Eva Aeppli's work at the Centre Pompidou-Metz

About the exhibition entitled "Le Musée sentimental d'Eva AEppli" which runs until 14 November at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

For Richard Leydier, editor of the contemporary art magazine Artpress, the current exhibition devoted to the Swiss painter and sculptor Eva Aeppli has only one flaw: it is "confined to Lorraine". The Centre Pompidou-Metz will just have to digest the pill, and the people of Lorraine with it. The decentralisation of national institutions, whose main aim is to give access to major exhibitions of modern and contemporary art to a public other than the Parisian one, does not seem to convince everyone. Well, yes: on condition that they do not remain "confined". Be that as it may, "this exhibition is fascinating," says the journalist at the beginning of his article for the September issue of Artpress.

It is therefore a good opportunity to follow Richard Leydier's lead and travel to Metz, in Moselle, to discover "Eva Aeppli's Sentimental Museum" before November 14. And without any complexes: even the eminent art critic and exhibition curator knew nothing about this work before responding to the invitation of Chiara Parisi and Anne Horvath, both curators of this exhibition, the former directing the Centre Pompidou-Metz since December 2019 and the latter being in charge of research there. Eva Aeppli (1925-2015) frequented the likes of Daniel Spoerri, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Constantin Brancusi, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Pontus Hulten and other stars of contemporary art from the 1950s to the 1970s, including Jean Tinguely, who was even her second husband from 1951 to 1960. But never before had the spotlight shone directly on her art.

This is the first retrospective in France devoted to Eva Aeppli, and it is hard to believe when you visit this exhibition. How could these striking silhouettes, these patched up faces, these hilarious business cards, have escaped us until now? How could this great gap between humour and tragedy, between symbolism and realism, almost be overlooked in the history of art in France, where she lived since the 1950s? Let's not exaggerate: Eva Aeppli, who died in Honfleur on 4 May 2015 at the age of 90, was recognised. But more often elsewhere. Her drawings, paintings, figurines, textile sculptures and bronzes have been exhibited in museums and art galleries since 1954. In 1976, his sculptures were featured in the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and at the ARC in Paris. Important retrospectives took place in 1993 in Stockholm, in 1994 in Solothurn and in Bonn. A large group of her artworks are in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, while others are housed in various museums and private collections around the world.

Eva Aeppli was born on 2 May 1925 in Zofingen, a Swiss-German municipality in the canton of Aargau, and is the daughter of one of the co-founders of the Rudolf Steiner School in Basel, named after the Austrian philosopher, architect and teacher who created anthroposophy, a pioneering movement that is sometimes visionary and sometimes enlightened, and that places man at the heart of nature and the cosmos. The young girl who followed the teachings of this movement was awakened very early to a form of open-mindedness that was off the beaten track. She became very interested in astrology in 1975, thanks to the astrologer Jacques Berthon and the painter Eric Leraille. According to Richard Leydier, "she does not seem to have fully adhered to Rudolf Steiner's beliefs, but her bronze heads, which symbolise the planets of the solar system, nevertheless have a very mystical feel to them. The bronze heads at the Centre Pompidou-Metz are compared with diagrams by the Swiss spiritualist and painter Emma Kunz (1892-1963).

During her studies at the School of Decorative Arts in Basel, where she practised painting, engraving and sculpture, Eva Aeppli discovered the existence of the death camps while reading "The Soldier in the Mud" by Wolfgang Langhoff. This reading had a lasting effect on her work. Her first marriage gave her a son in 1946, and she began her career as an artist in 1950 with charcoal drawings. However, she was already making cloth figurines to support her family. These were real works of art for sale. It was around 1952, when she moved to Paris a year after marrying Jean Tinguely for the second time, who convinced her to switch to oil painting and from whom she had a daughter, that Eva finally gave more importance to her artistic work on life-size human sculptures. At the same time, she continued to sell puppets to toy shops to feed her little world,

Despite the many Parisian artistic trends of the time, which she was closely involved with, such as the so-called miserabilist painting of Bernard Buffet or Francis Gruber, which was exploding at the same time, or the new realism in which she was evolving, Eva Aeppli followed her own path throughout her life. Her own voice. Singular and autonomous. Perhaps this is the beginning of an explanation for the lack of response to her work in France? In any case, it was the only way for her not to let her art be stifled by that of Jean Tinguely. Not to let herself be influenced by the intense creativity surrounding her. What she wants to do is to translate and bear witness to human suffering on the basis of her favourite themes and plastic inventions, which are characteristic of an art that is liberated and transcendent. But without ever discussing it.

Having always avoided "chatting" about her work, the artist who amusingly described herself as a "consultant in Wouzi and Wouzi-Wousi", a "philosopher", a "teacher of life" or an "acrobat between heaven and earth", has left behind a theatrical work marked by poetry and tragedy, which has had a considerable influence on the work of her friend Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely's second wife. In 1963, Niki de Saint Phalle appointed her as the temporary physical and spiritual manager of his work in the event of the death of the sculptor whom they had both married.

Eva Aeppli's unwavering commitment to the service of humanity was born of her trauma during the Second World War. This is evidenced by the installation she created in 1968, Group of 13, in homage to Amnesty International, an organisation of which she was a member, and the creation in 1990 of her own foundation, Myrrahkir Foundation, to fight oppression, poverty and ignorance. When she separated from Tinguely in 1960, she devoted herself to painting in large canvases in which skulls and skeletal figures, crammed together, defined compositions bordering on abstraction, contemporary dances of death and pessimism, but extending them with sculptural work that she considered an extension of her paintings.

Before abandoning the body in 1976 to concentrate solely on the faces and hands of her sculptures, Eva Aeppli's sculptural work was one of the first by a woman in the 1960s and 1970s, along with Germaine Richier and Barbara Hepworth. Her slender, spectral, ghostly figures, which she herself calls "macchabées", are mostly made of fabric and kapok with a great economy of means. Mute and solitary, monochrome, their arms swing along their bodies, their legs are stunted, their faces pale. The effect is striking.

Among the groups of these textile mannequins considered masterpieces today is La Table, from 1967. "A long theory of officiants who, for once, do not have generic features but are undoubtedly inspired by real faces," writes Richard Leydier. An installation that is judiciously confronted at the Centre Pompidou-Metz with Warhol's Last Supper, and which does not fail to impress the visitor as he makes his way along this path rich in emblematic works.