Synthesis of an artist’s life
In 1946, it was the creation of the “Salon des Réalités Nouvelles” (Association of New Realities), which was created in 1931 to replace the association “Abstraction-Création”. It is the Salon of Abstraction, animated by artists, in which Duchamp and Villon participate. Del Marle and Herbin reserve a room for the musicalist group.
In October of the same year, he projected at the National Congress of Friends of Art, at the Louvre school, two minutes and thirty minutes of his short film, Prelude to the Spring Symphony.
In 1947 he created with Marcel Lempereur-Haut a school of Cinepeinture. Pedagogues, they began by writing a small brochure explaining their curriculum, published in the magazine “Beaux-Arts” at the end of 1947.
In the autumn of 1948, he obtained a CNRS research allowance for the academic year. : He became a researcher – under number 4111 – at the Laboratoire de Filmologie with the title: “Research on the possible animation of painting by means of cinema – creation of drawings, colors, shooting, and means of Paint under the camera, during shooting. “And Raymond Bayer succeeded in May 1949 in renewing his allowance.
In 1949, he became a member of the Salon des RÈalitÈs Nouvelles, and joined the Bureau in 1950.
He began the simultaneous study of the four fundamental elements and conducted these symphonic elements: Symphonie de l’Air (1947), Symphonie du Feu (1947), Symphonie de l’Eau (1948) and Symphony de la Terre (1948).
Having already treated colors in symphonies before the war, he decided for the fugue: Fugue in blue (1947), Fugue in green (1948), Fugue in red (1948) and Fugue in yellow (1948).
Between 1949 and 1952, he realized : La Vie Militaire, La Vie Ouvrière (1950), La vie paysanne (1950), La Vie Militaire (1950), La Vie bourgeoise (1951).
In 1954, he painted, back to symphonies, War, then Peace (it took him time to mature while meditating these two paintings).
He painted his isolation the first time in 1952, The Isolated Proud (or The Proud Isolation), of which he makes several versions.
The year of the death of his wife Yvonne (1954) he painted Nocturne for a couple (just before) and Nocturne for a solitary (just after), as well as In Memoriam (1954).
En hommage à son épouse bien-aimée, il crée le prix Yvonne Valensi, et dont les membres du jury en 1955, sont à ses côtés Jean Cassou, conservateur en chef du musée d’Art moderne, le philosophe de l’art Raymond Bayer, l’esthéticien Étienne Souriau, des artistes peintres František Kupka, Marcel Lempereur-Haut, mais aussi Herbin et Jean Milhau, président de l’Union des Arts plastiques qui les a rejoints en 1956. Jean-Marie Euzet, peintre musicaliste depuis 1934, fut leur premier lauréat, avec Composition n° 27 Jaune assez animé, qui sera retenu par le musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris.
After a trip to Scandinavia, he hangs up the Norwegian Symphony and the Stockholm Symphony for the Comparisons session at the Salon des Indépendants in 1955. It is also the year of his first exhibition in Bordeaux.
The year 1956 is marked by two events: an exhibition in Lyon, and an intervention at the Congress of Aesthetics in Venice, followedby a personal exhibition in June 1956 at the Grange Gallery in Lyon. After this Venetian congress he also painted a Venetian Symphony (1957), as well as a Yugoslav Symphony (1957).
In 1959, on his return from a trip to Spain, he painted an Illuminated Nocturne and a Spanish Symphony. they will be his last paintings.
Throughout these years, in parallel with his paintings, he continued to manufacture the film La Symphonie Printanière, which he finished at the beginning of 1959 (it extends over 30 minutes) just in time for the Bergamo International Film Festival, and without sound accompaniment.
He also thinks on the future of Art on television, which was born in 1960, making a evidence that Ciné-télé-peinture would perfectly achieve “the marriage of Art with Industry”..
In 1960, the Union of Plastic Arts in Saint-Denis, organized a retrospective with twelve works.
Henry Valensi died in April 1960 in Bailly (Oise), in the house of the woman who had been his student, but also his friend and secretary (she typed the 1,200 pages of his manuscript), Christiane Vincent-La Force.
