We remember him for his supple, slender silhouette. A lunar Pierrot with a bleached face, black commas in place of the eyebrows, a sailor top and a hat topped with a pink flower. The mime Marceau, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. To commemorate the man nicknamed the “Prince of Silence”, the National Arts Club devotes an exhibition to him until Friday, April 28 as part of the reissue of the book Marcel Marceau: master of mime to Optimum Limited editions, a book capturing the intimate, life, career and family of the Mime through the eyes of his friend, the star photographer of Time magazine, Ben Martin, also deceased. Playwright Anne Sicco, the artist’s widow, will exceptionally travel to New York to attend the opening on March 20. “It’s a leap in time. I will discover this exhibition at the same time as the public, it will be very moving. This centenary stirs up a lot of things. Marcel Marceau is the genius known throughout the world, but there is also the companion and the father. »
Kathryn Leigh Scott, the photographer’s widow and at the origin of this project, recounts its genesis. ” I wanted to reissue the book as a tribute to those great artists who were Ben Martin and mime. It is also a way of introducing the work of the great mime to new generations unfamiliar with the secular tradition of pantomime. »
Mime and photography, two analogous arts
The exhibition is organized around forty photographs from this book, vintage prints, already exhibited around the world in the early 80s. “These photos speak of a bygone era, they are direct testimony to it. They are very moving both by their weathered side and by what they tell, says Robert Pledge, close friend and other curator of the exhibition who signs the afterword of the book. I always thought that mime and photography were analogous arts. We say a lot of things with images as we say a lot of things with gestures. Without sound. »
What do these photos say? The story of a child of war. A refugee in Limoges during the Second World War, Marcel Mangel, his real name, joined the Resistance with his older brother Alain and learned to be silent in the face of the enemy. “My taste for silence may have come from there”, confided one day the one whose father was deported to Auschwitz. After the war, he studied drama and mime in Paris where, in 1959, he founded his own pantomime school. The success is immediate. And internationally. In Japan, China, Chile and the United States, he takes the character of Bip, which made him famous, around the world.
New York, the city of his first triumphs
Paradoxically, it is not in his country that the one who nicknamed himself the “most famous Frenchman in the world with Commander Cousteau” finds recognition. “His first triumph with the company was in New York! France is only interested in him when he returns from the United States, remembers Anne Sicco, his widow. He adored this city, there was something mythical about succeeding here following great artists. The little Strasbourg boy who goes to Paris and makes his place in the United States. At the time it was amazing. »
50 years after his first steps on Broadway, this craftsman of the gesture who had inspired Michael Jackson his famous Moonwalk is revealed through moving, funny and intimate shots that remind us that the Mime Marceau was not only the poetic clown that we knew but certainly the last genius of the Art of silence.
