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The trouble with Uncle Maurice
Uncle Maurice, born in 1902, a technician in military radiography, spent the first 35 years after his retirement drawing, until he went blind. He made thousands of artworks – Father Jacques Benoist, his legatee, estimates that he made some ten thousand pieces.
Being of modest means, he was big on recycled materials, especially in terms of cardboard and quality paper, which he certainly consumed in prodigious quantities. A truly “humble” and “compulsive” creator, as we like them in raw and outsider art.
Or was he? Self-taught, he demonstrates an obvious talent for drawing and a sharp intuition of composition. The selection of the drawings in this exhibition, for which we brought in the artist Marcel Bénaïs as consultant, was conceived with an aim at explicitly showcasing the plastic faculties of this “amateur”.
His aesthetic language, quite personal, is partly borrowed from microbiology. Theme lines seem to stand out: fantastic creatures hidden in a lacework of points and minuscule lines; portraits of men – always the same; views from an unidentified town; recurring shapes evocating human gametes, as if to betray a fixation on procreation, from which he was excluded…
The persistence of these themes over almost four decades and the hyper-meticulous execution speak volumes as to a certain obsessive streak in the psyche of Uncle Maurice.
So, was he a raw artiste? Hard to say, for he certainly wasn’t deprived of visual culture or of artistic conscience. Quite the opposite, he was so fully aware of his calling that it seems to have engendered an actual neurosis, as suggested by some very interesting artefacts, the “catalogues”, which have never been shown before.
Trying to pierce through the bullet-proof skin of the artistic world – he never did – as a good ex-military man, he went by the book and first enlisted with the National Syndicate of Artists.
But syndicate membership does not make an artist’s renown. Exhibitions and auctions do, with their catalogues and invitation cards and posters. And of that, he had none. Thus, he started making his own: he recovered, who knows how, the catalogues of real art shows and he refashioned them, keeping the covers and the printed texts inside, but replacing all the images with his own drawings.
Never mind that the texts spoke of a Mexican Juan Soriano! They were genuine exhibition catalogues and his works were in them. There are also Hotel Drouot auction catalogues, “improved” by Maurice in the same fashion, and his other “artist’s books”, for lack of a better word, contain tens of drawings done on the back of invitation cards to the past shows of other artist. If his contemporaries refused to acknowledge his legitimacy, he would manufacture it himself, with scissors and glue.
Artistic conscience, sense of humour, or pathologic obsession? Raw artist or not? After all, he wouldn’t be the first raw creator to fancy himself an artist. How about Marcel Storr, to name just one? At times, Maurice thought himself either a surrealist, or an abstractionist, leading some to deny him the tiniest place in outsider art, forgetting that aspiring to be something does not actually make one that thing.
In "My Name Is Red", Orhan Pamuk tells us of the medieval illuminators and miniaturists in the Sultan’s shops, who often went blind with the strain. To them blindness was ecstasy, a sign of the divine recognition of their merits. In his way, Maurice was a miniaturist who went blind. If the masters of Ispahan and Tabriz had known him, they might have celebrated him as a great artist. But few people did know him, it seems. His real name was Joseph Paul Gustave Vanneyre. His artistic pseudonym: Charles Lanert. In his family he had people call him Uncle Maurice. I chose this third alter ego because, of all the real or made-up names on his Syndicate card, it is Maurice, not Lanert, that he underlined with a thick emphatic line, as if to say “this is my name”. Or as if he knew that he would need a new passport to enter this different artistic land.
Text by Oana Amăricăi