By Michel Del Castillo :
Catherine De Moncan, loyalty to oneself

How can someone predict, without waxing presumptuous, that a young painter still struggling to learn the profession will someday become a great artist? Yet such was the case for Catherine de Moncan, a tall, shy, young neophyte who at the time was studying in the studio of Edouard Mac Avoy, a portrait-painter of the famous.
Her singularity stood out without our being able to put our finger on it or explain what form it took, even if one day it would clearly reveal itself. Short of managing to explain this feeling of being faced with a personality in the extraordinary sense of the word, we used vague words, sensitivity or maybe strangeness, suggesting that, despite her teacher's influence, despite the vicissitudes of the profession, despite the angular stiffness of a drawing more expressive than delicate, hers was a strange personality, bathed in mystery but tending to self affirmation. This tectonic slide by a reflective soul, attentive to the trembling of things and people, this dull ache before the ravages that time inflicts on faces and the humblest of objects, this spider-like attention that waits, huddling in a corner of the web, for the threads to vibrate, this concentration that is as calm as it is cruel, this was the young Catherine's mystery, on the surface of things so impassive and showing such outmoded courtesy. Unused to the rantings of café discussions, she remained aloof, a faint ironic smile on her pale lips, her Venetian blond hair cascading to her shoulders. An enigmatic Madonna from a Masaccio fresco, she derived obvious pleasure from listening to her friends' conversations. You could guess the pleasure she felt as she wrapped herself in the group's warmth, listening to far-fetched arguments or the defence or indictment of art.

A flitting ghost lost among trumpeting males, she followed their jousting with a glint of amusement in her eyes. It was as if she were sitting on a park bench watching turbulent kids at play. As if immured in her remote beauty, Catherine seemed alien to this caterwauling.
What thoughts were coursing behind that broad, smooth forehead? What feelings were hiding behind her serene gaze? Both absent and present, she smiled, shook her head, raised a long, thin hand to brush away a lock of hair and occasionally said something before subsiding back into her depths again. The more intuitive of us felt uncomfortable under the cosh of her terribly attentive gaze, her eyes seeming to see beyond appearances: not shapes, not lines and colours but a buried reality.
Maybe that's what explains her mysterious estrangement? While her companions talked painting, she was seeing beyond it to the depths of peoples' beings...
...In the beautiful book that has just been published called Moncan, we follow her on her way from her first works to her most mature later works on a path that from one period to the next is lined by explosive masterpieces that confirm the intuition we had of her from our youthful years. We find ourselves face-to-face with a great painter who, without ever raising her voice or giving in to facile effects, has hoed her row, deepened her manner and transformed herself without ever renouncing her initial intuitions.
From the first sketches under the influence of her teacher, a Nu assis ("Seated Nude") which won her the Prix Jullian for drawing in 1964, Le Jeune Homme sur fond jaune ("Young Man on a Yellow Background") the same year, the portrait of Dom ("Dom") or Le portrait de ma mère ("The Portrait of My Mother") up to Paternité ("Fatherhood") in 1968, you can see that to find herself she had to forget: the harshness of a rough-hewn drawing, overly massive architecture, a style filled with robust volumes, a dry conception of the painting with its stifled monochromes.
A powerful, eloquent system but false in that it freezes life, imprisoning it in severe lines. A detail – but is it a detail when it comes to Art? – reveals her brash approach: the hands, the always-enormous hands highlighted as if to mark an optical effect but inert in their intellectual exaggeration. Hands imagined rather than observed. But Catherine would refine these hands, stretch them out, lengthen them and extend them like fine threads, expressive of trembling caresses in the exhausted search for a loved body. Her 1969 Jeune femme en noir ("Young Woman in Black") is a hyphen between two worlds, that of the studio and its rigidity and that of the Proustian music that by then inhabited bodies, thrusting them into a melancholic quest of broken harmony. By 1970 at only twenty-five Catherine de Moncan came into her own. To find herself she had no need to deny what she'd learned or repudiate techniques she'd acquired. She just assimilated and digested them, letting them melt into her most intimate self. Then the masterpieces started coming: from Le Baiser ("The Kiss") to Le Sommeil ("Sleep"), from Tendresse I ("Tenderness I") to La Porte entrouverte ("The Door Ajar") or Trois personnages ("Three Characters"). And of course the illustrations for Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, a way for her to burrow into what is most intimate in her personality. It was to ensure the tonality of this dreamlike world that she chose [to paint in] the deepest of deep blues. Admirers will marvel at this perfectly consistent inner world that cannot be qualified simply as figurative or surrealist or fantasy, a world of lazy musings, weary enthusiasms, distracted melancholy, irremediable solitude as in Celui qui pleure ("The One Crying"), a body consumed by its pain. Many in Catherine de Moncan's place might have exploited this soft option. They would have given in to the easy hedonism of success. How many painters have spent their entire careers only doing one painting time after time? How many have allowed themselves to drown in this cowardly abandonment to their gifts? Only the very great find the strength to turn their backs on their talent. Catherine de Moncan belongs to this rare breed when, perhaps exhausted by that blue that threatened to engulf her, she abandoned her brushes and palette knife.
It took her ten years from 1963 to 1973 to find and begin to assert herself. There would be an intervening twenty-three years before she would take up her brushes again.
So what did she do in that quarter of a century? Write and dive back into her childhood to revive the feelings of that original time period, talk about wondrous things and her disillusionments, breathe in the smells of those vanished times that compose her inner life, listening to each sound, each rustle in the house of dreams.
As Colette has said: deep sadness can exist in the happiest of childhoods, an inconsolable nostalgia of paradise lost. But whilst writing, Catherine never forgot to live. She travelled, she loved, she married, raised children, first a son, then a daughter. She divorced with a nonchalance that disarmed the woman judge, amazed by this young woman she saw arriving at the hearing hand in hand with the husband she was divorcing, asking for nothing for either herself or her son, wishing simply to divorce elegantly and discretely in a friendly manner without complaints or rancour. Why would she get angry at the man she had loved? She remarried with the same simplicity.
Everything in her life occurred with the same gentleness, the same indifference nearly. No ruptures, no jolts, a peaceful follow-up, as natural as are her gestures, as is her production. But what a ground-swell lies underneath the smooth waters of the surface! Life has not spared Catherine de Moncan any of those wounds that put scars on faces. From very early on, probably in her childhood, she had decided to show nothing of the mess of the feelings. Maybe a single loss while she was still a loving, passionate little girl, maybe that irremediable disillusion had disenchanted her forever. Nothing seemed to surprise her, the worst leaving her frozen in distant astonishment.
It was with the same simplicity that she returned to painting in 1996. Had she ever really abandoned it? To confirm that she had never ceased thinking about painting all you need do is look at the Portraits of Emilie, her daughter, and Ninif, both from 1993, works of Oriental splendour, a purity of line that is both detailed and minute.
Leonardo da Vinci once said that "painting is a cosa mentale, a thing of the mind". And we recall the impressive demonstration by Velasquez in his Las Meninas to convince the King, his friend and protector, of the nobility of his art. Then there was the fury with which Picasso kept imagining another kind of painting. Once the physical skills of painting are mastered, the painter forgets his or her "cooking" to think the painting. The hands no longer do anything but interpret the piece. Music begins when the pianist forgets his or her fingers. The same goes for painting.

In the decade between 1963 and 1973 this "thinking" the painting was Moncan's originality, the strangeness and strength of her art. While her teacher was heavily insisting on the weight of matter and the way that things and people have of sinking into their presence, very quickly Catherine contrasted the power of the mind to that dense sensuality, not the reasoning mind but what is ineffable in the dream, the weirdness and melancholy of desire. The hands drawn by Mac Avoy have prehensile strength. They want to grab, crumple, dominate and touch. Moncan's hands barely dare to brush by. They tap, search and stretch in a hopeless effort to reach hermetic feeling, the secret hiding behind a smile.
The teacher painted the arms and hands of eager men; Moncan paints the arms and hands of a lover forever powerless to regain lost harmony. He may well have painted reality; she surely showed the impotence of love.
When at the closing of this long parenthesis she returned to her brushes, it is significant to see just how loyal she remained to her youthful years. She didn't so much change as transform. The appearance of colour, an exploding, almost joyous and always cheeky palette give a feeling of deliverance. But what was Catherine de Moncan being freed from?
In 1969 she abandoned the overly dry influences of art school with its brownish tones and cinnabar greens, to plunge into the blue of her fancies and her dreams. By 1993 she had uncoupled from her fascination with Proust, the enchantment of his sinuous sentences, the minutiae and pitiless analysis of the subtlest feelings. She left behind the nostalgia of lost childhood to move into the present, which, for her, is Time Regained. The world got its colour back.
Did she have any regrets? In Inachevée ("Unfinished") of 1996 questions have to be asked about the unkempt stack of manuscript lying on the table, the artist prostrate before it as if it had worn her down. It's impossible not to think of her 1970 Celui qui pleure ("The One Crying"). Perhaps for the genuine artist there is nothing but a single sadness before the awful demands of his/her enthusiasms and hopes.
With a twenty-five year gap we see the same disenchantment, the same attention to the most imperceptible of movements. Her Jeune homme assis sur fond bleu ("Seated Young Man on a Blue Background") of 1997, a bona fide masterpiece, responds with fuller, more assured means to Celui qui pleure, and maybe all we've done is change position with the hopeless figure in the second painting raising his head to stare straight ahead. Jeune Peintre I ("Young Painter I"), another masterpiece, probably shows the discouraged perplexity that must often have seized the young Catherine in her studio, just as Le Modele ("The Model") reveals and smells of what there is of impassive cruelty in the artist's gaze. As for the bitter sadness of My Husband and I, in which the husband turns his back on the easel where his unrelenting portrait is being finished, we find the same sense of dereliction as expressed in the great paintings of the 1970s.
Technique, training and natural gifts aside, what a genuine artist recognises in him- or herself is a certain self-loyalty. This language, this style distinguish him or her from all others and are what make people say that this is a Monet or that a Van Gogh.

Catherine de Moncan possessed this originality at twenty five. It was impossible to confuse her with another painter. She was fully herself. But a great artist is able to renew him- or herself without losing or abandoning the self. Since 1996 Catherine de Moncan has shown that her painting has the capacity to metamorphose, to open and expand without compromising anything of what composes her deepest being.