Yvon Adam (1932-2017) - Album complet de 119 enveloppes peintes à la gouache

Yvon Adam (1932-2017) — Complete album of 119 envelopes painted with gouache, correspondence from military service, 1954-1955. Mail Art before its time. Characteristics Artist: Yvon Adam (1932 – 2017) Belgian School Title: Illustrated correspondence to Mademoiselle Louise Denoël, Grivegnée Technique: gouache on blank postal envelopes, Belgian stamps featuring the portrait of King Baudouin and Leopoldstadt postmarks Number: 119 envelopes, complete series Dimensions of each envelope: about 14.5 × 11 cm Dimensions of the album: 30 × 30 × 5.5 cm Period of mailing: February 1954 – April 1955, military service at Bourg-Léopold Assembly: album assembled in the 1990s by the artist’s family, with his help; chronological order of arrival; protective sheet between each page State: envelopes with a lively freshness; introductory explanatory page detached; envelopes empty, the letters no longer present Provenance: artist’s family, without interruption to this day Exhibitions: about fifty envelopes shown at Salle Saint-Georges, Liège, Yvon Adam retrospective, September-October 2004; the complete album, however, had not left the family Description of the lot Even before Mail Art had a name, a young Liège painter, still in uniform, transformed each letter addressed to his fiancée into a small work. From February 1954 to April 1955, during his military service at Bourg-Léopold, Yvon Adam wrote to Mademoiselle Louise Denoël, 61, rue Fraichamps, in Grivegnée. He illustrated the envelopes with humor and tenderness. Some bore almost no address: they all nonetheless arrived, without delay, to the great delight of the postmen of Leopoldsburg, then Grivegnée. This album, kept uninterrupted in the artist’s family, gathers the entire series: 119 gouache-painted envelopes, carefully mounted in the chronological order of their arrival. The album itself dates not from the 1950s. It was assembled much later, around the 1990s, by the family, with the artist’s help. Between each page, a protective sheet preserves the drawings. The envelopes are empty. The love messages they contained are no longer there: what remains is their painted shell, the only visible witness of this correspondence. Each piece, about 14.5 × 11 cm, is an autonomous work. Belgian stamp bearing the portrait of King Baudouin, Leopoldstadt postmark, calligraphed or painted address: mail becomes medium, and the medium becomes painting. In them one traverses, in fourteen months, almost all the languages that young Adam was exploring at the time. Constructivist geometries, Fauvist blocks, stylized fish, masks, smiling cats, brass and jazz drums, cyclist, sun, heart stretched to the mailman, barracks room, canteen stove. The line is lively, the irreverence light. On one envelope, the king’s head is detached from the stamp and pasted onto a soldier’s body: a military wink, at the border of respect and play. Elsewhere, a bag marked “Long live the class” and these words: “And here is the last one, Postman… Goodbye postman and thank you again.” For fifty years these envelopes were never exhibited, with the exception of about fifty shown at Salle Saint-Georges in Liège, during the September-October 2004 retrospective. The complete, orderly, familial album had not left the hands of those to whom these letters were addressed. A rare, intact, tender and learned set. One hundred and nineteen small painted mail pieces, gathered as they were at Grivegnée, day by day. The words have disappeared; the envelopes, they are all here. Biography Yvon Adam was born in 1932 in Grand-Halleux, in the Belgian Ardennes, and died in 2017 in Nandrin. Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Liège, he led a dual career as painter, draftsman, and engraver, and as a teacher of graphic arts. He also produced sketches for the National Bank of Belgium, where this already confident, elegant, almost calligraphic line emerged, which would remain his signature. His later work is best known for its erotic charge: nudes, couples, intimate scenes treated with economical means and a never gratuitous irony. The line is firm, the white of the paper part of the drawing, desire is stated without heaviness. Behind this maturity, the envelopes from 1954-1955 reveal the artist at twenty-two: already master of the line, still fully turned toward a single recipient. There one sees, on a fragile and constrained support, the games of form, humor and tenderness that will structure all that follows. A Liège native at heart, Adam belongs to the post-war generation that renews Belgian drawing without denying figuration. His works are in Belgian and European private collections; a retrospective was dedicated to him at Salle Saint-Georges in Liège in 2004, where part of this correspondence was shown for the first time. The complete album, however, remained within the family. It today constitutes the oldest and most intimate testimony of his hand.

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