Art: Telegrapher

For two decades. Painter Paul Colin had all France for an art gallery. His work appeared on stately buildings and on ruins, on the walls of Paris’ Folies-Bergere and in a thousand small-town railway stations.

As France’s most successful poster artist, Colin turned out the best affiches since Toulouse-Lautrec, and he had mastered his predecessor’s trick of seizing a subject’s single feature and turning it into an artistic stop sign. Among Colin’s subjects: Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Pavlova, Katharine Hepburn, the French National Railroads, Cinzano, vacation resorts such as Cannes and Deauville.

Soon after World War II, successful Artist Colin—who had started as a penniless Montmartre dauber, decorating bistro walls and menu cards—concentrated on serious painting. Last week Paris saw the result. Painter Colin himself was on hand in the gallery to explain the difference between his old and his new work: “Designing a poster is like writing a telegram. Painting a picture is like writing a letter.”

As a letter writer, Colin kept his telegraphic style: he was terse, stuck to the main points, ruthlessly cut out punctuation and unnecessary sentiment.

His show was called Femmes, but few of Colin’s 33 canvases contained whole women. One Degas-like study showed a ballet lesson: a room filled with morning light and dust in which four isolated legs without bodies kicked in the air. In another picture, a wistful nude sat on an airy chair, minus her back and bottom. The effect was charming because the spectator’s mind quickly filled in the missing portions, like the omitted words in a telegram. A pair of muscular legs and two busy hands easily became a ballerina bending over to put on her tights. Said Colin: “I paint the things I consider essential. To me, women are merely subjects. A nice female breast has no greater artistic value than a ripe tomato, and a woman’s torso is not necessarily more beautiful than a well-built guitar.”

Some critics who like their guitars complete questioned the truncated treatment (“Is Colin a sadist?” asked one solemnly). But they unanimously praised his brilliant draftsmanship and his tender use of color. Wrote Le Peintre: “A great artist . . . Behind his playfulness lies a lot of meditation and some particular mystery which is Colin’s own invention . . .”