But Malkine “didn’t like crowds, gatherings. The Surrealists always had gatherings, symposiums, meetings complete with someone taking the minutes…it was too formal and structured for his taste. So he avoided many of those meetings, and André Breton would call him on this in 1926, saying that Malkine kept too much of a distance. He was very much a loner, even when he was living with his family in Shady, from 1953-1966…When his studio door was closed, it was understood that he was working and wasn’t to be disturbed.”
But, says Tanyol, Malkine was not anti-social. “I would call it, rather, unsociable; there’s an important distinction there. He had a reclusive nature, and so it’s perhaps surprising that he had a wonderful sense of humor. He was an effervescent, sometimes hilarious writer. He was not a humorless man, he just didn’t like to be noticed. He had no interest in self promotion or marketing.”
Gilles Malkine says, “Although Malkine was considered a true surrealist, it doesn’t mean that everything he painted conformed to the many and varied definitions of Surrealism by certain of its aficionados. For example, the Surrealist Revolution declared it was sweeping away all prior rational exigencies for art, and therefore one could conclude that beauty was no longer of itself an end for a work of art. But this new way of accessing the content of art, by allowing the unconscious to reveal itself without the constraints of aesthetic control, did not cause Malkine to abandon his sense of the beautiful, nor the value of sharing that through his paintings in a conscious and accessible way.”
Fern Malkine-Falvey perhaps sums it up best. “If he could explain things he’d have no reason to paint them. The things he wanted to see, he painted them himself because he couldn’t find them anywhere else. They were in his head and he wanted to see them.”
Around 1946, not having painted since the early 1930s, Malkine, working as a proofreader in Paris, met Sonia, who was 25 years younger than the artist.
The catalogue picks up the story:
Soon after they met, Malkine and Sonia went to his apartment on the rue Riquet in the 18th arondissement (“a terrible place, small, awful,” according to Sonia). Having heard that Malkine was a painter, she wondered where all his artwork was; Malkine replied that he had not done any painting in a long time. Knowing nothing about painter’s materials, Sonia went out and bought him some brushes, and bluntly suggested he get back to work. Art history is rife with examples of wives and lovers being called “muses” — Camille Claudel to Auguste Rodin, Gala to Salvador Dalí, Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz. If the concept of wife-as-muse is somewhat trite, Sonia, herself a singer and recording artist, was an undeniable energizing force in Malkine’s creative life. He would refer to her as his “alter ego, who took care of what needed to be organized, foreseen, methodized (neol.), noted, etc.” In 1946 Malkine embarked on a new era of artistic productivity after a hiatus that had lasted since 1933.
Married in 1948, Georges and Sonia Malkine moved to the United States with their two small children, Monelle and Gilles.
They settled in Brooklyn at first, then she and the children came to Woodstock, while he commuted until moving up in 1953. It was there that he painted, and walked to town, and there that he burned his work in the 1956 fire, and began again to work.
A 1966 show drew him back to Paris, where he would stay until his death.
“The Parisian newspaper reviews of Malkine’s 1966 exhibition, as well as the catalogue contributions by his Surrealist accomplices, are unified by a communal feeling that Malkine had been nothing short of resurrected. Many assumed he was dead, not without Malkine’s complicity in this misconception; since his departure for New York in 1948, he had maintained contact with practically none of his Parisian acquaintances.
And, about the opening of the show, which occurred just after Breton’s death, Tanyol writes:
Malkine hoped that he, too, could be excused from attending: “About the opening,” he wrote to Waldberg during the summer prior to the exhibition,“am I really supposed to go?” He was not joking. True to form, Malkine wanted to stay home alone and quietly eat the noodles and hard-boiled eggs that were his staples, dictated by the ulcers that had become a persistent source of physical distress for him.
He died of a brain hemorrhage, March 22, 1970.
Sonia, having visited Malkine several times during his four-year sojourn, buried Malkine in the company of a few friends. It was a small funeral, “not a big deal,” she says, although any number of people was a big deal for Malkine. From his youth until his death, he had been the consummate loner.
Sonia Malkine, of Shady, passed away in 2014.
We’re getting two loans from Daniel Filipacchi, one of the world’s best-known collectors of Surrealism,” says Tanyol, “one of which has never been seen in the United States, Night of Love (La Nuit d’amour), and the other The Passport’s Deliverance (Délivarance du passeport), which was in a 1999 show at the Guggenheim, consisting of over 700 works from the Filipacchi collection and that of Nesuhi Ertegun.”
Filipacchi and the Malkines have long history. “When I first moved to Paris in 1976 he owned 15 of my father’s paintings,” says Fern. “I went to see him and we’ve been friends since then. Whenever there have been shows he made sure my father was included…Daniel told me it’s so rare to see a painter have as great a period of painting at the end of his life as he did at the beginning. My father kept inventing and inventing and it just never stopped. When he first got back to Paris he painted 35 paintings in six months because they got a gallery for him faster than he thought. He was 68 when he went back to Paris in 1966 and his health wasn’t that great. It was like starting over again.”
She described his life there. “My father was very glad to have the time and the quiet around him, the longest period of his life those last four years to paint. He was left in peace and his friends were helping. At a period of your life when you’re isolated and alone, he had the opposite happening. He did believe in miracles. I was surprised to read that, but I did ask my mother and she said, yes, he did. With the kind of life that he led, it’s a miracle we have as many paintings as we do. He lived through two world wars and the depression in the middle, a very difficult life and he just kept painting. He just couldn’t stop and he didn’t until he dropped. He just kept going.”
Tanyol hopes that this show is a new beginning.
“As any revisionist history might hope, it would be ideal if in the wake of the book and show, Georges Malkine were rightfully given a place in the canon — the most recent survey of Surrealism by Gerard Durazoi has a full page of color reproductions of his work…at least it’s a start. At the end of 2013, he was included in an exhibit at Eykyn Maclean in New York, Surrealism and the rue Blomet, referring to a building on rue Blomet where André Masson, then Malkine and Robert Desnos, lived, kind of a stomping-ground for great Surrealist thinker and painters. Slowly but surely he might be working his way into public awareness.”
*Italicized passages are from the Catalogue, Georges Malkine: Perfect Surrealist Behavior (Woodstock, NY: Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, 2014), by Derin Tanyol, with contributions by Fern Malkine-Falvey.
