A committed artist

Born in Caen in 1948, Messac grew up in an intellectual environment. He was cradled by his parents' creative hobbies, as well as by the examples of his grandfather, a writer and activist, and his uncle, a journalist and literature enthusiast.¹A pacifist, but also a Resistance fighter during the Second World War, Ivan Messac's grandfather was also a renowned novelist who today rests in the Panthéon: BELLET, Harry, Ivan Messac, De la peinture avant toute chose, Paris, Somogy éditions d'art, 2005, p. 10.

In 1960, his family moved closer to Paris and settled near Nanterre. This new environment is of importance for the artist because it motivated the artistic direction he would take a few years later²Ivan Messac evokes the encounters he had within this intellectual milieu, encounters which nurtured his future: see Ibid., p. 11.. Evolving in a politicized environment, in a city like Nanterre, a "communist" and "armed on the cultural front" city³Ivan Messac, Pop politique, 1967-1972, exhibition catalog [Paris, Galerie T&L, 16.03 -08.04.2022], Paris, Galerie T&L, 2020, p. 11 (remarks collected by Tancrède Hertzog)., the artist grows closer to the engaged student circles, in an atmosphere of protest that prefigures May 68.⁴On March 22, 1968, nearly one hundred and fifty students, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, occupied the faculty of Nanterre. Viewed as the starting point of the future revolts of May 68 in Paris, the student movement then blocked the entire country for several weeks, see : DREYFUS-ARMAND, Geneviève; FRANK,Robert; LÉVY, Marie-Françoise; ZANCARINI-FOURNEL, Michelle (dir.), Les années 1968. Le temps de la contestation, éditions Complexe, 2008, p. 40.

"I like to say that I am both a child of the Beatles and of Marxism: at the beginning, I did not see painting as a site of political commitment. It was the climate of the city I lived in that had a lot to do with this shift: Nanterre."⁵Ivan Messac, Pop politique, 1967-1972, op. cit., p. 11.

As an autodidact, Messac never attended any school of Fine Arts. He rather preferred to study philosophy at the University of Nanterre because, according to him, it was "a much better education for painting".⁶Ivan Messac, Pop politique, 1967-1972, ibid., p. 7. It is in this context that his work – devoted until 1967 to the creation of psychedelic gouaches – took on much more social dimensions starting in 1968. Initially using Indian ink⁷Two works on paper are also part of the collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art. They are Je passe, vous repasserez (June 1968) and Sur le Quai (1968). Both are available online., he subsequently executed flat paintings with pop colours. In them, he played with shadows and lights using stencils, a technique emblematic of his work between the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Messac, being close to the capital, developed his interest for politics by regularly attending debates organized at the ARC from 1967 onwards⁹The ARC, an acronym for Animation – Recherche – Confrontation, was created in 1966 and developed within the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. It was at the heart of cultural debates that questioned the criticized models of the museum and its public (as attested for example by Pierre Bourdieu's famous book L'amour de l'art, 1966). Its goal wasn’t conservation but rather exhibition. It wished to be the bearer of a new program of cultural animation whose aim was to "reach a new public", as stated in ARC’s first manifesto. In a period when the Parisian contemporary art scene was declining to the benefit of New York, ARC intended to revitalize the Parisian scene and to promote new artistic currents and mediums. See : TÉNÈZE, Annabelle, Exposer l'art contemporain à Paris. L'exemple de l'ARC au Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1967-1988), Thesis, École nationale des Chartes, Paris, 2004, available online: https://www.chartes.psl.eu/fr/positions-these/exposer-art-contemporain-paris-exemple-arc-au-musee-art-moderne-ville-paris-1967#content-chapter-1 ,accessed on 11.12.2022.. He then made his first forays into the Parisian artistic life. At the time of the debate on the "Red Room for Vietnam" in February 1969, he was introduced to the Salon de la jeune peinture. Becoming a member of its committee, he showed work there, that same year 1969, alongside artists such as Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, Henri Cueco, Jacques Monory and Bernard Rancillac¹⁰The Salon de la Jeune Peinture seeks to counter the shortage of exhibition spaces for young artists from 1950 on. In the 1960s, it became an instrument of struggle and of political debate. What is to notice from that moment on is the return of a more militant painting practice as evidenced by the project of the "Red Room for Vietnam" in 1969. See : PARENT, Francis; PERROT, Raymond, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, une histoire 1950-1983, Arcueil, éditions Patou,2016.. Responding to the domination of abstract art after the Second World War, narrative figuration displayed its desire to chronicle everyday’s reality and the society of the ‘The Glorious Thirty’ by way of interrogating them¹¹Organized in 1964 by Hervé Télémaque, Bernard Rancillac and the art critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, the exhibition "Mythologies quotidiennes" is afoundational event of narrative figuration..

Being conscious of the "power of images" and desiring "to evacuate any ambiguity", the artists of this movement attempted to "maintain between them and their work a certain distance"¹²Idem.. They implemented this in drawing from what mass communication put at their disposal: publicity, cinema, comic strips, or photography¹³Idem.. These tools became one of the main components of their language. For that matter, this very aspect is what strongly stands out in Messac’s work. With his paintings and drawings, the young artist gives an account of the 1960s, the decade’s injustices, aspirations and social struggles that derived from it. Like other artists close to narrative figuration, Messac highlights the "fog of illusions" that the affluent society had turned into after years of reconstruction¹⁴Idem.. Thus, with his "pop" pictorial style and the societal subjects that he treats, Messac grew close to the main artists of the movement. One strong evidence of this is his 1969 work Black Panther, Tigre de papier (fig. 1).

Tiger and Panther

This painting reveals two distinct problematics. They are illustrated by subjects that both oppose and respond to each other. On a red background, a beret wearing figure carries a rifle on his right shoulder. The figure appears to be surrounded by other individuals, one of whom is facing him and wearing a similar beret. Easily identifiable both by the title of the work as well as by his "uniform", the main character clearly makes reference to a member of the Black Panther Party, a political group founded in 1966 in the United States to defend the rights of African-American communities. According to the artist's testimony¹⁵According to an electronic exchange with Ivan Messac, 10.11.2022., the figure is to be identified as one of the party’s founding members, namely Huey P. Newton (1942-1989)¹⁶The Black Panther Party (BPP) is a revolutionary African-American liberation movement of Marxist-Leninist inspiration. Formed on October 15, 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in California, it went national in the mid-1970s. The composition of the party is based on a governmental model, with a president (Bobby Seale), a minister of defence (Huey P. Newton), a political program and a set of rules. In addition, the participation of women in the BPP was important. Figures such as Angela Davis or Ericka Huggins made their mark and became true icons of the party. See: LAURENT, Sylvie, "Black Panther," lecture recorded on September 26, 2018 at the Claude Lévi-Strauss Theater, in the cycle "Les Grandes révoltes" at the Université populaire du musée quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1h0tz0pH7w , accessed on 11.11.2022.. The carrying of the weapon, a sign of intimidation and provocation, refers to the capture of the Capitol in Sacramento, the capital city of the State of California, on May 2, 1967. Following a government legislative decision to curtail the rights of African-Americans¹⁷In the spring of 1967, Denzil Dowell, an African-American citizen, was murdered by the police. As a result, the Black Panthers formed an armed group of "Police Patrols" to defend African-Americans against police violence. A few weeks later, a law was drafted by the Republican politician Don Mulford, with the guidance of the National Rifle Association (NRA), to ban the carrying of loaded firearms in public. Prior to this piece of legislation, it was perfectly legal to carry loaded firearms in public in California, as long as they were not brandished in a threatening manner. It all seems too evident then that this bill had the intention to stop Black Panther patrols. Suffice to say, in this regard, that the media dubbed it "the Panther Bill". See: JARRET, Matthew, "Black panther Capitol March", in Forgotten History, published 15 January 2021, online: https://www.forgottenhistory.me/domestic-affairs/black-panther-capitol-march, accessed 12.12.2022., thirty members of the Black Panthers gathered in front of the Capitol on that day to enter it with weapons (fig. 2). The image Messac seems to be referring to could be related to a photograph of Huey P. Newton, rifle on the shoulder, an image that was regularly reused in the American press (fig. 3).

The preoccupations of the opposite figure on the green background appear quite different, to be away from the act of protest. Armed with her supermarket cart, her attention is focused on consumption. The image, probably found in a magazine or advertisement of the time, evokes the stereotype of the housewife, also a "victim" of the affluent society, not unlike the members of the African-American community, victims of social discrimination in 1960s America¹⁸According to the artist, most of the images he uses for his works originate in documentation taken from the press, magazines or advertisements of the 1960s-1970s, which he unfortunately did not keep. According to an electronic exchange with Ivan Messac on 10.11.2022.

Even though they are represented as opposites, the two subjects somehow still come together, and this not without a touch of irony. On the one hand, the Black Panther Party inspired by Marxism-Leninism, represented by the sickle and the hammer, opposes capitalism with force and conviction. On the other hand, the American society is led by the nose by its own capitalist ideals, thus sweeping away the communist symbol with the back, so to speak, of a shopping cart.

The title of the work is crucial in this mirror game. Indeed, Tigre de papier (Paper Tiger), which is derived from the famous expression by Mao Tse-Tung in an interview in 1956¹⁹LU, Jack, « Chine : les tigres de papier », in Outre-Terre, n° 37, 2013, p. 344, available online https://www.cairn.info/revue-outre-terre2-2013-3-page 343.htm, accessed 18.11.2022., is in fact a personification of imperialist America, both able to roar and to be harmless, easily tamed. In this painting, the Tigre (Tiger) – a reflection of the United States, victim of overconsumption – is set against the Panthère (Panther), a being that struggles and fights fearlessly to defend its rights. This work, carried by this double title and by these echoing subjects, is a critical reflection of the societal problems emblematic of these years.

Social struggles through Angela

Black Panther, Tigre de papier can easily be linked to another painting in the collection, the artist himself making the connection²⁰According to an electronic exchange with Ivan Messac, 10.11.2022.. Also made in 1969, Angela, Angela (fig. 4) is similarly composed like a mirror and similarly addresses issues related to social struggles of the time.

Alluding to the female icon of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis²¹Born in 1944, Angela Davis is a communist, pacifist and feminist activist who defends human and minorities’ rights. In the 1960s, she was established as a female role model within the Black Panther movement., the title equally suggests that the young woman who is getting out of the car could be the one called Angela²²According to an electronic exchange with Ivan Messac, 10.11.2022.. This double evocation shows the importance that the artist gives to this figure. Angela, then, is associated with the leader of communist, feminist and minorities’ struggles. She is equally linked to the image of the post-May 68 woman, a signifier of the liberation of morals, as she is wearing a mini-skirt, a symbol of sexual liberation. In that sense, this work differs strongly in regard to the housewife represented in Black Panther, Tigre de papier.²³VENET, Anna, « Le jour où la mini-jupe est devenue l’emblème de la révolution sexuelle », in Numéro, n° 235, 31 August 2021, available online: https://www.numero.com/fr/mode/mini-jupe-andre-courreges-mary-quant, accessed 07.12.2022..

In Angela, Angela, Messac addresses several issues. Indeed, on the right side of this composition, the artist focuses on representing the struggle of minorities, as it is symbolized by the repetition in a mosaic pattern of Ericka Huggins’s silhouette, an icon of the Black Panthers in the vein of Angela Davis (fig. 5). Often used in the press as well as on the banners of Black Panther Party supporters demanding the release of political prisoners²⁴Between 1967 and 1970, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins and Huey P. Newton were all three charged with homicide and imprisoned in the aftermath of shootings in which police officers were killed. Protest campaigns for their release erupted everywhere and the proclamations "Free Angela", "Free Ericka" and "Free Huey" became far-reaching slogans. The emblematic images of these three personalities, executed with stencils, are reproduced repeatedly on the banners of the protesters, on posters and other leaflets of the Black Panther Party. See: BLAKE, J. Herman, "The Caged Panther: The Prison Years of Huey P. Newton, in Journal of African American Studies, 16, 2012, p. 236. VINCENT, Anaïs, "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners," in Hommes & migrations, 1302, published September 13, 2013. Available online, at https://journals.openedition.org/hommesmigrations/2517, accessed 13.12.2022; HUGGINS, Ericka, Passionate About Inspiring Transformation, available online https://www.erickahuggins.com/bio , accessed 13.12.2022., the image of Ericka Huggins’s raised fist symbolizes the fight against the inequalities faced by the African-American community in the 1960s.

While illustrating the struggle of women and minorities, a third issue specific to this period and to the protests that came out of May 68 is here addressed by Messac. Indeed, the crouching figure represents for the artist a personification of, what was at the time called, the "Third World"²⁵According to an electronic exchange with Ivan Messac, 10.11.2022.. In that sense, the woman on the left of the painting bears a completely different meaning and contrasts with this image of poverty. In this context, Angela could even be associated with the dominant class. She could thus symbolize the divide prevalent in the affluent society of the 1960s, where the class struggle deriving from Marxist ideals, is coupled with the various social struggles, such as women’s and minorities’.

With these two works, Messac establishes himself as an artist who paints a picture of the anti-establishment society in which he evolved, thus following his comrades into the narrative figuration tradition. Like them, he uses material from the media to depict daily life and the political reality from which the social struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s arose, as is demonstrated by other works by Messac conserved at the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art²⁶According to an electronic exchange with Ivan Messac, 10.11.2022.. This is for instance the case with Modello pour la fresque de Nanterre (1969), which describes the revolutionary climate of May 68 and the student struggles. But also with Loin des Réalités (1969), which shows the confrontation between the Western and Eastern blocs, and Viet Nam 70 (1970-1971), a denunciation of the Vietnam War and the burden borne by the Vietnamese population (fig. 6 to 8).

Lucie Pfeiffer
Assistant curator fine arts collection
Geneva, March 2023