Jean Crotti: ‘Inhabiting Abstraction’

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Cotter

"Fragment de la Création" (1955) By Jean Crotti (b. France)

NEW YORK - Socially, the French painter Jean Crotti (1878-1958) was near the center of early Euro-American Modernism. Married to the artist Suzanne Duchamp, sister of Marcel, he knew most of the leading avant-garde players in Paris and New York and counted a good many as friends. Crotti was born in Switzerland, studied painting in Paris and sampled various vanguard trends, including Cubism, Orphism and Dada. He and his wife developed a customized version of Dada, called Tabu, which was distinguished by its rejection of the negative, anti-art aspects of the original. Crotti was a spiritually minded, if not religious, painter who viewed art, and specifically abstraction, as a tool for grappling with existential questions and processing cosmic impulses. On view at Franci Nauman Fine Arts, 24 West 57th Street, Suite 305, Manhattan through Friday. [link]