“[Óscar Domínguez] interprets reality with a tenacity that is so consistent that we can say that more than any other, he only paints what he dreams.”
Le Plus clair du temps II is a masterwork of Óscar Domínguez’s emotionally potent and ceaselessly inventive Surrealist output. Executed in 1943, the present work dates to the year in which the Canarian artist held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Louis Carré, Paris. A superlative embodiment of Domínguez’s wartime aesthetic, Le Plus clair du temps II is one of the foremost Surrealist paintings of the early 1940s. In the collection of Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem for nearly five decades, the present work featured in Domínguez’s most important recent retrospective exhibitions, including La part du jeu et du rêve, Óscar Domínguez et le surréalisme 1906-1957, held in 2006 at the Musée Cantini, Marseille.
Domínguez was well ensconced within the Surrealist group for nearly a decade by the time he executed Le Plus clair du temps II; he had moved to Paris in 1932 in hopes of becoming a serious avant-garde painter. After an encounter with André Breton at the Café de la Place Blanche in 1934, he began attending the group’s meetings and befriending artists who would have a profound influence on his art, including Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. Domínguez developed new techniques like decalomania, a process which involved pressing a sheet of paper or glass spread thinly with gouache or another material onto another surface and subsequently working around the resulting impressions (see fig. 1). This technique would have a lasting effect on Surrealist formal practice and would particularly influence Ernst, who began integrating decalomania into some of his most recognized works (see fig. 2). From then on, Domínguez participated in all of the major exhibitions of the group, notably the first International Exhibition of Surrealism in Copenhagen in 1935 and the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Fig. 2 Max Ernst, La Comédie de la soif, 1941, Private Collection. Sold: Sotheby’s, London, 8 February 2021, lot 21 for £1,609,250. © 2023 MAX ERNST / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / ADAGP, PARIS
In 1943, Domínguez was one of the few Surrealists remaining in Occupied Paris, with the majority of his colleagues having fled to New York following the onset of World War II. Determined to continue his practice during this troubled period, he joined the group La Main à Plume, whose members, including Pablo Picasso and poet Paul Éluard, sought to sustain Surrealism in Europe. Domínguez was a primary contributor to their numerous collective publications, authoring artistic treatises and illustrating texts (see fig. 3).
Amidst these activities, Domínguez ushered in a wholly new and innovative aesthetic. Eschewing the phantasmagoric compositions that predominated his late 1930s output (see fig. 4), Domínguez renders the readily identifiable forms of Le Plus clair du temps II with a vivid palette. While the artist continues to reveal the subconscious within his paintings, he shifts away from his spontaneous automatic painting style. Instead, the present work belongs to an eponymous series that perpetuates the same motifs with slight compositional variations. As the title of this series suggests, these works offer a rumination on optimism within a dark moment of the world's history: Emmanuel Guigon explains, “Le plus clair de notre temps, that is, the days of the occupation, is ‘the limited space,’ the hope and the wait…waiting for that day in which each one will find his ‘elemental good’” (O. Domínguez: Óscar Domínguez, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1996, p. 106, translated from the Spanish).
Featuring several recurrent elements from Domínguez’s inventive world, the present work is a remarkable synthesis of symbols that hold significant personal meaning for the artist. These seemingly disparate objects, ranging from a sundial to an hourglass, are visually linked, reflecting the painter’s thoughts as they progress with no apparent logic. Central to the composition is a case of dried butterflies belonging to his father, which appear throughout his oeuvre as an emblem of his nostalgia for his homeland of Tenerife (see fig. 5). Charged with intense hues, these objects cumulatively create a fantastical dreamscape. Eduardo Westerdal underscores, “Domínguez understood painting intuitively as a representation of reality. All the narrative was taken to the realms of fiction. For him the visible objects which surround us had not failed, as might happen with abstraction. He believed that these objects were not limited by a single meaning. Nor were they sealed in their destiny. They were, on the contrary, changing bodies endowed with vitality, things that were transitory, consequences of a mysterious impulse, astonishing and inventive” (Eduardo Westerdahl, Óscar Domínguez, 1968, Barcelona, pp. 50-51). Domínguez’s rendering of these objects manifests the strong impact on Picasso on his work during this period, which José Pierre characterizes as the, “Savage truth with which he renders beings and objects…a sense of strength and forcefulness” (Exh. Cat., Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas (and traveling), Óscar Domínguez. Antológica. 1926-1957, 1996, p. 28, translated from the Spanish).
Le Plus clair du temps II commingles the Surrealist emphasis on the symbolic significance of objects with a de Chirican ambiguity of space. Augmenting the enigmatic tenor of the work, the present work reconfigures elements from Giorgio de Chirico’s wartime metaphysical works, including prismatic architectural structures, an emphasis on perspective and the use of strong light and shadow (see fig. 6). “What the Canarian painter inherited from the founder of metaphysical painting was the disquieting profundity, the singularity of atmosphere and the intense poetic weight of objects,” José Pierre explains, "Throughout his “synthetic period”… Óscar Domínguez took from de Chirico his oneiric atmosphere” (José Pierre, ibid.). Emmanuel Guigon continues, “Objects…appear in the middle of lonely, desolate landscapes whose perspectival artifice, rigorously established, accentuates the effect of derealization, the twilight light adding to the strangeness of the composition…The metaphysical breath has never been so active in Domínguez's work” (Emmanuel Guigon, ibid., 1996, pp. 103-04).
Fig. 9 Pablo Picasso, Pichet de fleurs sur une table, Winter 1942-43, University of Iowa Museum of Art. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
This newly geometric division of space and depth is enhanced by the crystalline structures that appear to expand infinitely into the recesses of this invented world. Marcel Jean writes, “Perhaps influenced by the appearance of the Polyèdres, one of the mathematical objects photographed by Man Ray, the painter [Domínguez] unleashes across his worlds…dense prismatic clusters, networks of long, sharp needles like images of death in a crystalline form” (Exh. Cat., Marseille, Musée Cantini, La part du jeu et du rêve Óscar Domínguez et le surréalisme 1906-1957, 2005, p. 37, translated from the French; see fig 7). Domínguez first experimented with these intricate geometric systems in the late 1930s with works including Nostalgie de l’espace (see fig. 8), where the ever-expanding network of prisms restrains the viewer’s gaze and threatens to overwhelm the pictorial surface. Confined to the background, they imbue the painting with a dynamic energy while foregrounding the significance of the still life at the crux of the composition. This proliferation of weblike structures echoes Picasso’s use of rigorously linear background elements at this time (see fig. 9).
Le Plus clair du temps II: Modern Reinventions of the Still-Life Genre
Representing the zenith of his oeuvre, Le Plus clair du temps II superlatively captures Oscar’s Domínguez contribution to Surrealism, adeptly summarized by Paul Éluard in his introduction for Domínguez's is solo exhibition at Galerie Louis Carré: “From Picasso to Domínguez, passing through Miró and Dalí, variety, generosity of Spanish painting, painting of the imagination that wants to be strong and free, painting in exile, resounding and combative. Painting of imagination and science of a shimmering reality, heroic painting…Domínguez opens to Surrealism new doors on a world where each finds one day his elemental good and his right to see everything. Hot painting of metamorphoses painting where usual objects sweat their color like a mirage or gigantic figures, of the most light anatomical form, are liberated, eternized by the space however imitated” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Dominguez, 1943, n.p., translated from the French).