Surviving the Collapse of Humanism after World War II: The “Abhumanist” Response of J. Audiberti and C. Bryen

Abstract

Camille Bryen is best known as an abstract painter from the post-World World War II “École de Paris.” At the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, his works were claimed by the various branches of lyrical abstraction dominating the Parisian artworld. It is less known that Bryen together with playwright Jacques Audiberti invented a new philosophical concept, “abhumanism,” which he himself considered as the most appropriate term for his art. Casting into question the humanistic values, both authors claimed a return to vitalistic materiality against the fallacious spiritual aims underlying humanism: “I want to write like the bull mooes,” Audiberti wrote. The books dealing with abhumanism (the founding Ouvre-boîte. Colloque abhumaniste in 1952 and later L’Abhumanisme) designated painting (and that of Bryen in particular) as the abhumanist activity, because of its intrinsic material and earth-bound anti-spirituality. “Abhumanising” Bryen sets his artistic production in the wake of Dada and Surrealism, to which he was affiliated, who clearly accused the Western humanistic civilization of enacting World War I; it also sets him apart from the restricted lyrical and ahistorical argumentation related to post-World War II Parisian abstraction.

Keywords:

• Humanism
• Abhumanism
• Audiberti
• Bryen
• World War II
• École de Paris

Notes

1 An earlier version of this article was first published in French in the special issue “Mythe” of the journal 20–21, U of Nanterre P, autumn 2011. My recognition goes to Bernard Zirnheld whose help with the translation was precious.

2 The text is unpublished in English; all the translations are by B. Zirnheld and the author.

3 The Swedish chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, founded by will five annual prizes, one of them dedicated to peace.

4 I am borrowing this term to Daniel Abadie; see next paragraph.

5 An ironic paraphrases of ad vitam eternam?

6 Abadie avoids oblique commentaries, typical of Bryen's critical fortune and of the commentaries on abstract art at the time (Adamson 3–4)

7 Bryen was one of the fames of the Latin Quarter. In Georges Patrix's canvas, Les Gloires du 6^e Arrondissement (1950, private collection), he appears next to B. Vian, J. Prévert, J. Genet, J. Gréco and J.-P. Sartre.

8 Bryen puns on the French homonyms mythe (myth) and mite (moth)