Room 12

The Franco-Belgian artist Pierre-Louis Flouquet was one of the pioneers of the historical avant-garde in Europe. Of the 266 “imaginary” portraits on display here, the vast majority (252) remained unpublished until last fall, when they were shown for the first time by the Roberto Polo Collection. Center for Modern and Contemporary Art of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca. To them are now added another 11, never exhibited, all of them owned by the collector Roberto Polo, plus the 3 that already hung in the CORPO headquarters in Toledo.

Between 1927 and 1931, Flouquet made a large number of drawings in Chinese ink, of surprising virtuosity, representing ghostly faces with a hallucinatory, almost nightmarish air, oblivious to any naturalistic inspiration. It would seem that they form a collection of character studies in the tradition of those that artists like Leonardo da Vinci or the Flemish Mannerists liked to execute, both with their taste for the caricature. These by Flouquet accentuate in the faces those features that Nazism detested as they were considered racial impurities. Pierre-Louis Flouquet (Paris, 1900-Dilbeek, Belgium, 1967) shared his first studio in Brussels with René Magritte. In modernist circles he is known for his geometric abstractions and surrealist biomorphic works. He is co-founder of the avant-garde group 7 Arts and an artist associated with the legendary Galerie Der Sturm, founded in Berlin in 1912. Along with Serguei Eisenstein, Max Ernst, Walther Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, Victor Servranckx and others, he is a regular guest at the Maison des Artistes by Baroness Hélène de Mandrot, in her Château de La Sarraz, Lausanne, where many revolutionary artistic events at the beginning of the century were held.

In 1925, Flouquet founded, in collaboration with Eugène Gailliard, the L’Assaut group, and under its aegis he organized important exhibitions. Becoming the leader of La Plastique Pure, he regularly exhibits abroad: Buenos Aires, Chicago, Leipzig, Madrid, Monza, New York, Paris, Philadelphia and Zurich. His work is represented in institutions such as the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels and Antwerp, Ghent and the avant-garde Grenoble Museum; and has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Lakenhal in Leiden, Ghent and the Tate Modern in London, among others.