Pierre Roy was a member of the Surrealist group in Paris, participating in early exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the United States. His best paintings are characterized by a precise style that evokes an unsettling reality.
The Storm portrays a strange group of four unrelated objects set in a room: an oversized cart wheel with no hub, balanced precariously, straddles the interior and exterior; a pair of gigantic green scissors is nailed high up on the corner; a tall lath leans against the wall; and a small spool of thread lies on the ground. The wheel element that appears in sunlight mysteriously suffuses the room, causing a shadow on the right wall. The relationship between the objects is ambiguous, as is their relationship to the title. The Storm is typical of surrealist paintings of the 1920s evoking the “uncanny,” a 19th-century term popularized by Sigmund Freud in 1919 calling attention to the frightening quality associated with familiar objects placed in unfamiliar, illogical circumstances.
Provenance:
The Storm was first exhibited shortly after it was painted in the 1930s, and was for many years owned by the well known Hungarian-born psychoanalyst, writer, collector, and art dealer Carl Laszlo, a Holocaust survivor and one of the earliest exhibitors at the Basel Art Fair, who lived in Switzerland from 1945 until his death in 2013.