Malkine was considered to have lived the most surreal existence possible, refusing to be restricted by any particular career and allowing fate to lead him through many adventures. The son of world-class violinists—both his Danish mother, lngeborg Magnus, and his Russian father, Jacques Malkine, performed with such notables as Fritz Kreisler and Saint-Saëns. Georges Malkine was artistically gifted as a child, and attended the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, but his studies were interrupted by the First World War. Drafted at nineteen and wounded while driving an ambulance at the front, he was sent to a hospital in Paris, where he met Apollinaire. Upon his mother's death in 1920, he left Paris to travel through Africa, finishing his journey with an elephant hunt in Cameroon. Returning penniless in 1921, he earned money selling neckties on the street, translating English texts, transcribing concertos and proofreading. Already friends with Jacques Prévert, Marcel Duhamel and Yves Tanguy, Malkine met Robert Desnos in 1922. Becoming fast friends, they ended up sharing an apartment on Rue Blomet. Malkine had painted sporadically for years, and his style was now transformed by his connection with the movement. Breton recognized him as an artist dedicated to "absolute surrealism," and Malkine was the only painter to sign the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Although employed at a sanitation company in Nice, by 1926 he had moved back to Paris, where he began one of his most prolific periods of painting, creating abstract or poetic works, such as La nuit d'amour and La dame de pique. Malkine's one-man show, in 1927 at Galerie Surrealiste, was a huge success. That same year, he began working on illustrations for Desnos' The Night of Loveless Nights. Disillusioned by purges within the surrealists' ranks, he fled to Tahiti, where he learned to make coconut jewelry and attended sacred ceremonies. He returned to Paris on a passenger ship, working as a galley hand, and later traveled to Haiti where he participated in voodoo rituals. From 1933 to 1939 Malkine acted in over twenty films, among them Billy Wilder's Mauvaise graine, and Jean Gremillon's Remorques, with Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan. In 1939 he was again drafted into the army, but was discharged in 1940 for health reasons. Joining the Resistance in 1941, he was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to a labor camp. He returned to Paris at the war's end to find that both his wife and Desnos were dead. While working at Ce Soir as a proofreader, he married Sonia Niel, with whom he moved to New York and had four children. Painting in earnest after his retirement in 1966, Malkine decided to visit his old friends in Paris, perhaps for the last time. After a fifteen-year absence, they hailed him, and with the help of the art historian Patrick Waldberg he had a number of successful exhibitions. In an explosion of creativity, he painted over a hundred paintings in what would become his second most prolific period. Many of these works are so wonderfully imaginative that they are bound to be rediscovered one day. He is the painter of poetic analogy.  

Georges Malkine

Born 1898 and died 1970 in Paris.  

La Femme Tatouée, Oil on Canvas, 1929