Journey to the centre of art: Paris, Rome and...Torremolinos

"Paris was a different world. Paris is fantasy and mythology, you can hardly believe you are there.  One of the most beauti­ful moments of my life was when I went to the place where Picasso painted the Guernica.  I knew the address, I looked it up on the map, I went over there... phew, I can remember it... I reached the building and... there was nothing interesting about it, but it was there, it was there he had painted it!  I also went to Delacroix's studio, but Picasso was my obsession."  When Ellis first stood on French soil he was incredibly shy, and you could even say fearful of all the novelties surrounding him.  Even so, the mere fact that he had set off to travel to the Old World was an act of braveness in itself.  On the boat he met an American couple who had already visited France, so he gladly accepted their suggestions.  And like so many other Americans, he gave himself over to discovering the city of his dreams, the city of light, which was such a contrast to the society he came from.  "Many Americans visited Paris with Henry Miller's book under their arms.  Do you know what a pissoir is?  A urinal. Well, Miller wrote of the pissoirs of Paris, which were located on the sidewalks there men went to urinate.  They were standing there urinating and you could see their bodies from the waist up and their feet, and if anyone passed by they greeted them quite casually, without batting an eyelid.  This was inconceivable in the United States. We went around looking for the pissoirs, some pissoir where Henry Miller may have peed.  I was also surprised, in the cinema, to see the bathrooms were mixed. This did not exist in the US, no way."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an element of fetishism in Ellis' appreciation of the French capital. but also one of anxiety, of an indescribable thirst for knowledge and discovery of what the European capital of art had to offer him.  And what it offered was precisely direct contact with avant-garde art, in spite of the fact that at that time the new artistic movement, the evolution of abstrac­tion along the paths initiated by the 'isms', was brewing in New York. "Whilst I was in Paris there was a huge exhibition of the American abstract expressionists; Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko etc... And it's curious, because l was impressed by it, but I did­n't pay much attention to it.  I  was so obsessed with Picasso and Braque that there was no space in my head for anything else."

 

Braque, specificaly, was one of Jacobson's big discoveries in Paris. "I remember a friend spoke to me of an

exhibition that was showing of Braque's recent work.   I only vaguely knew who he was, I went to the exhibition and I can still see it, as though it were yesterday.  Those works are etched in my mind, I did a lot of works

like his, I imitated him for a very long time." It is Ellis himself who affirms that Braque's influence is probably the most pronounced in his work.  Because of  "his way of applying paint, and above all his way of looking at things, very zen, very spiritual. He worked on cubism, like Picasso, but in a very different way.  Braque looked at negative space and played with it.  With Braque I  realized that positive and negative are not absolute, that negative can be positive, that the figure in the foreground can become secondary and cut­ting it out can be

positive.  It is very difficult to explain, but he displayed this. Vacuum is not vacuum - all the great masters in history have said that.  Although knowing it and seeing it and implementing it are different things.  You can spend hours with this observation, it's fascinating.  It broadens our vision of objects and space. It is a process,

like so many others: how to draw with your eyes closed."  Or how to free oneself of the automatism the abstract expressionists drank of.  But that will come later. For now Ellis is in Paris, drinking from all the bottles the French city uncorks before his eyes.  Ellis cannot believe what he sees, but he drinks it in, absorbing it like a sponge.  Although not everything is avant-gardes.  In the Opera Library he discovered master­pieces on caricatures, books on ballet, with figurines and scenes which would stay with him.  However, we could say that many of the hours Ellis spent in France were passed in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre Museum, an authentic icon in the cre­ator's artistic training, where he went without doubt attracted by the vast quantity of

drawings by the grand masters housed there. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres said that drawing makes up three-quarters and a half of what constitutes painting.

 

In the Cabinet des Dessins de L'Louvre, Ellis learned endless lessons, from the portfolios of the great painters that were accumulated in the files.  Jacobson,  unflagging  and impatient,  began with Michelangelo Buonarroti. The box files piled up before him, containing originals which engrossed Ellis for hours at a time.  He gave himself over to discovering the keys to their genius, as he would with the d rawings of Delacroix, too; notes and sketches the French man produced prior to his major works. "The Louvre was a school for me. More as an inspiration than as imitation." During this period, these originals were very accessible indeed, and there was only one ru e: copying the drawings was forbidden. Ellis complied, doubtless because he was not interested in reproducing those l i nes, but rather i n capturi ng the sense of each stroke, of each gestu re, i n i nvestigati ng i nto the gen i us of those masters in order to extract thei r teach i ngs. He certainy absorbed them, as one can percei ve in the skilll Jacobson shows in his drawings afterwards."

When not in art school or in museums, or walkign the streets, Ellis spent hours, days, sitting sketching in the cafes of Paris, Le Select was his favorit, but he also spent many hours drawing and drinking at Le Dome.