Background
Ethnicity:
He was born to a Wallon mother and of a Flemish father.
Marcel Marien was born on April 29, 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium. He was a single child in a poor family.
Signature of Marcel Mariën.
Marcel Mariën
artist essayist filmmaker Photographer collagist poet
Ethnicity:
He was born to a Wallon mother and of a Flemish father.
Marcel Marien was born on April 29, 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium. He was a single child in a poor family.
In 1933 Marien entered the college of Antwerp where he had difficulty because the classes were given entirely in Flemish. His mother wanted him to leave school as soon as possible so that he could start bringing money into the home.
Aged 15, Marien worked as an apprentice photographer, but later he set up a home studio to develop his own projects.
In 1937, he first encountered the surrealist paintings of Rene Magritte in exhibition and traveled to Brussels to seek out the artist. He soon began corresponding with Magritte and was warmly welcomed into the close-knit Belgian Surrealist group. Within a year, Marien had his own work included in the Surrealist group exhibition "Surrealist Objects and Poems" in London.
Initially, he could not paint or draw, so he instead used a wide variety of media, including collage, decoupage, drawing, painting, toys, household items and even a reproduction of a Michelangelo fresco. With this anarchistic approach, he was acknowledged as the initiator of the Surrealist technique of étrécissements. Throughout his career, he produced hundreds of humorous, puzzling and provocative tableaux that challenge and mock preconceptions and taboos.
In 1939, he enlisted in the Belgian Army to fight in World War II, but was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Germany. Following his release, he returned to Brussels and, in 1943, wrote and published the very first monograph on Magritte.
The same year he produced his first photograph with a distinctive personal vision “De Sade à Lénine”, an image of a woman cutting a slice of bread, the loaf gripped tightly against her naked torso, the blade pointing at her left breast.
He signed on for two years as a sailor on a Danish cargo ship in 1951.
In 1954 Marien founded the magazine "Les Lèvres Nues" and directed his review "Le Ciel Bleu" with Christian Dotremont and Paul Colinet. He published the writings of such Belgian Surrealists as Paul Nouge, Louis Scutenaire, Andre Souris and Rene Magritte.
Despite this and other successful photographs, Marien would soon abandon photography to concentrate on object making, drawing and writing.
In 1959 Marien produced and directed the film "L'Imitation du cinema". A combination of sexual and religious imagery, it caused a scandal in Belgium and was banned in France. Even with the support of the Kinsey Institute, it proved impossible to have the film shown in the United States.
He lived in New York from 1962 to 1963 before relocating to Communist China from 1963 until 1965, where he worked as a translator on the French edition of the magazine "China Under Construction".
In 1979, Marien published "L'Activité Surréaliste en Belgique", a chronological record of all the documents, manifestos, tracts and articles pertaining to the surrealist movement in Belgium that appeared between 1924 and 1950.
He again took up photography in 1983 as a quick and immediate way of expressing his ideas. He carried on where he had left off in 1942 and began producing one extraordinary image after another, simple yet elegant surreal images with free associations of imagery and text.
Marcel Marien died on September 19, 1993 in Brussels, Belgium.
Waiting
Sculpture Friends
Peace During Wartime
Province de Hainaut & Banane, Le carnaval de Rio
L'introuvable
All Gum
Courtisane au repos
Star Dancer
Monsieur Courbet's Good Days
The Tomb of Jack the Ripper
The Animal Kingdom (1953) with English Translation
The Prostitute r...
The Woman from Alost
Antiportrait
Maryline, Parler de soie
Desperate Attempt to Save Andy Warhol from Oblivion
Why We Are Fighting
While working in Communist China, Marien was disappointed with Maoism and left Communist China in 1965.
Quotations:
“Don’t pay attention to the photography.”
"Have you ever been alive? Curious sensation isn't it?"
He was a member of Belgian Surrealist group.
Marien loved making jokes. In 1953, he went to the Belgian coast, where he distributed false bank notes printed by Rene and Paul Magritte.