Christian Dotremont – The Poet of CoBrA
The Belgian artist Christian Dotremont (1922-79) found his special place in CoBrA as the group’s poet and philosopher. He formulated CoBrA’s manifesto “The Case Was Heard” during the inaugural meeting at the Hotel Notre Dame café in Paris in 1948, and he was the group’s primary spokesperson and secretary until 1951.
“The only solution for sustained international activity is, in our opinion, an organic experimental collaboration that avoids all the sterile and dogmatic theories.”
Christian Dotremont, CoBrA’s Manifesto “La Cause Était Entendue” (The Case Was Heard), 1948.
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Dotremont was a poet, and his career was formed within the intellectual atmosphere of Surrealism in Belgium during the 1940s, where the way forward was through revolutionary thinking in a close embrace with artistic experiments. In his later fellowship with the other CoBrA artists, he found a way to weave art and politics even closer together. He was inspired by the spontaneity in his colleagues’ visual art, which for him held great opportunities for renewal. The written word was always Dotremont’s starting point – even when he later supplemented the poetry with a career as a visual artist. His paintings appear as beautiful, almost calligraphic, patterns, often completed by a poetic text at the bottom. He thus established a bridge between the otherwise separate worlds of the written word and visual art. He called these images “Logograms”, where he created smooth transitions between the meaning of the poetic texts and the graphic effect of the brushstrokes. Dotremont’s work showcases CoBrA’s thoughts on the community and the collective experiment that became an artistic form of conversation between the group’s members. Here, works and exhibitions were created across artforms and artists. This was expressed in the “Word paintings”, which Dotremont created together with Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel and Corneille. Another example of the collective experiment is Dotremont’s collection of poems “Vues Laponia” from 1957, where the individual poems were illustrated by the same artist colleagues. |
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