" In spite of 46 years of life together, Mirabelle Dors appears to me as mysterious as on the day we met and her art is still adorned in my eyes with the enigmatic prestiges that captivated me when I discovered this creation of unparalleled originality. It is understandable that I did everything to provide Mirabelle Dors with material security and a climate of open camaraderie, conducive to her work. For Mirabelle Dors gave a great price to the collective action and it is the Critical Figuration Salon, at its peak, which gave her, without doubt, the feeling of an exceptional success.

Mysterious Mirabelle. confusion reigned over her year of birth - usually given as 1913 - and even her identity in the civil status!To top it all off, her year of death is also subject to error: sales catalogs often indicate 1991, whereas she died in 1999.

What is certain is that she arrived in France from Moldavia in 1952 with the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca, her companion at the time. Welcomed in Paris by André Breton, she first lived in Montmartre. Her French first name would be a nickname that would come from her skin color mirabelle while her artist name would have been found by Breton who liked to practice on her to hypnosis sessions, pronouncing this injunction: "sleep Mirabelle, sleep!

She met Maurice Rapin in the early 1950s and married him in 1954 despite the hostility of her family-in-law who found their age difference shocking. The couple settled in Vélizy-Villacoublay, in a house painted green. She dedicated her art"To Maurice, for Maurice, with Maurice", a mention she bears for posterity on the back of the work Une Terre d'attente (1994) presented in our sale. In his company, she creates without respite strange masks, totems, dolls, chimeras and "populations of images". It is a surrealist, repetitive and "popular" mechanism, inscribed in the world. Mirabelle and Maurice did not live in the isolation of the protest painters. Collective action was their dada... The groups Jeune Peinture and Figuration critique that she animated were resolutely outside the official circuits.

Paradoxical Mirabelle, committed and rebellious, a staunch feminist and yet indefectibly linked to a man, with a somewhat dominant personality, who " brought her material security ". Older, she died before Maurice, in November 1999. Would André Breton have ordered her, from the beyond: " Sleep, Mirabelle, sleep... for eternity "? According to Etienne Ruhaud's research, she does not share her husband's tomb, division 6 of the small cemetery of Bercy where he is buried... In the game of exquisite corpses, Mirabelle - born who knows where, who knows when - is even a separate tomb!

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WORKSHOPS MIRABELLE DORS AND MAURICE RAPIN - COMRADES IN LOVE, FOUNDERS OF CRITICAL FIGURATION

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