AB-MP4-1967-001 — The Crucible of the World (1967)

Technical information

Title : The Crucible of the World
Date : 1967
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 195 × 114 cm
Location : Unknown

Biographical / historical context

Dated 1967, this work stands at the heart of the late MP4 phase, when André Breuillaud drives the aesthetics of “imaginary biology” to its densest point.

Following the presentation of the Pillement corpus that same year, he heightens the matrix-like dimension of his compositions: the canvas becomes a site of fusion where realms, faces, and bodies do not accumulate but undergo continuous metamorphosis.

In this pivotal context—just before the more distinctly cellular networks that appear from 1968 onward—The Crucible of the World asserts the ambition of an organic cosmogony: a world in gestation, perceived as a boiling mass where birth and disappearance belong to the same movement.

Formal / stylistic description

The compressed, saturated composition stages a mêlée of anthropomorphic forms and embedded masks against an incandescent red-orange ground.

A central flow in milky greens and ivories forms a living column: nude bodies fold, twist, and interlace within it, as if driven by an internal force that compresses them and propels them anew.

Around this pale core, pockets of shadow—night blues, deep greens, violet-black tones—harbour negative faces with dilated eyes, watching from the periphery.

A supple, serpentine line links the figures through a continuous network of torsions, appendages, and vibrating contours; the paint, built from superimpositions and rubbings, lets an inner light surface, giving the forms the appearance of beings half-liquefied.

The whole reads as a crucible: a combustion chamber in which flesh, mask, and membrane are made of a single substance.

Comparative analysis / related works

With its incandescent nucleus and its abundance of masked figures, The Crucible of the World extends the major MP4 dispositifs of 1966 while intensifying them.

It notably dialogues with AB-MP4-1966-006 (Identity of the Realms) through the idea of generalized fusion, and with AB-MP4-1966-007 (The Garden of Masks) through the proliferation of faces incrusted in matter.

The field’s saturation—close to a “everything on everything”—also recalls the principles of the drawings Cosmique I and II (1966), here transposed into a warmer, more telluric painting.

At the same time, the way forms weld into masses and membranes announces the next stage: the atomization and cellular legibility that will assert itself from 1968 onward.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating and attribution to André Breuillaud rest on a converging set of indicators.

The work is cited in the Pillement catalogue (1967), providing a direct documentary anchor.

Formally, it lies in the immediate continuity of the large formats of 1966–1967: a palette of red ochres and acid greens, a contrast between nocturnal zones and luminous foci, and elongated silhouettes with undulating lines typical of late MP4.

Finally, the absence of segmentation into cellular or tubular networks—features that become structural from 1968 onward—confirms its threshold position, specific to the year 1967.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Pillement catalogue, 1967 (primary reference).