Jean-Paul Ameline: Judit, you arrived in Paris in June 1950 after leaving Hungary, your native country, in March of the same year. Under what circumstances?
Judit Reigl: By crossing Europe, most of the time on foot or by makeshift means such as hitchhiking, sometimes with the help of a few friends I met along the way or associations that gave me train tickets.... I have always been lucky in my misfortune!
JPA: Was this departure from Hungary clandestine?
JR: Absolutely, including the Iron Curtain! I had in fact already left Hungary once before in October 1946 with three painter friends, with a scholarship to study art in Italy, but, on my return to Budapest at the end of 1947*, I had had to return my passport. The Stalinist political system was being put in place and they were beginning to offer us commissions in the socialist-realist style imposed by Zhdanov...
* at the end of 1948.
JPA: So it was for reasons as a painter that you left Hungary...
JR: At 120%! And yet, I was full of enthusiasm: I wanted to build socialism, I was idealistic, naïve... but the reality was the opposite of what I hoped for: I received several commissions from the Ministry of Culture to make portraits of Stalin, Gerö, Rákosi... For their part, the French had given me an initial authorization to come to Paris and so I requested a passport again to leave Hungary but it was refused to me, and I was even refused paint to work with!
It was after eight attempts to leave clandestinely that I succeeded, the ninth time, in crossing the Iron Curtain after having walked 35 km...
From March 10 to the end of June 1950 I crossed Europe, with very little help. In Switzerland, I was offered to work for a year as a housemaid, or to go to a factory. I refused and told the Swiss that I asked them only one thing: to let me reach the French border… I finally went through Germany and Belgium and arrived in Paris via Lille by train. At the Gare du Nord, the disappointment was enormous! Paris was dirty, ugly, miserable !
JPA: Were you expected in Paris?
JR: I was expected. I immediately went to Simon Hantaï and his wife, who had arrived in France two years before me. Hantaï was one of the three painters with whom I had made the trip to Italy in 1947. Soon, I was able to settle at the studios of La Ruche thanks to another painter friend, Antal Biró, and it was Pierre and Véra Szekely who obtained my first commission for me, a mural in a building that has since disappeared near the Autoroute de l’Ouest...
JPA: Is it through Hantaï that you meet André Breton ?
JR: Yes, but it was four years later. In May 1954, Hantaï suggested to Breton that he come and see my studio. It was there that he saw one of my first paintings made in Paris, Ils ont soif insatiable de l’infini, inspired by a poem by Lautréamont. In front of the painting, Breton was very struck and the very next day wrote me a letter in which he confided to me his emotion at having been before this image so close to that of Lautréamont. Hantaï immediately wanted to know the contents of the letter... Moreover, Breton immediately offered to organize an exhibition for me. I refused, because I did not feel ready. Meret Oppenheim also took me to the Berggruen gallery; in the gallery, I saw the Louis XV armchairs, I became frightened. I did not feel free... I preferred to continue working in my small studio of 4 metres by 3... I went every day to the meetings of the Surrealist group. In July, I read L'Amour fou and it deeply affected me. I then wanted to offer Soif insatiable to Breton and he accepted it. In November, he again offered me an exhibition; I replied: “I am ready.” It began on November 19 at the Galerie de l’Étoile Scellée. All the Surrealists came... Max Ernst came by. In the gallery, there was a small coal stove. Max Ernst said: “I look at the fire, I look at the paintings of Judit Reigl, they go well together; it holds.” Among the fourteen paintings in the exhibition, there were only two figurative works: Soif insatiable... and Volupté incomparable.... The others were abstract paintings made since September 1953 in total automatism, both psychic and physical.
JPA: How did the Surrealists look at these abstract paintings ?
JR: Some paintings had organic forms which may have interested Breton. Despite his preferences for figuration, he had understood their interest... but the contradiction was there.
JPA: Wasn’t automatism nevertheless at the source of these abstract paintings?
JR: Automatism was total, global. But the Surrealists, in their majority, had returned towards imagery. I wanted to go beyond dreams, underneath. At the very beginning, with Hantaï’s help, I tried to paint using curved blades, like razor blades. It did not work. I then worked alone, with a bent curtain rod bought at the flea market. I even wanted to exhibit the tool in the gallery during my exhibition but Hantaï wanted and obtained its removal. Three months after the beginning of the exhibition, in December, I preferred to leave the Surrealist group and I wrote to Breton about it. The critic Charles Estienne had invited the Surrealists to exhibit at the Galerie Kléber and requested Soif insatiable for the hanging. I refused. I no longer wanted to exhibit this painting because I had gone beyond it.
JPA: And did Breton understand your approach?
JR: I don’t know. He replied to me with a very kind letter. Hantaï himself, who was to leave the group three months later, said that there was nothing else to do.
JPA: Who then are the artists who seem closest to you?
JR: My friend Antal Biró often took me to galleries: at Drouin, at Maeght, at Loeb. I saw there, among others, Tanguy, Ernst, Duchamp. Matta touched me very deeply. His large abstract, “cosmic” paintings deeply affected me.
JPA: And the Americans?
JR: When Pollock began to become known in Paris, Hantaï immediately became interested in him. It was around 1955 that I began to hear about him, at Drouin.
JPA: It is also at the Drouin gallery that you exhibit in 1956 with Degottex, Hantaï, Claude Georges, Mathieu, Viseux, in an exhibition entitled “Tensions.” What brings you together?
JR: Mathieu was the most important for us. It was a matter of painting on large formats with the whole body, giving priority to the speed of execution and without having a prior conception of the work to be painted.
JPA: How were your paintings then made?
JR: Without any preparatory drawing or brush: with both hands, walking towards the canvas, sometimes throwing the paint from a distance.
JPA: And why is this series entitled Eclatement?
JR: I felt inside me something like a centre that had burst. Like a trauma. This also corresponded to the bursting apart of Surrealism and strangely coincided with the beginning of the Hungarian uprising of November 1956 in Budapest.
JPA: The following series is entitled Ecriture en masse. Why?
JR: Because the paint is placed in masses on the canvas. I had bought a material used by masons: a ground black that dries slowly, in depth, over years. Starting from a white ground, I placed the lumps of paint on the canvas with a flexible and rounded blade, sometimes a simple wooden stick, and I then “raised” them from bottom to top on the canvas, covering, with this ground black, the lighter colours placed underneath.
JPA: What is surprising is the relationship of these pictorial masses to space: they seem to be in movement.
JR: They are weightless and one does not know whether they are rising or descending. This “floating” is that of all my painting, up to the Déroulements of the years 1974–85.
JPA: In your texts, you establish a relationship between these paintings and the movements proper to the Earth or the Cosmos…
JR: It is not a relationship: it is the same thing! But it passes through me. Heraclitus indeed says: “Ta Panta Rheï,” that is to say “Everything flows.” And I translated Déroulement into Hungarian as “Folyamat,” that is to say “movement in duration,” thinking of the movement of a river.
JPA: Is it then Mathieu that you feel closest to?
JR: Yes, but, with Mathieu, the movement has become frozen and his late paintings evoke wrought iron or passementerie. At the beginning, he is in the electrical discharge. In 1953, one of his paintings, presented at Drouin, had literally stunned me, like a stroke of lightning.
JPA: Moreover, he very quickly arrives at very large formats…
JR: And I have never had a studio to match my needs. They have always been too small. And perhaps these ascents or falls, these weightlessnesses, in my painting, come from the need to get out of this confinement…
JPA: Does the Guano series (1958–65) also come from the desire to get out of this confinement ?
JR: The Guanos were made simultaneously with the Ecritures en masse starting in 1958. On the occasion of a move, I put on a parquet floor that had to be protected old failed paintings from the Ecriture en masse and Centre de dominance series on which I had walked for days without thinking about them anymore. They fossilized and I found them again much later. The fallen, excremental material had become a marvel. Like a Dubuffet.
JPA: When do you show this series ?
JR: Jean Fournier, who ran the Galerie Kléber and who showed my work from 1957 to 1962, presented a Guano at the Salon d’Automne in October 1962, but the first gallery to buy works from me was the Van de Loo gallery in Munich starting in 1958. It was wonderful. Thanks to it, I showed my Eclatements and my Ecritures en masse in Munich but also in Lausanne and Freiburg during the 1960s. René Drouin had also helped me to participate in my first group exhibition in a museum, in Wiesbaden, in 1957.
JPA: Judit, we must now evoke an important moment in your work: the arrival of anthropomorphic figures in your works from 1966 onwards...
JR: It did not appear to me immediately. When I began to notice that this imperceptible presence was becoming clearly figurative, I said to myself: “Oh, but I don’t want to do that...” I therefore tried to return towards non-figuration, which had been my daily domain for fifteen years. To my great (and bad) surprise, it insisted. Finally, after a while, I had to accept because I said to myself: “this thing really important to me, which went unnoticed by my eyes, was already there. I had realized, from the imperceptible to the perceptible, the same thing: the Ecriture en masse had already become, in a way, this series that I did not name Homme until much later because I had had no preconceived programme in this direction.
JPA: These figures that appear in 1966 are incomplete: they are torsos...
JR: I was even told that they were “truncated” or “mutilated.” Absolutely not. They are simply larger than the canvas. They want to go beyond it and they go beyond it.
JPA: And these bodies appear in levitation in space...
JR: Not yet in 1966. They stand upright, vertically, against nothingness, like an answer. Afterwards they will try to break free, to liberate themselves, to fly away. They imposed themselves.
JPA: And they are most often male bodies...
JR: Yes, for the most part, because they stand actively against nothingness, they assert their existence, their liberation. In my view, this demanded that. Nevertheless, I believe that art is both masculine and feminine, Yin and Yang. There is between these two poles a total complementarity, a harmony. The female bodies appeared a little later. There was no hierarchy...
JPA: Does the word levitation bother you, concerning them ?
JR: That comes afterwards. If you notice carefully, you see them first standing upright, struggling, trying to free themselves, sometimes succeeding, but with tumbles, falls... sometimes rises which end in balances oh so ephemeral and momentary !
JPA: One also thinks of other works coming from the History of Art, where bodies also seem to be in levitation in space...
JR: Of course, you can imagine unconscious references, in me, to Signorelli, to Michelangelo, to Tiepolo... I can also notice that, and accept it...
JPA: In this series, the bodies always appear naked, muscular, powerful...
JR: If you want to break your chains, you also need physical strength, which is why the legs, the arms are powerful. Everything goes together: the psychic and the physical.
JPA: The psychic even seems to be absorbed into the physical: the bodies have no face...
JR: To make a face is already to individualize. That is what I want to avoid. Basically, the fundamental experience is not properly human: it is the experience of being, beneath and beyond the human...
JPA: Which perhaps explains that you continued the work on this series....
JR: For six years, from 1966 to 1972, eight even if one adds the Drap/Décodage series where I took up the imprints of my anthropomorphic figures on very thin, almost transparent canvases.
JPA: And despite this, the Homme series was little shown, and late...
JR: And I regret it, for the understanding of the whole of my work. There has been a coherence in my painting for now more than fifty years that one can never see, or, at least, too rarely.
JPA: It is in fact the case that, when you move into this new phase, you move strongly away from the abstract artists alongside whom you exhibited. This may have been disconcerting...
JR: I could even say, if I wanted to be truthful, that there was an incredible resistance on the part of those who knew my previous work, as soon as they considered me “figurative.” Thus, Bernard Ceysson, director of the Musée de Saint-Etienne, did not even want to see these new paintings whereas he had liked the Ecritures en masse... Art critics, dealers, curators wanted me to continue what I no longer wanted to do. I could not very well make paintings to please them !
JPA: At what point did you perceive that this series was now better accepted ?
JR: It was never really accepted. Especially in France, where this evolution was very badly understood. In Germany, and today in America, it seems to be going better...
JPA: Perhaps it is also because after this figurative phase, you returned, starting with Décodage, to an abstract period...
JR: But it is nevertheless the same thing! Even today, France remains caught up in this Figuration-Abstraction opposition that I suffered.
JPA: And this new passage to abstraction, in 1974, takes place through the experience of the Décodage series...
JR: Yes. Décodage corresponds to the imprint of the old paintings of the Homme series that I veiled and whose tracing I then made on the front of this veil. I then showed the back, which corresponds to the imprint of the paint after its passage through the veil.
JPA: And this work based on the imprint is going to become, for the years 1974–1986, a constant in your work...
JR: The only constant in my work is the experience of being! If it is to be figurative, I accept it. If it becomes abstract, I accept that too. The Drap/Décodage series enabled me to get out of the very hard straitjacket of the Homme series. Once again I said to myself: “I am going to move out towards freedom,” and it happened quite naturally, organically, ontologically, from the qualities proper to the pictorial material, from the movement of my body having become a simple instrument allowing me a writing as fluid as the canvas that receives it, like a “river in movement” once again.
JPA: The Décodages are indeed made, off stretcher, on loose canvases…
JR: I was told that they were like shrouds, winding-sheets, whereas they are only light imprints on semi-transparent canvases, like Indian saris…
JPA: And it is these Décodages that lead you to the Déroulement series in 1974…
JR: And the Déroulements are once again totally abstract, but why not? There is no single path for life: the unicellular organism indeed became a man and, from there, God knows where…
JPA: But this time you work on both sides of the canvas….
JR: It is already, in a way, what I was beginning to do with the Décodages, but until now, in the Décodages, I still showed only the back of the canvas. In the Déroulements, the paint appears on the front (the painted side) in an undulating form, and on the back in corpuscular form, since it has partially passed through the canvas. But modern physics has indeed discovered the dual nature of matter, both undulating and corpuscular… This has always intrigued me; one day, I came across an article that explained it, and I said to myself: “There! This is what I do on the canvas!”
JPA: But the making of the Déroulements is quite new since you staple blank canvases onto all the walls of the studio and then paint them with a brush while walking along the walls…
JR: Never with a brush. I always make my own instruments: I make a kind of reinforced sponge that I dip into the paint; this allows me to work with both hands. Often also, I listen to classical music while working. This is how a new series will be born that I entitled L’Art de la Fugue…
JPA: You thus arrive at a sort of cursive writing along the canvas…
JR: An undulating writing with thick glycerophthalic paint (a kind of Duco) on the front, which becomes thinner and becomes corpuscular as it passes onto the back. Curiously, this very greasy paint resists the acrylic dye that I then apply over the entire back of the canvas installed, this time, horizontally on a provisional stretcher. In this second phase, the greasy paint repels the acrylic like a duck’s feathers repel water. It is a struggle that passes through construction and destruction and gives this incredible result, in its last phase, of a painting visible differently on its front and on its back…
JPA: It is therefore a work where you use the specific qualities of each of the two paints…
JR: Exactly. And I sometimes repeat the operations several times on the same canvas until its saturation. Technique is fundamentally important to me, from the purchase of the canvas to the choice of formats, paints, and instruments for painting. I did not touch a brush for forty years, and now, strangely, I am returning to it…
JPA: From Eclatements to Déroulements, the change is therefore total…
JR: For me, it is one and the same thing. Whether the sun is at its zenith or at its setting, it is the same sun…
JPA: But, this time, the Déroulements are going to interest a new generation of critics and artists...
JR: The critic Marcelin Pleynet even wrote that he considers all my work as belonging to the Déroulements, including in its anthropomorphic aspects. Moreover, another painter of my generation also constantly moved from figuration to abstraction by changing his techniques and materials: it is Gerhard Richter…
JPA: Some, during the 1970s–80s, were thus able to bring you closer to the painters whom one classified under “analytical abstraction.” Moreover, the Déroulement series multiplies from 1974 to 1985, into series that complement it…
JR: For me, “analytical” means nothing. What prevails for me is discovery, this experience of being, in a universal way. As for the series that follow Déroulement, they come from the same source from which music or poetry originate: that is to say, from the elementary gesture, rhythm, tempo.
JPA: What associates Eclatement, Ecriture en masse and Déroulement is therefore the gesture on the canvas…
JR: Yes, but not the gesture as a sign. The destruction of signs belongs to my work, which distinguishes me from Mathieu or Degottex, for example.
JPA: The sign itself would therefore be a limit?
JR: Life is construction and destruction, which my paintings show from the beginning. Degottex moves towards deconstruction and disincarnation. For me painting must become embodied and destroy itself. Déroulement is that: an action in duration to find this fixed source that allows movement to exist.
JPA: In 1986, once again, the human figure returns and the first series in which the bodies reappear is called Entrée-Sortie… Is this a break ?
JR: But there is no break! In 1986, the Hydrogène series, the last of the Déroulements, seemed to be buried under the layers of paint. It was becoming like a wall that had to be crossed. So I traced a sort of rectangular opening on the canvas that some called a “door,” and, in this door, a human figure appeared. Why? I don’t know. Because once again, it wants to get out of this door, get out of this wall…
JPA: And this human figure is a silhouette.
JR: A silhouette that also tries to fly away. How? By destroying this door and that is how Entrée-Sortie became Face à… because what remains facing me myself is myself.
JPA: If I understand correctly, this silhouette is present in the painting because you are in the painting…
JR: I am at the same time the image in the mirror, the mirror, and the spectator who sees the mirror… I am everything together. It is this elementary basis that I seek.
JPA: For the flying figures of the 1960s, Icare has been mentioned. Sometimes, you use the name Lazarus to designate these figures…
JR: It is rather you who used this designation. It is an excellent term but it does not come from me. Pleynet had also noticed that I had been attracted by an image of the catacombs of Rome presenting a figure in front of a tomb.
JPA: What was the reaction of the critics to this new series ?
JR: Very limited because the link that associates all of my series was not seen.
JPA: This is why, in your exhibitions, you now prefer to associate abstract works and figurative works. As at the Centre Pompidou in 1994, on the occasion of the presentation of the donation of Maurice Goreli, your principal Parisian collector. As in Budapest in 2005, during your retrospective at the Mücsarnok.
JR: Yes, and this one took place largely thanks to the activity of Kalman Maklary, my gallery owner, who has exhibited me at several European fairs since that date, in Paris, Cologne, Moscow… And this is also what Janos Gat does, in his gallery in New York, by presenting my principal series in several successive exhibitions: in 2007, the Eclatements and the Ecritures en masse, today the Homme series and next spring the Déroulements.