---
title: "Anselme Boix-Vives: painting between the shop and the world"
description: "Two gouaches by Anselme Boix-Vives reveal animals and figures shaped by reused paper, memories of Spain and images arriving through television."
canonical: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/anselme-boix-vives-gouache/
lang: en
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
translations:
  en: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/anselme-boix-vives-gouache/
  fr: https://chicodasilva.org/fr/articles/anselme-boix-vives-gouache/
  pt: https://chicodasilva.org/pt/artigos/anselme-boix-vives-guache/
---

Art and artists

# Anselme Boix-Vives: painting between the shop and the world

Two gouaches by Anselme Boix-Vives reveal animals and figures shaped by reused paper, memories of Spain and images arriving through television.

Before covering pieces of board with flowers and animals, Anselme Boix-Vives drew birds on the backs of invoices from his fruit and vegetable shop in Moûtiers, Savoy.[^press] Paper passing through his hands could hold an account or receive a creature.

Boix-Vives (1899–1969) was born in Spain, moved to France at eighteen and began painting regularly in 1962, in his sixties.[^manas][^hebert] Yet his age at the time soon ceases to explain very much about the gouaches. An animal stretched across a horizontal board and a priest looking out through a frame of leaves involve quite different decisions. Both works belong to the LaM, which received them in the L’Aracine donation of 1999.[^dahu][^cure]

## The length of the dahu

![A very long brown animal, with two purple ears and a pink and green eye, walks on short legs against a yellow background covered with flowers. The board is visible around the painting.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/anselme-boix-vives/dahu-640.jpg)

*Le Dahu, 1964. Gouache, dry pastel and graphite pencil on grey board, 27.5 × 80.5 cm.

Anselme Boix-Vives. LaM, 999.134.2. Photograph: © Nicolas Dewitte/LaM. © Adagp, Paris. [LaM collection record](https://www.musee-lam.fr/fr/le-dahu).*

The proportions of *Le Dahu* are the first oddity: the board is almost three times as wide as it is tall. The animal follows this narrow strip. Its head is on the left, two ears reach almost to the top and a thick tail descends at the right edge. Between them runs a brown body that seems to have been pulled at both ends.

There is a curious economy to its anatomy. A blue line follows the back, a band of warmer colour runs along the belly, and a few dark legs are enough to lift it off the ground. Green and pink circles make up the eye; the muzzle ends in a small patch of colour. These details give the animal expression without identifying its species. However familiar the head may look, the length of the trunk remains improbable.

The body is the darkest, most continuous area of the painting. Everything around it breaks into pieces. Above are flowers with pink petals and yellow centres; below, orange and black brushstrokes pass between the legs. Green divides into leaves and stems that change direction. No horizon joins these fragments into a distant landscape. Animal and plants are pressed against the same surface.

This arrangement gives the long form its balance. Following the back from left to right takes us almost out of the picture; the flowers bring us back through their circular centres and branching stems. The dahu occupies the entire board, yet its silhouette does not exhaust the painting. Above its back is another route, between leaves growing obliquely and petals barely fitting into the remaining strip.

In *Two Birds and an Insect*, a gouache by Chico da Silva dated to around 1969, the passage between plants and animals occurs within the plumage itself. The larger bird’s pointed feathers have veins like leaves; on the right, a broad-leaved plant repeats this pattern at another scale.

[![A long-billed bird stooping toward a bristled insect, with a smaller bird in flight above. Two Birds and an Insect, Chico da Silva, c. 1969, gouache on paper.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-087/chico-da-silva-two-birds-and-an-insect-undated-gouache-on-paper-50x72cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-087-chicodasilva.org-1280.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/two-birds-and-an-insect-087/)

*[Two Birds and an Insect (c. 1969)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/two-birds-and-an-insect-087/), Chico da Silva João Cunha Collection.*

The resemblance gives us a foothold for returning to the dahu. With Boix-Vives, the long body stands apart from the flowers through its almost continuous brown, while legs and orange brushstrokes start to merge near the ground. With Chico, the boundary between leaf and feather passes through the creature’s body. The same uncertainty is located in different places: a mark may belong to vegetation or to anatomy. In the dahu, that uncertainty occurs mainly in the compressed strip beneath the belly.

## Images arriving in Moûtiers

Boix-Vives used salvaged paper and board, gouache and also Ripolin, an industrial paint sold by a nearby shopkeeper. To increase his supply of models, he bought a television. The Musée Hébert’s 2004 exhibition *La télé enchantée* brought together paintings made from what he saw on screen.[^hebert] In his work, flowers and animals thus coexisted with images broadcast into a French home in the 1960s.

The MANAS identifies another source: memories of Spanish festivals, bullfights and processions.[^manas] The priest reproduced below belongs to this world of recognisable characters, although Boix-Vives alters his presence through painting. Religious references arrive with a vocabulary of marks spreading across clothing, body and vegetation.

![A figure with a white face and large yellow eyes wears dark clothes with pale crosses. A tall red cross stands on the right; green, red and yellow shapes surround the head and body.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/anselme-boix-vives/cure-640.jpg)

*Curé de montagne très noble, 1963. Gouache on thick paper, 65 × 49.7 cm.

Anselme Boix-Vives. LaM, 999.134.1. Photograph: © Nicolas Dewitte/LaM. © Adagp, Paris. [LaM collection record](https://www.musee-lam.fr/fr/cure-de-montagne-tres-noble).*

The white face in *Curé de montagne très noble* has black-ringed yellow eyes, a triangular nose and a short mouth. Brown and red brushstrokes form something like a crown around the head. Pale crosses cover the clothing, and an enormous red cross stands on the right. They identify the figure’s role even as the surrounding shapes seem to invade his body.

A less conspicuous figure occupies the upper left. A small dark head with two long ears extends into a narrow body filled with green and yellow marks. It repeats the priest’s upright stance but seems to belong to another realm. Near the bottom, two large greenish eyes and curving lines allow another presence to emerge among the leaves. These neighbours make the encounter with the priest less solitary than it first appeared.

Plant motifs also change their role from one passage to another. A row of brushstrokes can fringe the red cross; nearby, similar marks attach to a stem. The yellow chains descending over the chest resemble flowers in a row. The painting brings fabrics and plants together through brushwork without literally turning the priest into a tree.

Red is not reserved for the large cross. It reappears behind the head and among greens throughout the sheet. Dispersing it prevents the largest symbol from holding all our attention. The face remains a point of return: its white gathers the eyes and mouth within a small area, surrounded by colours that keep moving.

## A peace project and an interest in the present

Boix-Vives also devised a plan for world peace, promoting it through manifestos and public talks.[^manas] In 1959 he sent his plan to the UN secretary-general; by 1964 he was exhibiting at Galerie Denise Breteau in Paris.[^press] These gouaches were made by someone seeking an audience and following events beyond his town.

That outlook offers no single key to the dahu or the priest. Their interest also lies in what painting does to scale: lengthening a body to the width of its support, making a cross as tall as a man, giving a small eye enough colour to interrupt our passage. The horizontal board and the upright sheet pose different problems, and Boix-Vives answers each through its own arrangement of figures.

In the priest, a green brushstroke may end in a branch or enter the edge of a garment. In the dahu, the dark back supports a garden almost without ground. These two images resist being reduced to a story of a late start: an animal occupying more space than its anatomy should allow, and a man sharing his sheet with beings only just coming into view.

[^press]: Musée Hébert. [*La télé enchantée* exhibition dossier](https://musees.isere.fr/sites/portail-musee-fr/files/docs/communiquepresse_2.pdf), 2004, PDF sheets 2 and 4–5, without printed page numbers: drawings on invoices, peace writings and exhibition chronology. In French.

[^manas]: MANAS, Laval. [*Anselme Boix-Vives*](https://musees.laval.fr/manas/anselme-boix-vives/). Life in Spain and Savoy, the peace project, subjects and materials. In French.

[^hebert]: Musée Hébert, Département de l’Isère. [*Anselme Boix-Vives. La télé enchantée*](https://musees.isere.fr/expo/musee-hebert-anselme-boix-vives-la-tele-enchantee-peinture). Exhibition, 25 June–31 October 2004: work from 1962–1969, supports and television. In French.

[^dahu]: LaM. [*Le Dahu*](https://www.musee-lam.fr/fr/le-dahu), 1964, inventory 999.134.2. Materials, dimensions, donation and reproduction. In French.

[^cure]: LaM. [*Curé de montagne très noble*](https://www.musee-lam.fr/fr/cure-de-montagne-tres-noble), 1963, inventory 999.134.1. Materials, dimensions, donation and reproduction. In French.

## Related reading

-   [Séraphine Louis: flowers and trees in an imagined world](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/seraphine-louis-paintings/)
-   [Primitive, Naïve, Indigenous](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/primitive-naif-indigenous/)