Henry Valensi began painting the sunny landscapes of his native Algeria at a very young age. His family, who settled in Paris in 1899 in the ninth arrondissement, encouraged him in his budding passion for pictorial art. On the advice of Léon Bonnat, Valensi entered the Académie Julian in 1902 where he studied painting under the direction of Jules Lefebvre and Tony Robert-Fleury. In 1905, Étienne Dinet allowed him to have his very first exhibition at the Salon des Orientalistes. He was still an impressionist at the time, but expressed the need to renew pictorial art by freeing the artist from the purely objective vision that the practice had crystallized in immobility. Valensi, who had inherited enough to live comfortably, positioned himself on the side of freedom and total independence by turning his back on the art market (which would prevent him from making a name for himself). He joined the Society of Independent Artists and exhibited regularly, each year, in their salons from 1908. Valensi traveled extensively in Europe and around the Mediterranean basin. His landscapes began to transform by integrating abstract elements, during a trip to Greece, in 1909. From then on, Valensi was only interested in avant-garde attempts: it was movement, dynamism that painting needed, and it was with Marinetti and the Futurist painters that Valensi would bond the longest, before finding his own path: “musicalism”, from 1913. In 1912, he managed and organized the Salon de la Section d’Or alongside Jacques Villon, Pierre Dumont, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. From 1913 onwards, he exhibited regularly in various salons in France and abroad. Valensi is also a great traveler with a predilection for Russia and the Mediterranean basin. In 1932, Henry Valensi and three other painters Charles Blanc-Gatti, Gustave Bourgogne and Vito Stracquadaini founded the Association of Musicalist Artists and organized in Paris (Galerie Renaissance) the first of twenty-three Musicalist Salons. According to his theories, which give Art a preponderant place in the evolution of self-awareness across civilizations, music because it is science, rhythm and dynamism, becomes in the 20th century the art most capable of expressing the nuances and subtleties of the human soul. Color being like sound, vibration of matter, the musicalist painter is the one who uses his art material (color, line, shapes) to subjectively create a “music” of color on his canvas. Valensi considers that the last stage in the evolution of pictorial art consists of introducing real movement into the space of the canvas, which leads to CINEPAINTING, produced by cinepainters. Valensi worked alone, with a camera installed as a title bench in a maid’s room-studio, from 1936 onwards, on the development of an abstract colour film which would not be completed until 1959: La Symphonie printanière1 thirty minutes, 64,000 drawings from a painting painted in 1932. His life and work are traced in a book published in the autumn of 2013, commissioned by the beneficiaries, written by Marie Talon in the form of an imaginary dialogue, which has the great interest of tracing the entire history of the Parisian artistic avant-garde, with numerous unpublished archive documents (among others: the letters that Max Jacob wrote to Valensi during the summer of 1914, also letters showing that Valensi spent a lot of time with the Delaunays). The writing of this book was facilitated firstly by reading Claire Euzet’s doctoral thesis, “Musicalism, a trend of abstraction”, defended in 1996 at the Sorbonne, then by the confidences of Christiane Vincent Laforce, (aged 90 in 2014) musicalist painter and collaborator accompanying Valensi, (from 1957 until his death) and finally by the help of a young student in Art History, Monika Lilkov, who worked on Valensi in 2012 for her master’s thesis: “Painting in Movement”. Valensi finally comes out of the shadows: – In 2013, seven of the paintings he had bequeathed to the State, as well as the “cinepainting” film La Symphonie printanière were presented for a period of 14 months from October 23, 2013 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris to January 5, 2015 as part of the hanging of the Modernités Plurielles collections.
