1904 - 1953
1904
– On 17 August at 5.55am, Louis-Ghislain Cattiaux was born in Valenciennes, the youngest of four siblings, into a family originally from Nord- Pas-de-Calais. His father, Étienne Cattiaux, a coach painter, was born on 21 February 1851 in Cambrai. He married Palmire Séraphine Fiévet (born 19 December 1866) on 13 December 1884 in Valenciennes. Their children were Étienne (1884-1959), Marguerite (1888-1973), Marie-Germaine (1894- 1960) and Louis (1904-1953). His father died on 26 April 1926 at the age of 75, when Louis was 22. His mother died on 27 June 1919, when he was 15. He was brought up mainly by his sister Marguerite, 16 years his elder, with whom he maintained a close relationship for the rest of his life.
1914
– At the age of ten, he was evacuated to the Paris region with his sister Marguerite and joined the Hanley boarding school, of which he had a painful memory:
These boarding schools are the dirtiest memory of my childhood… the injustices and sufferings endured during childhood leave a deep mark on people, and each reacts according to his temperament, but all remain raw at the mere memory of the gratuitous wickedness of certain educators (Cf. Correspondances de Louis Cattiaux avec James Chauvet, Gaston Chaissac et Serge Lebbal, Éd. Miroir d’Isis, Ways (Belgium), 2016, p. 60.).
1922
– At the age of eighteen, he prepared for «Les Arts et Métiers», but was forced to leave his studies for the barracks to carry out his military duties. He was then sent to Ruttenscheid in the Rhineland for the French occupation, where he was conscripted for 4 years. He later qualified as a master mechanic.
1928
– He met Henriette Péré at Le Mée, in Seine- et-Marne.
– They became engaged, but distance would separate them for a few months, as he was forced by the hazards of life to leave for Dahomey, where he was employed in a commercial enterprise. He continued to sketch and draw and brought back a series of paintings and watercolours to France.
1929
– On his return to France, he was hired by an insurance company to canvass the market and win contracts. Encouraged by Henriette Péré, he devoted himself more and more to painting and frequented the literary and artistic circles of the Parisian avant-garde. He painted «Les Fables de la Fontaine» for his sister Marguerite.
– Entirely self-taught at the time, Cattiaux developed a very personal, time-consuming painting technique using knives. With this technique, painting becomes matter. Knife-painting requires a more synthetic vision of the work, suggesting rather than accurately representing. Courbet is often regarded as the pioneer of this technique, but it would seem that the process goes back to Titian, as Vasari reports.
1932
– Louis Cattiaux and Henriette Péré took up residence on the ground floor of number 3 rue Casimir Périer in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, where they set up an art gallery called «Gravitations» (See images of the gallery Gravitations), in honour of the collection of poems by their friend Jules Supervielle, published in 1925 and from which they borrowed the name.
This extraordinary character, born in Valenciennes in 1904, lived in Paris in the middle of the Latin Quarter, with his wife Henriette and his cat Poupinet, a superb Persian, which he would stroke and jokingly refer to as «my great Jesus!». One can understand his using that name, even though it seems a little irreverent, if one bears in mind that the cat is the emblem of the Word of our Master Hermes, for it says «Miaou», with the four vowels of the divine Name; it is «IAKHOU» for the Ancient Egyptians, or even «HELOUIA», who, according to Louis Cattiaux, is the true author of «The Message Rediscovered», his main work. (Cf. Charles d’Hooghvorst, «The Lost and Rediscovered Word» lecture delivered at the «E. Canseliet Colloquium» held at the Sorbonne on December 4 and 5, 1999, in the journal «L’alchimie», Arcadis Ed., no. 6, January – March 2001).
1933
– He published a series of ten wood engravings with Sagesse Publishing House to illustrate the collection of poems «Ariston» by his friend André Guilliot, whom he took as the second major witness to his civil marriage in 1935.
1934
– He signed the Manifesto of Transhylism (« Les Arts » in Paris-Soir, 13 January 1935, p. 10) with the painters Jean Lafon, Pierre Ino, Erik Olson, Jean Marembert, René Paresce, Lucien Coutaud, the sculptor Étienne Beothy and with the support of the poets Jules Supervielle, Fernand Marc and Louis de Gonzague Frick, with whom he was very close.
– Cattiaux exhibits «La Belle Ferronnière» at the «Salon des Indépendants et des Surindépendants»: The hallmark of the «Salon des Surindépendants», whose motto was «Independence and Discipline», was that the vast majority of the paintings and sculptures exhibited were works of the imagina- tion. The fact that the Surindépendants reserved a place for the Surrealists that year is a good indication of the tendency of a group that had no qualms about getting off the beaten track. Neo-impressionists, neo-cubists, neo-fauvists, expressionists, effusionists – to use the word smilingly coined by Mendès France, the group’s president and one of its finest painters – musicalists perhaps, whimsicalists in any case, the exhibitors at the «Salon des Surindépendants» were almost all visionaries (Cf. Gabriel-Joseph Gros « Les surindépendants », in le journal Beaux-Arts, 3 novembre 1933, p. 3).
1935
– On the twenty-third of April 1935, at thirty minutes past ten, before the Deputy Mayor of the Seventh Arrondissement, appeared in public in the town hall Louis-Ghislain Cattiaux, painter, born in Valenciennes on 17.08. 1904, residing in Paris, 3 rue Casimir Périer, and Henriette Alberte Péré, gallery director, born in Manciet (Gers) on 09.08.1904, aged thirty, residing in Paris, 3 rue Casimir Périer, and declare that they intend to get married.
– At this time, Louis Cattiaux abandoned knife-painting and painted «The Flight into Egypt». He remained concerned with pictorial technique and consulted Raoul Dufy about the mediums developed by Jacques Maroger.
– Shortly afterwards, the «Gravitations» gallery ceased to exist, but the Cattiaux family continued to live there and to hold private exhibitions.
1936
– Exhibition at Berthe Weill’s Gallery (known as «the small art dealer of great artists»), in Paris, of drawings and watercolours by some forty artists (three generations) from Saturday 12 December 1936 to 10 January 1937: Cézanne, Lautrec, Pascin, Od. Redon, Makowski, Renoir, Fernand Siméon, Zak, Barat-Levraux, Cl. Bertrand, G. Bouche, G. Capon, Cattiaux, Chagall, Charmy, Chirico, Dagoussia, Derain, Despiau, Dufresne, Raoul Dufy, Eisenschitz, Floch, O. des Garets, Gimmi, Hecht, Hermine-David, Kars, Kayser, Mrs. Laurencin, Lhote, Maillol, Vergé-Sarrat, Welsch, Matisse, Mercédès-Legrand, Peronne, Picasso, Rouault, Savin, M.- L. Siméon, Simon- Lévy, Francis Smith, Alice Thévin, Utrillo, Valadon. (Cf. Marianne Le Morvan: www.bertheweill.fr/expositions).
– A period of research became more pronounced, and his technical pictorial concerns were joined by an orientation towards Alchemy and the Quest for the Absolute, which renewed the subjects of his works.
1938
– He had already written part of «The lost Message», which was later pillaged by the hordes of French civilians fleeing Douchy (Loiret) in 1940. He resumed writing the book under the title «The Message Rediscovered».
– At Berthe Weill’s, a famous avant-garde art dealer, the exhibition of the members of the former «Gravitations» group was of great interest. He exhibited there several times: for the second time from 2 to 30 December 1938 (Cf. Marianne Le Morvan, idem) alongside Pierre Ino, Jean Lafon and Gio Colucci in a group:
– Cattiaux, while pursuing his research into matters with great success, plunges deep into the sources of spirit and knowledge to bring out skilful, colourful and lively transmutations (Gaston Diehl, in «Tribune des Jeunes – Peintres», in Marianne, 14 December 1938, p. 19).
1939
– Exhibition «Confrontations» in February again at Berthe Weill’s Gallery, this time along- side: Derain, Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, Rouault, Utrillo, Vlaminck, Ino, Lafon, Colucci (Marianne Le Morvan, ibidem).
– Exhibition of paintings and sculptures by the eclectic group at Berthe Weill, from 20 April, together with Jankel Adler, Beothy, Cattiaux, Colucci, Freundlick, Gonzalès, Pierre Ino, Kosnick, Lafon, Martyn, Metzinger, Péronne, Reth, Smith, Survage (ibidem).
– The exhibition from 15 June to 30 June of this same year, also at Berthe Weill, was entirely devoted to him (ibidem).
– He was mobilised for the «phoney war»: on the day of mobilisation he wrote to Guénon nine years later, on 11 December 1949:
I was in despair on the day of the general mobilisation, thinking that I was probably going to die a foolish death before being able to accomplish my research here on earth and that I would have to start all over again, and I was also thinking of the dangers, the pains that I had fortunately overcome with God’s help, circling around my main room like a caged lion weighing up my chances of escaping, when mechanically I opened my Bible which was on the table and I read this, where it opened at random: «Let a thousand fall on your side and ten thousand on your right, and you will not be harmed. Only with thine eyes shalt thou look, etc.’ (Psalms 91). I put the book down again without even realizing the enormity of the answer and went round the room several more times, as if in a daze, after which, waking up as it were, I called my wife and showed her the thing to prove that I was not daydreaming and that the unheard-of answer was right there in front of my eyes. I transcribed this verse from the psalms onto the first page of the Garnier Koran that I was rea- ding at the time, put it in my satchel and set off without turning my head towards my destiny, calm and full of faith in my star, which meant that I didn’t try to avoid being appointed to form a heavy tank battalion that was later engaged before Sedan and destroyed after 24 days of battle, I neither saw nor received anything, while others who thought they were very clever, having hidden in depots in Brittany, were taken prisoner and taken to captivity where many died of dysentery and other diseases. The funny thing is that I wasn’t caught in the line of battle, whereas the others were in the rear! (Paris-Le Caire Correspondance entre Louis Cattiaux et René Guénon, op. cit., p. 71).
1941
– Cattiaux took advantage of the years of occupation to frequent the libraries of Paris, copying in notebooks numerous alchemical texts that were impossible to find at the time:
During the Occupation, I ate one apple per meal. But I spent all my time in the Library of Paris, which contains the secrets of esotericism and medieval art. I literally fed off the spirit of my predecessors, who were believers and scrupulous artists.
Cattiaux brought back from these studies a treatise on the pictorial science of the 14th and 15th centuries. He then wrote a book (The Message Rediscovered) of maxims, which he reworked until the eve of his sudden death. Finally, some clarifications on Christian esotericism (Adolphe de Falgairolle, « Cattiaux, peintre et mystique » in L’information artistique, n° 7, January 1954, pp. 35 – 36).
He explained to his friend Chaissac:
I know […] the works of philosophers and alchemists from the Middle Ages to the 18th century and those of the ancient sages, unknown to today’s literati. This is where beauty, science, poetry, life and love come together (Letter to Chaissac, January 1947).
– Cattiaux mentions his pictorial discoveries in an art journal:
Having had the curiosity to become practically interested in the old techniques of oil painting and having succeeded in a few modest works in this field and also a few small paintings, it has not occurred to me, since 1935, to take out patents or to found a brand of paint, nor to open shops, nor above all to profanely «debunk» the old ones in order to better promote my little invention. On the contrary, as I owe my discovery to the work of my predecessors, I can only praise them and thank them in my heart, and I can only imitate their prudence – that is, wait many years – to find out the value of this restitution where modern cacochemistry has nothing to do with it, because the means are simple and anyone can implement them without complicated laboratories, indispensable specialities or obligatory suppliers (1st December 1950).
– He painted «Sleeping Beauty or Alchemy in repose».
1942
– He took part in the «Salon des Tuileries» and in the exhibition «Les étapes du Nouvel Art contemporain» organised by Gaston Diehl at the Galerie Berri-Raspail:
Possessed by a deep metaphysical torment, he never ceases to question his visions with passion in order to extract their analytical and plastic content. With the help of a beautiful matter that he discovered a few years ago, he does not hesitate to pose the problem of man and the world with a particularly expressive persuasive force. And his symbolic language of harmonious simplicity is part of a serene unity of rich magic (Gaston Diehl, « Sous le signe de l’Esprit » in Les étapes du nouvel Art Contemporain, 1942).
1943
– He takes part in the exhibition «Dreams and Imagination in Art» organised by Gaston Diehl in the same He painted two versions of «L’Homme». He stays in Valenciennes.
1944
– He painted the «Portrait for the Message Rediscovered» and corresponded with Lanza del Vasto, whose portrait he painted after the latter’s stay in India with
1945
– «Les Poèmes du Fainéant» are published in Valenciennes. This year was marked by an evolu- tion towards an increasingly free style of pain- ting, as Cattiaux wished to work mainly on his hermetic research.
– He became acquainted with James Chauvet (1885-1955), with whom he exchanged letters on philosophical subjects ( Correspondances de Louis Cattiaux avec James Chauvet, Gaston Chaissac et Serge Lebbal, op. cit., pp. 9 à 53) for several years. It was on Chauvet’s advice that Cattiaux had «The Mes- sage Rediscovered» sent to R. Guénon, which indirectly led to Guénon’s review in the press in 1948. Cattiaux and Chauvet collaborated together in Théophile Briant’s review, «Le Goéland», notably on a fine tribute to Guénon in 1951.
1946
– He finished writing his essay on painting, entitled «Physics and Metaphysics of Painting», which Jean Cuttat of «Éditions des Portes de France» was preparing to In the end, this edition never saw the light of day during his life- time. Indeed, a few years later, Adolphe de Falgairolle wrote this note about the essay in a newspaper:
I have just had the honour of reading, on proof, this treatise in which Louis Cattiaux reaches the meta- physics of art because he has freed it from its technical constraints. But what a difference it makes between exploiting the deliberate awkwardness or incongruity of a technique (a modern right- or left- wing bluff) and expressing a true personality! Art cannot be penetrated by cunning, force or mediocrity. The science of painting, with all that it requires to know about supports, printing, pigments, vehicles and backgrounds, is dealt with here without any dogmatism, by a man who has been able to uncover the secrets of 15th-century painters. Once he has mastered the recipes and traditional solutions to pictorial problems, Louis Cattiaux moves on to examine the reasons for painting. The idea of impressing the public (?) or the intention of attracting a busy dealer have nothing to do with the impulse of the true born painter: to liberate oneself through coloured plasticity from a divine or satanic possession, some would say, and we wouldn’t blame them if they were genuinely diabolical-mystical. What Cattiaux is up against is the pseudo-merchants, the pseudo- amateurs. His table for rating the works to be exa- mined gives two essential ratings for the soul and the spirit. But none for the effect conveyed. Against false emotionalism, sincerity is the only thing that counts, as an expression of Faith. This will be an independent little book, anti-prig, erudite in its esoteric and metaphysical conception of painting. When it appears, I’ll mention its publisher, because I’m so convinced that I’m doing painters a favour (Journal Le Provençal, 8 septembre 1950).
– He exhibits at the «Salon du Hainaut» in Valenciennes.
– The first edition of the first 12 chapters of «The Message Rediscovered» was published in Paris on a self-publishing basis. The publication of this work won Cattiaux many friendships and a very active correspondence with a large number of personalities.
– He became friends with Gaston (1910-1964) and Camille Chaissac, with whom he exchanged many letters (Correspondances de Louis Cattiaux avec James Chauvet, Gaston Chaissac et Serge Lebbal, op. cit., pp. 55 à 73) between 1946 and 1953. They met at the «Salon des Indépendants».
1947 – 1948
– He exhibited in Valenciennes at the «Salon» organised by the «Association des Anciens Élèves des Écoles Académiques et du Conservatoire».
– He came into contact with René Guénon (1886-1951), an active correspondent, who that same year, 1948, published a glowing review of «The Message Rediscovered» in number 270 of the Magazine «Les Études Traditionnelles», created by Guénon and published in Paris by Chacornac. In his review, Guénon qualified Cattiaux’s work as «hermetic».
–He became friends with the writer Jean Rousselot.
– He organized a private exhibition in Valenciennes, in the art gallery set up by his sister, 2, Place de la République.
– At the end of 1948, Emmanuel (1914-1999) and Charles d’Hooghvorst (1924-2004) came into contact with the author of «The Message Rediscovered» thanks to Guénon’s review. Then Cattiaux built a solid friendship with them and their entire family, as evidenced by their intense correspondence (Cf. «The Collected Letters of Louis Cattiaux, Beya Editions, 2013).
– The relationship between Cattiaux and the d’Hooghvorst brothers was short-lived, but exceptionally intense. It lasted a little over four years, until the painter and poet suddenly left this world in the summer of 1953. He left, but without abandoning his new friends: he left them not only «The Message Rediscovered», but also the spirit that was its key.
– Following this meeting, the two brothers devoted their lives to spreading Cattiaux’s teaching: «We have simply sought to bear witness to what we have read and heard» (Cf. Raimon Arola, Croire l’incroyable ou l’ancien et le nouveau dans l’histoire des religions, Beya Ed., Grez-Doiceau (Belgium), 2006, p. 11).
– The two brothers were responsible for the first complete edition of the 40 chapters of «Le Message Retrouvé», published by Denoël in 1956, and for publicising his work in Belgium, France and Spain.
– Serge Lebbal (1931-1955) discovered the first edition of «Le Message Retrouvé» in a library and went to visit its It was from this mee- ting that a deep friendship was born. The son of an Algerian emigrant, Serge Lebbal was in a way the son Louis Cattiaux never had. Cattiaux taught him and instilled in him a love of books and ancient treatises on alchemy, which Lebbal would later unearth with disconcerting ease for his friend: he liked to call himself the «King’s bookseller». He appeared in Cattiaux’s life like a shooting star. He corresponded with him on a weekly basis over the short period from 1952 to 1953 (Cf. Correspondances de Louis Cattiaux avec James Chauvet, Gaston Chaissac et Serge Lebbal, op. cit., pp. 75 to 91). He left this world at the age of 24 in October 1955.
1950
– He sent «Maria Paritura» and «Les trois nuits de l’Être» to the «Salon d’Automne». These two works, although accepted by the Jury and included in the catalogue, were not exhi Cattiaux was deeply saddened. In a widely circulated circular, he protested that several works had been omitted from the «Salon d’Automne». The fault was attributed to the guards, who had simply failed to bring the works up from storage at the time of placement.
1953
– In May, he travelled to Catalonia and stayed at Santa Fé del Montseny with Emmanuel d’Hooghvorst and his wife. He complained of the pains of a stomach ailment from which he had been suffering since the age of 25.
– In June he wrote the last verses of «The Message Rediscovered».
– On 13 July he was taken to hospital in the middle of the night for an emergency operation, his life in He died at Suresnes hospital three days later, at eight o’clock on 16 July, surrounded by his wife Henriette and his friend Charles d’Hooghvorst.
