MARCEL JEAN (FRENCH 1900-1994)
L'île de fer
signed Marcel Jean (lower right); signed, titled and dated MARCEL JEAN / L'île de fer/ 1970 (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
81 x 100 cm (31 7/8 x 39 3/8 in)

L'île de fer (Iron island) is one of Marcel Jean's most ambitious paintings and shows many features that recur throughout his work, oblique vertical lines separating the painting into unequal parts the impression of a painting within a painting all add depth and a sense of mystery and greater curiosity.
Marcel Jean reveals he is an explorer of the psyche and pioneer of the imagination whose works convey narratives of psychic spaces, Objects, landscapes, and figures flow between layers of symbolic, subconscious meaning.

Marcel Jean studied at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and in 1924 moved to the United States to work as a textile designer. He returned to Paris two years later where he became influenced by Surrealism. A subscriber to the journal Révolution surréaliste published by André Breton, he participated in Surrealist meetings and contributed his works to Surrealist exhibitions. In the 1930s he befriended many of its leading adherents including Breton, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Péret and René Crevel, and became one of the movement's first chroniclers. After the War Jean embarked on an extensive analysis of the style in Histoire de la peinture surréaliste. He later edited Jours effeuillés, Jean Arp’s collection of writings. By the end of the 1960s Jean held a pre-eminent position among Surrealist scholars and was invited to lecture on the subject at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1976 he dedicated forty medal-effigies to Surrealist characters and motifs and two years later he published his Autobiographie du Surréalisme, an anthology of Surrealist writings. He published his memoirs Au Galop dans le vent paraît in 1991.

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