2023-07-01 13:12:05
Who knows the American painter Robert Guinan? Almost no one, with the exception of those familiar with the Albert-Loeb gallery in Paris, who defended him for more than thirty years. So run to the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon to discover some 80 paintings and drawings by this fascinating artist!
Child of the white middle class, installed at the age of 25 in Chicago, he has never ceased to be interested in the left behind, in particular the African-American community. Guided by his African-American friend the pianist Emil Breda, he portrayed pillars of bars, prostitutes, jazz musicians confined to obscure clubs, commuters on the subway. He depicted the dereliction of poor neighborhoods, with their burnt buildings, their vacant lots…
His images of urban solitude, his precise line, his nocturnal or twilight atmospheres sometimes recall the art of Edward Hopper. Except that Robert Guinan shows everything that this master, half a century before him, carefully avoided: black figures, sometimes heavy, tired, handicapped bodies. And he celebrates their battered dignity. His very palette displays a predilection for muted and dull harmonies, as if veiled in dust, a far cry from the glamorous seductions of his great predecessor…
A black Olympia
We understand that this unvarnished mirror held up to America did not have the good fortune to please collectors. Until 2010, Robert Guinan was not represented by any gallery in his country. Even in France, where he had a dealer, it was not until the artist’s death that the Center Pompidou agreed to acquire one of his paintings: Kind Hearted Woman (“Woman with a good heart”). A modern Olympia in which the black servant, once portrayed by Manet, has taken her place on the bed of her white mistress, and poses wistfully.
Guided by his friend, Emil Breda, Robert Guinan painted bar pillars and jazz musicians confined to obscure clubs, as shown here in his painting Au Bohemian Club Bar. / Robert Guinan
Robert Guinan indeed admired the French masters of the 19th century. Thus, among the paintings exhibited in Lyon, citations abound. For example, the portrait of Billy Matthews, an imposing black waiter, seated three-quarter length, borrows his imperial dignity from the Portrait of Monsieur Bertin par Ingres. The prostitutes portrayed by our American, with an empathy devoid of voyeurism, recall the art of Toulouse-Lautrec. As for its waitresses enthroned in front of rows of bottles, its drinkers captured by sets of mirrors, they seem to come straight out of a Bar at the Folies Bergere by Manet.
In Robert Guinan’s painting, the last are first
This does not prevent Robert Guinan from asserting his singularity with a heady charm. Who, as much as him, gives all his attention to the most humble? His prints illustrating the story of former slaves denounce the sadism of the dominant. And when he paints a white-haired old woman peeling corn in a back room to earn a few coins, he sanctifies her on a canvas worthy of a large altarpiece!
The last with him are the first. And he never overlooks his subjects. On the contrary. He almost always adopts a bottom-up point of view which gives a certain monumentality to his models or his urban landscapes. Often, he even creates an empty foreground, as if to approach it tactfully. Then he lets slip a long diagonal, erects a few verticals or horizontals to support his composition.
His slightly cloudy colors, his taste for reflections that disturb the apparent stability of reality, betray an acute awareness of the vulnerability of things and beings. Open your eyes! Sometimes, in a window, the image of the painter can be guessed drawing his model, both present and discreet. For having represented these minorities that museums for a long time did not want to see, Robert Guinan, the fraternal, has thus melted into their shadow. We would like to believe today that the hour of his recognition has come.
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Biography of Robert Guinan
1934. Birth of Robert Guinan in Watertown, New York. His mother, a piano teacher, gave him drawing lessons.
1953. To avoid being mobilized in Korea, he enlisted for four years in the US Air Force.
1959. Thanks to an army scholarship, the GI Bill, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Has a passion for reading Jean Genet.
1962. Robert Guinan befriends Emil Breda, an African-American bar pianist.
1972. The American Georges McGuire exhibits it in his gallery in Vienna, Austria. A year later, Robert Guinan also joined Albert Loeb’s gallery in Paris.
1981. It is exhibited at the Museum of Grenoble, which buys a painting from it.
1982. Jean Clair includes works by Guinan in the international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
1998. Exhibitions at the Arsenal in Maubeuge and at the Arc in Le Creusot.
2005. Exhibition at the Villa Medici in Rome.
2016. Died at 82 in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago.
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