Pol BURY

Pol Bury – Biography, Kinetic Art and Original Prints

Pol Bury (born 26 April 1922 in Haine-Saint-Pierre, Belgium; died 27 September 2005 in Paris) was the poet of slowness among the founders of kinetic art. A former Surrealist and member of CoBrA, he gave up painting in the early 1950s to make reliefs and sculptures whose balls, rods and cubes move so gradually that one is never quite sure they are moving at all. He represented Belgium at the 1964 Venice Biennale, took part in two documenta exhibitions and is represented at Tate by two motorised works of 1966. His printmaking, centred on the celebrated Cinétisations, includes screenprints, lithographs, an etching and a woodcut.

Le Coin des Arts follows Pol Bury’s work and offers his original prints as and when they become available, chosen, like everything we handle, for quality of impression, edition, provenance and condition. If you would like to be told when one arrives, simply ‘follow the artist’ on this page.

A Surrealist Apprenticeship in Hainaut

Bury enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Mons in 1938, aged sixteen, but stayed only briefly. Far more formative was the poet Achille Chavée, who brought him into the Surrealist group Rupture. His early canvases owe much to Yves Tanguy, and in 1940 he contributed to L’Invention collective, the review founded by René Magritte and Raoul Ubac. He showed at the International Surrealist Exhibition in Brussels in 1945, then joined the Jeune Peinture Belge and, from 1948 to 1951, CoBrA, writing and illustrating for its review alongside Pierre Alechinsky. In 1952 he co-founded the group Art Abstrait, the last chapter of his career as a painter.

From ‘Plans mobiles’ to ZERO, 1953–1960

The decisive encounter was with the mobiles of Alexander Calder. In 1953 Bury exhibited his first Plans mobiles in Brussels – flat geometric panels that the viewer could turn by hand. They caught the eye of the Paris dealer Denise René, who included him in the landmark exhibition Le Mouvement in April 1955, with Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Yaacov Agam, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely. By the end of the decade he had hidden small electric motors behind his reliefs: the Multiplans and then the Ponctuations, in which white wires or dots quiver almost imperceptibly. In 1959 he took part in Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision at the Hessenhuis in Antwerp, organised by the G58 group and regarded as the first international exhibition of the ZERO network.

International Recognition, 1961–1972

Settled in Paris at the start of the 1960s, Bury held his first solo show at the Galerie Iris Clert in 1962. 1964 was his breakthrough year: he represented Belgium at the 32nd Venice Biennale, appeared at documenta III in Kassel and opened his first solo exhibition at the Lefebre Gallery in New York. He returned to documenta in 1968, the year he also began designing jewellery. Working increasingly in steel, copper and polished brass, he was the subject of a retrospective that toured American museums in 1970–71, ending at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and of a European exhibition organised by the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover and shown in 1972 in Charleroi and at the CNAC in Paris. With Clovis Prévost he also made a series of experimental films for the Fondation Maeght.

Pol Bury in British Collections and Exhibitions

Britain’s national collection holds two characteristic motorised works, both dated 1966: 3069 White Dots on an Oval Background and 16 Balls, 16 Cubes in 8 Rows, made of wood and nylon set in motion by a concealed motor (Tate, T00918 and T00919). They sit there alongside the work of fellow kinetic artists such as Soto and Vasarely. More recently, London has rediscovered his early pieces: his motorised relief Erectile (1959) was shown in Turn Me On: European and Latin American Kinetic Art 1948–1979 at Christie’s Mayfair in 2014, and again in the exhibition Sotto Voce in London in 2015. The British artist Richard Hamilton also photographed him on 24 March 1988 for his series of Polaroid Portraits.

Fountains and Late Work, 1973–2005

Living at Perdreauville, west of Paris, Bury turned in the mid-1970s to hydraulic fountains, in which water slowly tips steel spheres, cylinders and cubes. In 1980 one was installed in the rotunda of the Guggenheim. Retrospectives followed at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City (1977–78) and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982). Appointed professor of sculpture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1983, he installed his stainless-steel sphere fountains in the Cour d’Orléans of the Palais-Royal in 1985. He died in Paris in September 2005 while an exhibition of his fountains was on view at the Château de Seneffe in Belgium.

The Printed Work: Cinétisations, Screenprints and Lithographs

In the mid-1960s Bury found a way of putting still images into motion. For his Cinétisations he cut a photograph of a landmark – the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty, a New York bridge – into concentric rings and shifted them, so that the building appears to buckle and swirl. The originals are unique collages; the best-known printed version is the portfolio X Cinétisations (1966), ten screenprints published by the Lefebre Gallery, New York, printed in Paris by Atelier Clot, Bramsen et Georges in an edition of 62. For Maeght’s review Derrière le miroir he made original colour lithographs, printed by Arte, for no. 178 (April 1969), and a further issue, no. 191 (1971), with a text by Roland Topor. In intaglio he produced an etching and aquatint (1973–74) published in Rome by 2RC in 77 impressions plus 10 artist’s proofs, and in relief a woodcut, Circle and Ten Triangles (1976). He also contributed studies after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to the 1973 portfolio Hommage à Picasso. To our knowledge there is no published catalogue raisonné of the prints – Rosemarie E. Pahlke’s 1994 catalogue covers the sculpture – so a sheet is identified by title, date, publisher, printer and edition.

Collecting Pol Bury: A Buyer’s Guide

Edition. Bury’s editions tend to be small: 62 for the X Cinétisations, 77 for the Rome etching. Check that the pencilled number tallies with the published edition – see printing and editions.

Signature. Published impressions are signed and numbered in pencil. A printed signature is no substitute, and nothing printed after 2005 can bear his own hand.

Collage or print? A unique photographic Cinétisation is a different object, and a different price bracket, from a screenprint; neither should be confused with an offset reproduction.

Derrière le miroir. The lithographs bound into the review are genuine original prints but unsigned and usually folded; only the deluxe copies were signed and numbered.

Condition and pitfalls. Flat screenprinted colour shows every scuff, so inspect for fading, foxing and trimmed margins, and beware exhibition posters sold as prints. Our guarantees are set out on the authenticity page; see also our bespoke framing service.

The gallery selects prints by the pioneers of art in motion and their circle: Jean Tinguely, Jesús Rafael Soto, Victor Vasarely, Yaacov Agam and Pierre Alechinsky. Explore the kinetic art and Op Art movement and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Rosemarie E. Pahlke, Pol Bury, avec catalogue raisonné, Crédit Communal, Ghent, 1994 · Frédérique Martin-Scherrer, Pol Bury. Livres et écrits, CFC-Éditions, 2022 · Pol Bury, CNAC Archives no. 7, Paris, 1972 · Tate – 16 Balls, 16 Cubes in 8 Rows · Tate – 3069 White Dots on an Oval Background · MoMA – Untitled from X Cinetizations · Toledo Museum of Art – Derrière le miroir no. 178 · Museo Reina Sofía – Richard Hamilton, Pol Bury 24.3.88 · documenta – 4. documenta