In 1959 Alechinsky participated in the exhibition Vitalità dell'arte in Venice, where he met for the first time Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, Bram van Velde and Willem de Kooning. This was followed by a visit to New York in 1961. By 1963, Alechinsky had developed a highly painterly style which was reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionism of De Kooning. The free gestural brush strokes in La Honte reflect many of these influences and combine them into a hallucionatory vision that automatically materialises into the phantoms of the artist's unconscious. The four figures in La Honte appear out of the heavily worked surface of the painting as if they were spectres from the recesses of Alechinsky's haunted imagination.

Alechinsky achieves this by employing the unconscious automatic techniques of the surrealists from which he had hitherto shied away. As he once said 'Surrealism is one of the principal sources of Cobra, but one from which Cobra turns aside.' However, encouraged by Dotremont he was visited by André Breton in 1963 who wrote to him first saying 'That which I savour most in art is that which you command, that power to entwine curves, that clearly organic rhythm, that happy feminine submission which you obtain from colours, from light. (Exh. Cat., Pierre Alechinsky, Writings and Paintings, Museum of Art Carnegie Instiute, Paris 1987, p. 209).

Alechinsky's work, which reveals the influence of eastern calligraphy, includes a large number of graphic designs.

Curriculum Vitae

The recipient of the Andrew Mellon Prize in 1977, Alechinsky is represented in the collections of sixty-five of the world's leading museums, incl. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.