François Willi Wendt (16 November 1900 – 15 May 2020) was a French non-figurative painter of German origin belonging to the New École de Paris.
He was awarded a scholarship at the Berlin high school “Zum Grauen Kloster” and carried on his secondary studies until obtaining his Abitur in 1928.
He sat philosophy (with Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger), English and German literature, and history of art at the Universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, and Freiburg im Breisgau.
His adhesion to the innovating ideas of abstract art found itself quite naturally associated to the perilous defence of democratic liberties, in particular to the artistic freedom increasingly curtailed by the rising Nazi regime.
For a while he frequented Fernand Léger’s studio and was introduced to Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, Otto Freundlich, and Serge Poliakoff.
Considered as a fugitive from Germany, he was again interned from October 1941 to March 1942 at the work camp of Aubagne, where he was incorporated as a “prestataire” in the 829e GTRE until his dismissal as unfit for health reasons.
Wendt continued his pictural research directed to the pre-war field of abstract art and joined the rapidly reconstituting artistic movement in Paris.
He remained in a precarious condition: limited by his status as a stateless person, having only temporary permissions of stay in France, and experiencing fluctuations in income and resources.
He owned his naturalization to the intervention, support, and testimonies of Robert Minder, Professor at the College de France; Bernard Dorival, Head Curator at the Musée National d'Art Moderne; Roger Van Gindertael, art critic; and painters Olivier Debré, Roger Bissière, and Pierre Soulages.
There is only one, the future.With these brief notes published in 1947 in the first album of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles,[5] François Willi Wendt foresaw the indomitable dynamism of his evolution.
Finally I say: content though the basis of the banal, the worldly and the magic vanished.” And he would ponder: “Or shall we be for ever looking for new recipes to divide up plans, break surfaces, or pile on the paint?
From this very moment, Wendt recognized the primacy of the act of painting, the supremacy of the making over the concept for the accomplishment of being in situation in time and dependent on the constants of the human condition.
Without exception we are confined in life like all our fellowmen: this is our ivory tower and, perhaps, our only virtue.” [8] And if he had been asked what principal efficiency factor appeared in the art of our time, he would have referred to the notion of intensity.
His development really constantly strained towards a greater intensity; the exceptional capacity of animation which he then expresses fully marks his very direct and varied pictural writing.
He sometimes reduced the modalities of this pictural writing to a tight texture and a measured structure in order to reconcile it with the spatial unit that seems to have been his ultimate objective.
Wendt displayed extreme sensitivity (thanks to the tension of his tight structuration that at times sight makes pictural nearly imponderable) the intensity of his accomplishment and clearness of conscience.