The Tombs

13 paintings, evoking 13 lives or works.

Gaps between abounding life and reduction of the tomb.

The tombs are those of Marilyn MONROE, Joseph BEUYS, Mark ROTHKO, Morris LOUIS, Jean DUBUFFET, Andy WARHOL, Fred ASTAIRE, Charlie PARKER, Tino ROSSI, Jacques BREL, Joan MARTI, HERGE, and Yves KLEIN.

I painted a series of Tombs, in homage to great figures passed away, joining the image they left behind.

What attracted me was their paradox. Marilyn Monroe, the eternally young blonde, was naturally red-haired; naturally she also had to grow old. Charlie Parker's saxophone produced the most jagged music, but also the most swing. Edith Piaf was that little pale round figure at the top of a black dress, but she produced an enormous voice. Fred Astaire combined mimicry and geometry.
“Tombs” are a literary genre in which the poet attempts to encapsulate an entire work and life in a short piece, such as a sonnet. Can painting capture the paradox of Marilyn, a luscious yet fragile fruit, in a single canvas? It had to be tried.

This gave for Edith Piaf the immense voice standing out against the tiny black dress. For Charlie Parker, the bird, a multicolored eruption. About fifteen paintings were made in this way, including Rothko, Beuys, Hergé, Fred Astaire, etc.

PS: For Hergé's Tomb, see the text that Micheline LO has attached to it.

Saint Anthony, the Nativity, Spain, and Dante moved around in the general mental landscape. It remained to be seen how this landscape was shaped in individuals.

Therefore, the portrait returned as prominent, a pictorial style abandoned by "modern" and even "post-modern" art. The first portrait she painted, that of Marilyn Monroe, was too large to be hung on the walls of her summer house in the Drome provençale. So, she did it on the ground, and later as she viewed it one morning, she thought she was watching a tombstone. Why would not these portraits be tombs, or Tombeaux, in the sense used by Mallarmé for his series of sonnets in which each was to be fixed "as, in itself, eternity finally changes it"?
We will not leave out any of the thirteen Tombeaux, because their system probably reveals something of the cerebral landscape of the artist herself.

PS: For the texts written by Henri VAN LIER on the thirteen Tombs, see the texts attached to each of them.