“I don’t like Guernica very much.” Hélène Delprat (Amiens, 1957) still remembers the laughter of those who, upon hearing this phrase from her mouth, could only think that it was just another joke from the prankster artist. “I myself laughed at my arrogance, but I thought that, indeed, I did not like that work, and that I had every right to be so. I can’t help it.” I don’t like it very much, Guernica (don’t tell anyone) is also the title of one of the paintings that are part of his exhibition El souvenir de les batalles perdudes at the Museu Picasso, a monumental oil painting full of boiling figures and of crackling images among which we read the names of Dolores Ibárruri, Gerda Taro or Nicole Stéphane, women of action, the true heroines… “The complaint through art…. Mmm… Actions, actions!!! “, writes.
There is something profoundly serious and intelligent behind the eccentricity and sense of humor of Delprat, an artist practically unknown in Spain –he exhibited for the first and only time 25 years ago in the now-defunct Maeght, Picasso’s neighbor– who after a successful period in the eighties, he stopped showing his painting in the nineties and did not return to the scene until well into the 21st century.
Shut up, Picassso, you monopolize the century, is the title of another of the drawings in the show, for whose promotional image he was about to use a photo of himself sticking out his tongue at Picasso. The first gesture of him when he set foot in the museum. In the end he opted for a collage in which he confronts the artist, dressed in a bathrobe, with a flag that is also a combat spear. “I think I like to make fun of Picasso out of sheer jealousy,†he jokes.
But Picasso is not the protagonist here, but war, and above all a woman: Nicole Stéphane (1923-2007), who was an actress for Jean Cocteau ( Les ​​enfants terribles ), produced Marguerite Duras ( Détruire dit-elle ) and filmed under the bombs the documentary about the staging carried out by Susan Sontang, his partner, of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, in the middle of the siege of the city. She met her at a wax museum opening, and was struck by her humility, her commitment, her humor. He proposed to make a movie about her.
That is how she learned that she was Jewish, that before becoming an actress, at the age of 18, she crossed the Pyrenees with her mother, that once in Barcelona she was imprisoned and that she understood what torture was when she heard the screams of the prisoner in the next cell. , a communist adolescent whose kneecaps were fractured by two Francoist guards. She joined the English army, learned to drive a tank, traversed London on a motorbike, and her knowledge of languages ​​allowed her to infiltrate Nazi Germany as a spy.
Delprat brings it closer to us from a small monitor, explaining its history in the first person, and magnifies the focus to show us Mourir à Madrid, the mythical documentary by Frédéric Rossif, of which Stéphane was a producer, which provoked the anger of the Francoist authorities, who offered buy the negative for 325 million francs to burn it. The film incorporated numerous images found on the cameras of journalists killed on the battlefield.
Using still frames from the film, Delprat offers us his own reading of the war, which he evokes again through old Disney films parodying the Germans and the Nazi regime or in a small toy tank advancing over a table loaded with swords, masks, chains, monuments, public fountains… All the objects are golden and the table has collapsed under its weight. It collapsed during the inauguration of the installation, in 2022, at the Musée Monet-Marmottan, and the artist recreates the catastrophe here. “Fate created it for meâ€, she ironizes herself.
