Event

On the occasion of the Salon du Dessin (March 25–30, 2026), we will present an exceptional dialogue between the artists Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Yahne Le Toumelin (1923–2023).

Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) is one of the major figures of the Russian avant-garde.
The series of drawings presented here, created between 1920 and 1950, belongs to this decisive period during which Goncharova developed an original technique at the crossroads of Rayonism—which she co-founded in 1912 with Larionov—and Primitivism, in a quest for “pure art.”

These works are divided between compositions traversed by dynamic rays, characteristic of the Rayonist vocabulary, and drawings structured around spheres and circular forms, likely revealing the influence of the contemporary research of Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay, with whom Goncharova and Larionov maintained close relationships.

Yahne Le Toumelin began developing the Dendrites series in 1950, upon settling in Mexico. There, she met Leonora Carrington, a major figure of Surrealism, with whom she formed a deep friendship. This proximity nourished her imagination and her taste for a dreamlike and fantastical iconography.

At a time of experimentation, when Max Ernst was developing his frottage technique and Oscar Domínguez his decalcomania, Yahne invented a new method of pictorial transfer. By pressing paint between two surfaces and then revealing forms at random, she composed mental landscapes in which unpredictability becomes pictorial material. She reworked her compositions using combs, then intervened with drawing to add highly surreal figurative elements: fantastical animals, enigmatic silhouettes, ghost ships…

Upon returning to Paris in 1955, she gradually moved away from Surrealism. Figures disappeared in favor of a more radical abstraction, leaving technique and gesture alone to structure the pictorial space. In 1957, she exhibited her Dendrites at Galerie Orsay, and André Breton wrote the preface for the catalogue. This text was later included by Breton in his anthology Surrealism and Painting in 1965.