1959, offer a glimpse of this evolving language, from the early use of walnut stain to the increasingly powerful black strokes through which Soulages became known.

Thanks to Soulages, Daix also came to know Zao Wou-Ki, who arrived in Paris in 1948 and soon formed a close friendship with the French painter. Their bond was sustained over decades, with the two travelling together through the United States and Asia and remaining close throughout their lives. In his 1994 monograph Zao Wou-Ki, l’œuvre 1935–1993, Daix followed the artist’s movement from recognisable forms towards increasingly open and atmospheric spaces. In a conference on Wou-Ki, Daix observed that "the painter gives life not only through the form of his signs, but where his brush has not touched the paper." For Daix, the spaces between Zao’s marks were therefore as active as the marks themselves, rooted in perception.

Antoni Clavé entered Picasso’s circle after arriving in Paris as a refugee from the Spanish Civil War. ‘A Don Pablo’ (1984), no doubt made in homage to Picasso, revisits this history through collage and assemblage, bringing together fragments, surfaces and found materials. Daix became particularly interested in this way of working. Writing on Clavé’s assemblages, he described "assembling and painting, painting and assembling, one pushing the other," with cutting, tearing, gluing, arranging, painting and drawing becoming "the same enterprise." He called assemblage "not only a machine for seeing, but a machine for revealing." What Daix recognised in Clavé was a practice in which the act of assembling was itself a form of invention, and in which materials could carry meaning through the ways they were brought together.

The most recent and briefest of these relationships was with Fabienne Verdier, whom Daix visited in her studio near the end of his life in 2013. Although he met her only once, he contributed a section on her work to L’Esprit de la peinture: Hommage aux maîtres flamands (2013), in which her paintings were placed in dialogue with the work of Van Eyck, Memling and other Flemish masters. The ageing French writer was particularly attentive to her return to Chinese calligraphy and her insistence on making her own brushes, seeing in this engagement with tradition not a retreat from contemporaneity but a form of resistance to a culture too quick to reject what came before. As in his writing on Zao Wou-Ki, Daix was drawn to artists who looked to the past without simply repeating it. His encounter with Verdier, however brief, returned to this idea: for Daix, the past was not something to overcome, but something that could still be made new.

Across the six artists brought together in Hommage à Pierre Daix, what emerges is the breadth of Daix’s vision as a critic. His legacy lies not only in the artists he knew, but in the way he taught readers to look at their work. For Daix, modernity was not simply a matter of breaking with history, but of knowing how to look at it differently.