Donner de la tête 1957

Curator: This is Jacques Hérold's "Donner de la tête", painted in 1957. It’s an oil painting. Editor: It looks like a dream I had after eating bad oysters. Is that too harsh? Curator: Not at all! The ethereal grays and ghostly white shapes certainly evoke a dreamlike, perhaps unsettling quality. Hérold was a key figure in the Surrealist movement. After initially resisting formal art training, he discovered Surrealism. Editor: And you can see the visual traces of that resistance, can't you? There's a raw quality in the application of the paint. I mean, what are we looking at? Ghostly figures? A lunar landscape? It is intriguing precisely because it withholds. Curator: Surrealism aimed to unlock the creative potential of the unconscious mind. His works frequently contain symbolic and mythical components, probing at hidden dimensions of reality through invented forms. There’s the recurring motif of a skeleton, but softened, as though being re-imagined. The “head” of the title seems ready to separate from the shoulders! Editor: I think the skeleton hints at what happens if you let your head run off! The Surrealists always saw something morbid lurking behind even the most cheerful scenes. It feels intensely personal; an emotional outburst translated into symbols on the canvas. Did he show widely? Curator: Hérold’s work was displayed across Europe and he had ties to Parisian art circles and, later, the New York avant-garde scene. He wanted to engage with a community. What do you make of it, as a kind of public statement, a statement on behalf of the unconscious? Editor: I think that's the great contradiction of Surrealism. To present something fundamentally private as public art...there’s a bravery, maybe a kind of generosity, in that vulnerability. Well, Hérold certainly leaves me feeling haunted in the best possible way. Curator: Indeed. Hérold invites us to give our own head, to surrender to the imaginative power of abstraction. Thank you for unpacking all that!