Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Le bel igérant – 1978

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – The Fine Manager – 1978 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: The Fine Manager Date: 1978 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 78” in the upper left. Technique: Thick white gouache and pencil on a prepared gray ground. The head is a mass of white, lined at the top, placed on a military bust only drawn: belt, buckle, uniform indicated. The background is a gray wash, horizontal, left visible. The blurring of the face is intentional. Dimensions: 49.5 × 39.5 cm Condition: Good overall condition. The gouache is held, thick, the line of the bust legible, the signature clean. Studio paper, grain, some fine cracks in the white and conservation marks, without affecting the figure. The covered areas are part of the work. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description: Sheet from 1978, from the series The Fine Manager. Detheux was forty-six years old. Portrait of a military man in uniform, the face intentionally erased. The uniform remains. The man disappears. The costume is still legible at the bottom: dark bust, buckled belt, hands barely indicated. In place of the head, a white, irregular mass, fan-shaped toward the top. No eyes, no mouth. The rank, the function, the buckle remain. The face has been covered. The title distances itself. Beautiful: the bearing, the costume, the finery. Manager: the function that runs, administers, that no longer needs a name. Here, it is the belt that survives identity. The white is closed: the face is no longer fading, it is. The gray background, in horizontal bands, isolates the mass. Nothing else. We are in Detheux’s 1970s — figure, texture, erasure — pushed to the refusal of portrait. Signed, dated, from a rare series: a characteristic sheet for collectors of Belgian drawing sensitive to figures of power and refused faces. Artist biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and deceased in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in Belgian art of the 20th century. A graduate of the St. Luc Institute in Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Academy of Tournai until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work of great coherence. From the 1950s, he established himself with a surrealist and highly personal graphical language. He received the Prize of Belgian Young Painting in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The following decades deepen the same territory. 1970s: body and face, hybrid figures, textures. The series The Fine Manager, in 1978, belongs to this moment: military uniform, erased face, function without a man. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, erotism, black humor. 2000-2010: spectral portraits, appearances, creatures. Little exposed during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The discovery of his studio archive (about 1,500 works) made this coherence evident. His drawing, demanding and instantly recognizable, today attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and Europe.

Estimation:€200

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