Paris Reputation

Islands Painter with, a Paris Reputation

By Lew Priday.

;ince his return to Paris in 1954, young French artist Michel olais, who will be well remembered Tahiti, Port Vila and Noumea, gone from one success to another, /ear or two ago, his paintings were :hing as much as £2OO apiece, and ;ay they are in still greater nand.

VERY year since I interviewed him in Noumea in 1954, and since I put him up for a few rs in Sydney when he was en ite for home, he has held an lual one-man exhibition in Pans, one or other of the well known leries. In 1956 it was at the Galerie irforen, and this year he has a •manent show at the Galerie du ristyle.

Islands Subjects

rhis year’s exhibition, among my civilised subjects in a highly jhisticated style, includes one or d Islands subjects: Tahitienne au rre d’Anis, and Bebe Big Nambas. rhese pictures remind one that blais, who is still under 35, went the French Pacific in 1949, after ishing his military service in chin-China and Cambodia. I first ;t him in Noumea after he had jnt quite some time in Tahiti and 5 New Hebrides.

He then went back to France, iere he held an exhibition at the derie de la France d’Outre Mer; t he was back in the Pacific in >2. He found it was the New ‘brides which attracted him most, giving him the opportunity to jord a primitive, unchanged way life.

With the Big Nambas

Fo this end, and against the ad ;e of the local French Admin rator, he and author Freddy •ilhon, whose book Une Geolette rench for “A Schooner”) he has chantingly illustrated, spent some Dnths among the Big Nambas of sfiekula.

Lablais then had little means, but is possessed of the Bohemian nplicity of the man devoted to i artistic career; he revelled in the it altogether comfortable experi ,ce of sharing the daily life of me of the most primitive natives ft in the Pacific.

When we passed through Sydney,

Lablais showed me albums full 9f a quite unique collection of drawings and designs of Big Nambas dances and customs, dress, weapons and adornments, of men, women and children, and interiors and exteriors of the still uncontrolled village of Amok.

Lablais’ preference for working among the Melanesian primitives

instead of taking to the decadent Polynesian “Paradises”, has been artistically rewarding, marking him out from other artists in a Paris which is overflowing with struggling artists.

He has been in demand as a de signer and book illustrator. One of the most noted books he has illus trated in colour and in black and white is an edition de luxe of Pierre Benoit’s novel, Erromango. Benoit, a member of the Academic Francaise, is now in his seventies, has never visited the Hebrides, but is a writer with a touch of the Jules

Verne imagination about him. He is popular, too —more than a million copies have been sold of his novel, L’Atlantide. This courteous, simple, delightful old gentleman lives now at Ciboure, in the South of France.

The limited edition of Erromango is today a collector’s piece, published in series ranging from 6,500 to 10,000 metropolitan francs, plus eight additional copies, with a Lablais original colour design hors texte, at 15,000 francs each. This volume was issued under the patronage of the committee formed in Paris to cele brate the fiftieth anniversary of the New Hebridean Condominium, and publication was undertaken jointly by the Societe des Amis des Nouvelles Hebrides and Albin Michel, the well known publishers.

I happen to know that the French Government had plans for flying

Benoit and other prominent French men to Port Vila for the jubilee celebrations of a few years ago, but the arrangements were cancelled on the score of expense.

The current catalogue of the Galerie du Peristyle quotes critics on Lablais’ work, gives a useful out line of his career, and quotes his opinions and philosophy as an “artist, contemplative, and an enemy of method”.

It is my bet that Lablais sooner or later will return to the Pacific for another spell of inspiration and work.

Michel Lablais, remem bered in the French Territories of the South Pacific for his paintings, is now making a name for himself in Paris.